Quoted By:
>FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO
"Good people of the Better Than Nothing!" you say. (Though 'good' is rather an overstatement.) "Pay heed! I have arriveth to— to deliver— AHEM. I HAVE ARRIVETH TO DELIVER EXCELLENT NEWS."
Even your raised voice barely carries over the din: the people watching you are still watching half-interestedly, but you're being roundly ignored by everybody else. Almost everybody else. "Shut up!" a far-gone man slurs back at you, and slings his bottle in your general direction.
It'll hit you in the face. You've calculated the trajectory. It'll hit you in the face, and you'll get little ceramic shards embedded into your skin, and you'll be bleeding everywhere, and probably crying, and there doesn't seem to be anything at all you can do about this immediate future except to watch it sail toward you, or toward your face, rather. You attempt to focus on the man so you can at least have someone to blame (maybe Horse Face threw the bottle at you?), but it's to little avail, your body doesn't seem to be listening in the second-fractions left until your inevitable and humiliating—
You prickle: all the hair on your right arm stands on end, all at once, before it jerks upward and catches the bottle an inch from your face like it's nothing. You watch dumbly as you proceed to flourish it, grip it, and shatter it between the fingers of your right hand, driving a thousand little ceramic shards into your skin exactly as predicted. You might've screamed a tiny bit had you not immediately been flooded with sunshiny glittery buoyant stuff, so that all you really feel is your heart throbbing through your hand and the grin stretched wide across your gums and— and something else, something kind of slithery, and you look back to see Richard pulling his arm delicately out of your back and wiping it on his sweater. "Go on," he says.
If you weren't practically levitating, you might've hesitated: instead, you turn to your audience and let the bottle bits shower out of your hand. The crowd quiets. "Ahem! I <span class="mu-i">said,</span> I have EXCELLENT NEWS. Fantastic— amazing— fantastic news. Do you want to <span class="mu-i">hear</span> it, or do I have to go and—" You lean down, pick up one of the ugly lady's stray bottles, and wave it about.
"CRUSH IT WIT' YER— YER OTHER ONE!" hollers somebody, possibly your original assailant, to a chorus of 'yea!'s.
"I—" You look at the bottle. You look at your mutilated right hand. "Okay!" And you curl your left hand around the bottle and squeeze a little bit and it comes apart. You hold the shards up to scattered cheers, but mostly murmurs and exchanged glances.
But they're quiet, is the important thing, and looking at you, so you drop the shards and wipe your hands on your chest. "Ahem! Indeed! Hello. I am Charlotte Fawkins, and—"
(1/2)
