...and as the last rays of light disappeared behind the far off mountains, Kate and Craig were standing at the bottom of the valley, locked in a passionate embrace and completely unaware that the day was ending.
THE END
The sound of fingers on a keyboard, which had been going on for at least three or four hours, stopped as Maire Connoly dropped her hands to her sides and leaned back in the oversized office chair that definitely didn't belong where it was, which was pulled up to a kitchen table, where Maire had been working. Sighing heavily, she glanced up at the computer screen in front of her and frowned. Then she quickly saved her work, hit the power button on the laptop, and pushed the screen down.
Maire was a pretty girl, though she would have killed anyone who called her that. She wasn't a girl anymore, at least, not in her mind. In her mind she hadn't been a girl since the time she had read an erotic short story when she was fourteen and had found herself quite excited by it. But she was still a pretty girl, since she didn't quite look the part of a beautiful woman.
Her features were not quite childish, just a bit more mature than that actually. Her face was quite attractive, but the freckles that were scattered across her nose and cheeks made her look quite a bit younger than her twenty-four years. Her tendency to wear her shoulder length hair (blonde, with just a hint of red from her partially Irish mother) parted down the middle and separated into two braids didn't help much either. Of course, neither did her short stature and slim, almost boyish, figure.
Luckily for her temper, anyone who caught a glimpse of the hazel eyes behind her glasses (with the thin, but bright emerald green frames that she had fallen in love with at first sight) knew immediately that she wasn't the twelve, maybe fourteen at the most, that she looked. Those eyes were windows into a much more mature mind, the same mind that hadn't thought of itself as a child in a little over ten years. It was also those eyes that betrayed her occasionally cynical nature, and her frequent quick temper (another legacy of her mother's Irish blood).
"Oh God," she moaned, falling forward across the closed laptop. She closed her eyes and moaned again before looking up at her roommate with a pleading look. "Kris, remind me again why I bother to write things for Peterson, will you?"
"Because you owe him big time," Kristine, Maire's best friend, cousin, and roommate to boot, said. She looked back over her shoulder at her collapsed cousin and smirked. She knew exactly what Maire was about to start doing, and she almost looked forward to the rants that came from her cousin every time she finished a piece of romantic trash for their mutual acquaintance.
Kris was definitely more mature looking than her cousin. She was tall and curvy, with a figure that screamed "woman!" to those who saw her. Her features, while similar to Maire's because of their shared grandparents, were very much those of a twenty-five year old women. She didn't have the freckles, and she wore her ginger colored hair in a short, simple style that didn't take much time to deal with in the morning. Her gray-green eyes, though, didn't have quite the worldly gaze that Maire's did. They were just as likely to be sparkling with some innocent humor or happiness as they were to be glinting with anger or cynicism.
"Well I should have just paid him the money," Maire groaned. "I swear, I'd rather just starve and go homeless than have to write this utter crap. It's so...so...cliché! I can't stand it anymore. If I have to write another one of these things for him I'm going to go insane!"
"Did you happen to forget that you're also doing it to make him crash and burn?" Kris added as she sauntered into the apartment's little kitchenette.
"It's not worth it," Maire said.
"Sure it is," Kris replied. She opened up the refrigerator and started to rummage around. After a few moments, she muttered something that sounded fairly nasty and came back through the partial doorway between the kitchenette and the "dining room," an imitation Tupperware container in hand. "What was this when you put it in the fridge?"
She set the container down on the table with a thunk and backed up as Maire sat up and reached forward to pry up a single corner. A horrible odor started wafting out of the container, making both women grimace and hold their noses, not that that helped very much. After she was sure that her hold on her nose was as tight as she could get it, Maire pulled the lid up a little more and peered into the container. She didn't recognize the blackish brownish greenish blob in there any more than Kris did, so she hurried to shove the lid back down and push the thing as far across the table as she could.
"I have no clue," she said after the smelled had abated a little and she thought it was safe to breathe deeply again. "I don't even remember putting it in there. You sure you didn't do it?"
"Yes, I'm sure," Kris said. "I take things out after a week or two if I haven't eaten them yet. That thing must have been in there since we moved in! I think it might have been alive... Oh well, back to searching for the pasta I saved from dinner the other day." She walked back into the kitchenette, leaving the container on the table. Maire glared at it.
"You already ate that," Maire called. "It was lunch yesterday, remember? And do you expect me to get rid of this thing?"
"Oh yeah..." Kris said. "And yes. It's yours, and I don't want to have anything to do with it. It looks like it will either poison me or try to eat me."
