I’d
decided to call it quits
after
another smoke, »Mother of shit,
this gets old quickly,« I said in Serbian.
I could hear Penelope’s pagan
horseman music through the walls of her house, as well as the
unmistakable sound of her
swearing her ever-loving ass
off in Chinese. The entire time
she was trying to do something, I could bet
hard Dinar that
she was cooking meth.
“Sha bi, wang ba dan!” I
heard her scream before looking at my cigarette for a minute.
»Ah, fuck it,« I muttered, putting
out the thing in my bucket before spraying down and going inside.
“Feel better?” Mom asked as I
tossed the empty pack of cigarettes in the trash, “Again?
You know how I feel
about you smoking, Rhys.”
“That was a pack of twelve, Mom,” I
said, “It lasted me four days.”
“I don’t know what’s worse,”
she said, “Your smoking or Penelope’s massive caffeine intake.”
“Hard to say,” I said, taking
my clothes out of the dryer, “But don’t
get onto her about it.”
“She’s my niece!”
Mom said, looking at me as I went into my bedroom and changed into
something that didn’t
smell like tobacco and sweat.
“Look, I’ve got something to
go to at the college, so I can’t do it tonight, but I will
talk to her about it in the morning.”
“Will you two please
put that feud of yours on hold for a few days, too?”
“No promises,” I said, putting on a
brown jacket and teal shirt, “Look good?”
“What do you have to do
at the college?”
“The books,” I said, grabbing
my keys, “They were a loan. Since they’re still in the plastic, I
get my money back because they’re technically
still unused.”
“Well, just be careful,” she
said as I headed out.
The books had been loaded up in
the back of the car for a few days, so that
wasn’t an issue, although I wouldn’t be sad if the car were to be
taken to Asia and dumped in the Mekong River.
Just saying.
As soon as I had my sunglasses on
and the engine firing away, I was city-bound, baby!
“What in the fuck!?” I said,
looking at a cop car on Reese Road
before noticing one of the cops was walking up to the passenger side
of the car.
“Ma’am, can you roll the window
down, please?”
»I’m sorry, but I don’t speak your
language,« I said in Serbian.
“The window. Now.”
I shrugged my shoulders, acting like I
didn’t understand him, “Srpski jezik.”
“Roll it down, or I bust
it down!”
I opened up Google Translate and
started using the Serbian setting to explain that I was just
visiting family in America and that I’d be heading back to Serbia,
Yugoslavia sometime next week. Unshockingly, he took it, so I drove
on my way.
“Idiot,” I said, smirking as
soon as I got to the park entrance, “Cops are so stupid.”
Yugoslaivan Rock and Yugoslavian Disco
were my two favorite (bar-none) genres of music in the
world. Serbian is a beautiful language, what can I say? Russian
is overrated, just like any WWII-era story mentioning Hitler.
The rest of the drive to the college
was about as mundane as you could get, save for a
fender-bender in town, but some people just shouldn’t be allowed to
drive, period.
As soon as I made it to the campus, I
took a park on the street that was still within walking distance of
the OneStop. The textbooks were already in my bookbag, so it was just
a matter of carrying them in the bookstore and showing them my rental
voucher.
Everything I’ve saved in unused
textbook rentals, I could probably take to the dealership and
put a nice down-payment on a new Mitsubishi Mirage sedan or some
other Asian import, but that wouldn’t take care of the parking
pass. The Yugo it is, then.
“Rhys Morgan Tauben?” the cashier
said as I put my books and voucher on the counter.
“That’s me.”
“What do you do with these
books when you rent them?” she asked me.
“They stay in my bag next to my
bookcase,” I said, “Why?”
“The only books you’ve used
were your Music Theory book and a math textbook. Everything else,
you’ve used your voucher on, even the Russian and Serbian
textbooks!”
“What can I say?” I said, “I’m
a smart cookie who knows Serbian and Russian.”
The cashier shook her head before
processing the voucher, “How would you like the refund?”
“Same as always,” I said with a
shrug, “Mail a check to my house.”
“Alright.”
~~~~~
For this preview, I decided to change the narrator and give you guys a hint of Chapter 6, which is a flashback from Rhys Morgan's point of view. Here, we can see a some similar personality quirks that we can see in Penelope (though Yugoslavian instead of Asian). Rhys Morgan's smoking has its roots in an OLD (emphasis) version of Aleks where he was a vampire and never went anywhere without a mustard glass, silver chain (with the Chrysler Pentastar, of course) and a cigarette.
My, how times change.
Anyway, now for an explanation of my absence last week. Towards the end of June, I had shoulder surgery (three of them, it needed several pins, screws, and a bone graft. Getting better now!) and got the sutures taken out Wednesday. I know I've probably got readers from other countries (this is the World Wide Weberverse, after all!), so I didn't want to just leave everything high-and-dry. Between piecing together the music for Trizonesien-lied (The Song of Trizonesia) and finding (enough of) the sheet music for Хороши весной в саду цветочки [Khroshi vesnoy v sadu tsvetochki] (Beautiful Flowers in the Spring Garden), the week just kinda got away from me. Mix that in with a nasty sinus issue, and it was just a miserable week.
I only found out afterward that green tea can help with that (though to a limited degree).
Anyway, so there's the preview and my ramblings. Depending on how I feel later on in the week, I'll try to post another preview to make up for last week's inactivity! Happy reading!