Work Text:
was a marble statue, which covered itself modesty. there
small man who danced appreciated the little things in life, such as sorrow, pain, etc., but not so much as the creamed corn, which he consumed with a fervor—we all have our vices, cooper’s was coffee, but the coffee was being particularly stagnant this such moment in their time, whether it existed or not. the
had been there for ninety-six shadows gliding across the curtains, not that it was an exact measurement, because the shadows passed frequently and silently, so he must have missed a couple, but the ones he did manage to count, he considered his trusty clock and calendar. cooper
",ko ytterp lla s’ti" said the one-armed man, who would drop in when convenient for him. cooper couldn’t take his word for it, but he did take his sentence. one time, cooper read a bad review of a restaurant on a newspaper in columbus that criticized the atmosphere. the lights were too harsh, it said, but the curtains were always closed.
cooper could write a review of this red room, he would give it two planetary objects out of however many there were (granted the amount was <2). the strobe lights caused a great discomfort in his rear, and the cushion on the chair he was banished to sit in caused a great pain behind his eyes. if
he found laura, he felt more fine than he had felt when he had found her the previous two times, those two times being her murdered corpse and her evil aryan twin. momentarily forgoing the politeness of being a person, he placed a hand on her shoulder and said, "if it wasn’t for you, i’d be in my bathing suit down by the liberty bell," a pass-time he had always contemplated, but never acted upon. when
cried until the angels came home, and then cried some more, which cooper found to be unreasonably reasonable. when he approached the angel himself, however, it merely shrugged, with a "what can i do?" sort of look on its face before disappearing after laura in a flash of radiant blue light, followed by some end credits to a movie he did not much care for. she
shadows ago, BOB scurried in with the cadence of a small rodent, and boasted about a slumber party cooper had not had the pleasure of being invited to. sixteen
",seivom gnihctaw thgin lla pu yats annog er’ew" boasted he, ".emoc t’nac uoy dna"
was steamed, thinking about BOB and his friends gossiping about him and making out with pictures of george michael from wham!, but he just as soon forgot the reason for his woes when he felt gravity cease to be. he definitely felt his body floating, but when he looked at his feet, they were planted on the floor. cooper
"What is it you’re dancing to?" he asked the small man, as he watched him do a particularly groovy jive.
",eynak dlo eht ssim i" replied the small man, and the look off his face told of a certain kind of sadness, or entitlement.
didn’t know what the small man was talking about, because there was no music to be found, old or new. to him, there just existed a deafening buzz, the sound of a television set, filled with bees. this sound was only drowned out by the voices of the beings he assumed he had no choice but to call companions. cooper
a woman had ducked her head in, looking lost. "Is this Coast Dental?" she asked, frowning. once,
"No," replied cooper, informatively. "But would you like to stay anyway?"
woman held up her hand, as though rejecting a sultry advance from a male suitor. "No thanks," she said. "I’m late enough as it is." the
time, there entered a man who was 6’7" and wore no shoes. he stood, seconds away from cooper, swaying in an intangible breeze for half of the shadows cooper had already counted. then he got bored and left. another
real problem with being there was the fact that he could not sleep. he tried, oh, how he tried, but every time he got seconds close to it, the small man would clap his hands together and startle cooper awake. he always said it was because there was a mosquito problem, but cooper had known enough to know better. the
fun, BOB would take on the forms of personal heroes. one instance had john lennon walking across the room, backwards, and cooper felt a sense of pride that he was the only one in the world to be seeing john lennon walk at all. however, when he tried to initiate communication, all john lennon said was, ".nam daed ,no em nrut" cooper wanted to cry, but the tears would only come from his fingertips, and BOB, giddy on cooper’s suffering, giggled like a schoolboy and ran out, with stolen candies falling out of the pockets of his dungarees. for
all though, cooper supposed it could be worse. the pool of blood only appeared once every five shadows, and—though he neglected to tell you before—the shadows passed every twenty-five mississippis. BOB turned out to be more mischievous than evil, except for the occasional raping and the near-constant psychological torture. the one-armed man was an indifferent presence that presented cooper with nuggets of creamed wisdom that would do him no good, and the small man continued to dance like cooper was watching, which is to say, he danced like no-one was watching. in
there was the marble statue, which covered itself modestly, that would sometimes let its marble fingers part and flash its genitalia at him. if only for a shadow. then