"Well I'm not touching it either," Maire grumbled. "I'll donate it to science or something like that. I'm sure some biologist would be overjoyed to have the opportunity to study it. Hell, Andy would probably piss his pants if I gave it to him."
"You're paying for a new container then," Kris called over her shoulder as she rooted through the refrigerator for something different to take to work for her "dinner." "That's one of mine."
A few minutes passed as Maire slumped back down across her laptop and started to drift off and Kris continued to hunt for something to eat. Finally, Kris grunted in frustration and closed the fridge. Then she headed over to the cupboard and stuck her head around the little wall that separated the kitchenette and "dining room" while she opened the cupboard and grabbed a package of instant ramen. "And do you really trust Andy with something green and slimy?" she asked.
Maire sat up with a start. She had just started to fall asleep when the words jerked her back to awareness. She sat up and scowled at Kris. "Huh?" she asked, her voice cross.
"Do you really trust Andy with something green and slimy?" Kris repeated. "After all, remember what happened when he got a hold of those shrooms that Anette had hidden away in her room. Things might turn out a little worse than just everyone in his dorm getting high if you give him that thing."
"As long as I don't have to be there when he plays with it I could care less what happens to the rest of his dorm," Maire said, waving her hand limply. "And he'll pay me for it. I could use the cash."
"If you say so..." Kris said, though she didn't sound convinced. "Do you want me to call him? I think I have his new number somewhere around here... Or do you already have it?" She started patting the pockets of her jeans.
"Haven't talked to him in over a year," Maire said.
"Thought so," Kris replied. When she didn't find it in her pockets, Kris ran out of the room to go root through her purse, which was in her room. About a minute later she came back, a tiny piece of what Maire thought might have once been a lavender Post-It note in her hand. "Found it!"
She handed the tiny piece of paper to Maire, who finally got up from her chair and trudged over to the phone. The numbers on the paper were barely legible, since they were written in the cramped, almost microscopic hand of Kris's younger brother Andy. After a few glances, Maire finally got her eyes working well enough to read the number and dialed the phone. Then she wandered off into the "living room" (which was actually just the other half of the "dining room," the half with a battered and threadbare puce green couch, a couple beanbag chairs, and a low, long table that was almost falling apart) to collapse on the couch and wait for her other cousin to answer the phone.
"You have reached the secret laboratory of Andrew Connoly," a deep male voice said in a monotonous, almost robotic tone after two rings. It sounded like the start of an answering machine message, but Maire knew what Andy had had on his answering machine ever since he got it, and that wasn't it.
"Since when has your dorm room been a secret lab?" she asked in a light voice.
"Since I convinced them to give me a single?" Andy exclaimed, his voice rising almost an octave as he dropped the pretense. Just like his answering machine message, Andy's tendency to try to act like a mad scientist (and sound older and more mature than his mere twenty years) was something that Maire was used to. He clearly didn't expect Maire to believe his statement, but it seemed that he had to say it anyway.
"Yeah, right..." Maire said.
"Maire!" he whined. "I do have a lab here. Well, a little one... And how would you know anyway? You haven't been by my new room yet!"
"I know you," she said. "And I know that the school would never trust you enough to let you get away with having a lab in your room. I'm sure they still remember the shroom incident."
"That's why it's a secret lab," he said. "And they forgave me for that time. It's the fruit flies that they're still mad about."
"Haven't heard that story yet... What happened? And, do you want another project to play with?"
"Oooh, something new!" he exclaimed. Maire turned herself to lay on the couch as he took a deep breath and started to babble his story about the fruit flies. "I was trying to breed some mutant fruit flies. Jake got them into the reactor a little and snuck them out. Most of them died, but I got a couple of them to breed. They didn't mutate, but they did get out, and we had fruit flies spread throughout the whole building before long. They still pop up when someone leaves food out too long..."
"Eww..."
"What's the new project you mentioned?"
"Some moldy thing Kris found in the fridge," Maire said slowly. She paused a little then, and he made an impatient noise, almost like a dog begging for a treat. "It almost looks like it can move, and neither one of us want to do anything with it. I thought you might like it."
"I'll take it!" Maire could almost see him jumping around his room in delight. She heard a slight thump over the phone, probably Andy sitting down on his bed as he grabbed for the battered stuffed bear that he still slept with so he could hug it tightly. He always did that when he was excited or happy and the bear was nearby, as Maire had realized when he was only four years old. The sharp crack of Andy losing his grip on the phone and dropping it on the floor only made her surer of what he was doing. She was laughing by the time he picked the phone up again.
"What?" he whined.
