hsavinien

Title: Terror and Dark
Author: H. Savinien
Rating: PG-13, for swearing
Author's note: I think the character has some form of mental illness. She also may be named Liv, which means "protection." I'm not sure. The story just popped into my head.

“Six televisions, miss?” The clerk is trying not to sound surprised, because if he accidentally talks her out of it, there goes his commission off them.

“Yes, presents for the family!” she answers brightly. It’s July. Why the fuck would she be buying presents for family in July? “And they’re such a bargain, aren’t they?” They aren’t. There will probably be a markdown next week. She hasn’t got until next week.

He makes repressed-delight noises as he takes her cash. It was supposed to be this month’s food and rent money. Fuck. She’ll have to ask Tom for another advance. The smiling clerk gets a young woman to wheel the TVs out to her beat-up little station wagon. It shouldn’t be possible to have a little station wagon. Of course, this car shouldn’t possibly run either, so she’s not being too loud in her disbelief, in case it hears and self-destructs.

She is twitchy at every stoplight, fingers beating out an unrhythmic rhythm against the steering wheel. At home, she unloads carefully, panting as she carries each of the little TVs gingerly up the apartment steps, all four floors to the top. Her air conditioner appears to be choking again. She’ll chew out the super as soon as she gets her rent money off of Tom. That’s what brothers are for when they have the gall to get a VP position in a fancy office building.

She barely manages her keys, but doesn’t drop the sixth television. Carefully, she arranges them around the apartment. The cable bill is paid through the end of the year.

Her fingers tremble as she places, plugs in, turns on the one in the kitchen facing the stove and refrigerator to a game show, the one facing the table—children’s programming, there’s a talking felt animal onscreen.

The one in the living room is old, but it still works. And it’s pretty big, so she didn’t have to buy another. It’s been flashing the Channel 4 News the whole time; she could hear it as she unlocked the door. The hall is safe, with the little portable on the table broadcasting a golf tournament. As soon as she opened the door, she watched a driver smack a little white ball into blue sky.

She puts the third new TV in the bathroom, carefully arranges it so she can see it from the tub and the toilet and in the mirror above the sink. She clicks it on with a tiny sigh of relief. A concerned looking man is interviewing a woman with a horse.

In her bedroom she needs three—one on her dressing table, another at the foot of the bed and the third in her closet. They add a crime drama, a soap opera, and a history of the Magna Carta.

She collapses on the bed with a whimper of relief.

In the noise of conversation, lecture, gunfights, yelling, singing, she can relax. Her body, “Rubenesque,” she mutters, as she learned from the art biography program last week, stops twitching. The (over?) generous curves still.

She sleeps, safe, surrounded by movement and sound. Her house is protected now from the terror and dark.