"You're gonna break your phone if you keep dropping it because you're too busy hugging that bear," she said. He blew a raspberry at her. "And you're gonna have to pay for this slime thing."
"But I'm broke!"
"No you aren't. Your birthday was just last week, and I know that Gram gave you fifty bucks, just like she always does. You can't have spent that all already, as well as the money you usually get from everyone else." He muttered something that Maire couldn't quite understand. Maire didn't dignify his mutter with a response, and after a few moments of silence he finally gave in.
"How much?" he grumbled.
"Twenty," she said.
"No way!"
"You're getting the container it's in too. Part of that twenty goes to getting Kris a replacement, and the rest is gonna feed me for the next week. Unlike you, I am pretty much broke. You don't wanna make me starve, do you?"
"Fine..." he muttered. "But this is a rip off."
"You won't be saying that once you have it and get to start playing with it."
"Says you."
"You know it's true. I'll bring it by sometime before the weekend. Probably not until Friday, since I really should start editing Peterson's latest project before I meet up with him on Saturday. What room are you in now anyway?"
"419," he said. "I usually leave the door unlocked, so just leave it on my desk if I'm not there when you stop by."
"Will do. Leave the money on the desk just in case that happens."
"Bleh."
"I'm not leaving it for you unless the money's there."
"Fine!"
"See you," she said as she started to lever herself up off the couch.
"Yeah," he said, and Maire heard the click as he hung up the phone.
As she returned the phone to its receiver, Maire noted that Kris had left for work while she was on the phone. She hadn't said anything when she left, which didn't surprise Maire. Neither woman bothered to make it clear when they were leaving the apartment, and though it often made their lives a little more complicated than they had to be, both accepted it as the way things were. Oddly enough, Kris had left a note for Maire, written on the front of the microwave with a stray black dry-erase marker.
"If you head by Andy's before I come back, his present from me is sitting on my bed. I forgot to budget money for it from the right paycheck and couldn't get it 'til yesterday, but don't tell him that."
Maire scowled as she wiped the marker off of the microwave, which changed from 2:43 to 2:44 as she did so. It was flashing, as it had been for 2 hours, 44 minutes, and some multiple of 12 hours, ever since the last time it lost power and no one bothered to set it. She paused to set the clock then, because the flashing green numbers were starting to grate at her already sparked temper. "Sure, make me do it so you won't have to face him with a late present!" she muttered as she checked her watch to see what time the microwave should read.
5:57 pm her watch told her, which made her hurry to finish setting the microwave. She struggled with the obstinate piece of electronic equipment for almost a minute and a half before it finally agreed to stop flashing and display the correct time. By the time it was set, the microwave displayed 5:59 in its glowing green numbers, and Maire was all too glad to finish so she could make a mad dash to grab her laptop and AC adaptor and leap onto the battered couch, making it groan loudly in a way that would have been frightening had she noticed it. She was just in time to turn on the TV and hear the first strains of the theme song to The Simpsons.
She plugged in the AC adaptor and booted up her laptop after the opening, while the first (of many) round of commercials flashed across the TV screen. As some frightening woman with a too bright smile and a sickeningly sweet smile tried to sell Maire dishwasher detergent (the same commercial that always made Kris want to buy the detergent even though they didn't have a dishwasher), she opened up the file for her just completed piece of crap that was thinly disguised as Man of the Mountains, the first novel of Jeremiah Peterson's newest series. The fact that Maire would be writing all of the novels and that Jeremiah himself wasn't even slightly familiar with the characters meant nothing. Maire didn't want to have her name associated with the thing she had created. She would die of embarrassment if it somehow became known that she had written it.
Man of the Mountains was a waste of the less than a megabyte of hard drive space that it took up. It was a "tender" story of lonely single woman meets wild, rugged, good looking man who seems to be too good to be true and then falls head over heels in love with him. There, of course, were a couple hurdles to jump before they could be happy together, but everything worked out in the end. Kate and Craig, the lonely single woman and the wild, rugged, good looking man, were flat and uninteresting characters, and the plot was full of holes and horrible clichés, not to mention several almost-main characters who just disappeared halfway through the story. While she was writing it, Maire had been hard pressed to keep from bringing those disappeared characters back, or filling in one of the plot holes, or even fleshing out the two main characters a little, giving them some quirks that made them unique people and not just part of the scenery. It had been difficult, but Maire had managed it, and the result was revolting.
In short, it was the absolute worst thing Maire had ever written. It even outdid the horridness of Peterson's last novel Foxbride (a heartwarming but thrilling tale of a woman and her soon-to-be lover who just happened to be a kitsune, a Japanese fox spirit). She had been forced to destroy Japanese folklore to create that monstrosity, and she had never thought that she was capable of creating something worse. The fact that she had created something worse both revolted and thrilled her. It also allowed her to hope that maybe this time Peterson wouldn't be able to sell it.
But all of those thoughts fled her mind as the commercial break ended. For the next short period of time (somewhere between five and ten minutes), Maire was absorbed in the bright cartoon world of the Simpson family. She forgot all about the piece of trash sitting open on her laptop for a while, until the next commercial break started.
She sat like that, alternating between rapt attention to the cartoon family on the television screen and disgusted re-reading of the novel in front of her, for the whole hour block between 6 and 7 pm. Two episodes of The Simpsons later she was only four pages into the story, and she was already wondering how she had written it. After four or five incident when she found herself making changes as she read (giving it at least some of the characteristics of a decent story), she closed the file and made it read-only. Then she re-opened it and continued to read, safe with the knowledge that even if she did make the story better, she wouldn't be able to save over the crap that she had already written.
She knew she shouldn't be starting the editing of the novel so early. She had just finished it, and she needed to give it a little time to cool off in her mind. She was too wrapped up in the world (however flat and unimaginative it was) to look at it objectively. Though in reality, it was probably best that she was doing that. If she gave it time to become less immediate in her mind she might notice more of the glaring errors and have a harder time keeping herself from fixing them. Starting the editing process too soon was just part of her plan to completely fuck up Peterson's career, the plan that so far hadn't been even the slightest bit successful despite the three awful novels she had already given him.
She was buried deep in the novel when Kris returned at 3 am. She had been similarly buried, too intent on the words in front of her (no matter how horridly put together they were) to notice, or even care about, what was going on around her, the whole time. She was still seated on the couch, legs tucked up next to her and laptop precariously perched on her knee and thigh. The TV was still on, blaring some annoying car dealership jingle that she barely noticed. She was dimly aware that the phone had rang several times during the eight hours between the end of The Simpsons and Kris's return, but she hadn't bothered to pick it up. The voice mail would get it.
Kris, on the other hand, cared about the missed phone calls quite a bit. When she saw Maire staring at the screen, eyes moving rapidly as she scanned the text, she knew that there were probably several messages waiting for her. There always were when Maire was like that. So she wasn't surprised when she walked into the kitchenette area and found the little red light on the phone blinking, telling her that there was at least one unheard message waiting. Sighing, Kris picked up the phone and dialed the number for their voice mail. There were five messages, the first one of which had been sent at 5:47 pm.
"Maire, honey, whenever you get this, call me," Maire's mother's voice said as the message played back. "It's urgent, so call back right away, even if it's the middle of the night. I'll make sure to be in until you call."
Kris couldn't help but be curious as to what was so important that her aunt, who was very much a morning person, would be willing to be woken up to talk to Maire about. She bottled that curiosity, though, and deleted the message. Silently, she listened to the rest of the messages, none of which were quite as important or interesting as the first, and then headed into the "living room" to give Maire her message.
Maire ignored her until she picked up the remote and turned off the TV. Then all Maire did was glance up, notice that the person who had turned off the background noise was her roommate, and then went back to her laptop. This was normal, so Kris took the next step in getting Maire's attention: she walked around behind Maire and reached forward to push the laptop's screen down. This earned her a scowl, but at least Maire started paying attention to her for real.
"Oh, you're back," Maire said.
"Yeah," she replied. "And I have a message for you."
"It can wait. I'm busy right now." Maire started to open the laptop back up, but Kris reached forward to stop her, which earned her yet another scowl.
"It's from your mom. She wants you to call her, and she says it's urgent. As in, "go ahead and wake me up in the middle of the night" type urgent. She called while you were on the phone with Andy."
"I'll call her in the morning."
"Take the phone and call her now, or I unplug the laptop," Kris said, her voice hard.
Maire sighed and held her hand out for the phone. Muttering various things, all of which sounded like they might be swearwords, she dialed her mother's phone number and placed the phone under her chin. Then she opened her laptop back up, closed the open file (not bothering to save the alterations she had made, since they all made the story better), and shut the laptop down. The Windows logoff sound rang from the laptop's tiny speakers just as her mother picked up the phone.
"That had better be you, Maire," Erica Connoly said blearily on the other end of the phone.
"It's me, Ma," Maire said. "What did you want to talk to me about that's so important that it couldn't wait until after I get some sleep?"
"Your grandfather is dead."