23/11/2022 - Wrong Assumptions
Reading time: 2 min
Photo by Max Muselmann on Unsplash
You knew he was dangerous, but you couldn’t care less. You were fourteen, invincible, and the world was a canvas you could only mark with a pencil.
Wrong.
You assumed a lot, back then. You saw him doing drugs, and you assumed he was a pusher. How else a bohemian artist could survive in this city? Teaching? You surely didn’t pay him. Not with money.
When your friends told you he was dangerous, you laughed in their faces, and when his friends told you he was dangerous, you assumed they were jealous of your immense talent.
You assumed you were never wrong.
And yet, you didn’t feel part of the pack. You were younger than the others, rougher, but you were sure you were a diamond waiting to be found. Or so you assumed.
They talked about politics and money, and you didn’t care. All you wanted to talk about was art, and paintings, but someone told you artists don’t speak about art at parties, bankers do.
The girls looked at you twitching their noses as if they knew how to fuck a man better than you; as if they kept their tricks secret in their wombs, and when you joined them in their little clusters, they fell silent, sipping their wine or sucking their cigarettes.
The boys were so mediocre, you were the one who didn’t want to mix with them. Sooner or later, one with pimples on his face or a greasy quiff would have asked you out with a poem and a rose.
Ew.
The men, though, they always smiled at you with sadness dripping from their eyes into their beards, and you never understood why, until that day at the party.
You were trying to keep up with the drinks, but a teenage girl has no place drinking with the elite of modern decadence, so the world was spinning, your stomach twisting.
Your mentor was fighting with Jacque.
They often fought over all sorts of subjects. Communism, temporary galleries, poetry. Punches were often thrown, but never to your mentor. Never.
You assumed it was out of respect.
Wrong.
That day, over the booze buzz in your ears, you heard them fighting over you.
As you looked, you saw your mentor grabbing an empty bottle and smashing it on the table.
You assumed he was going to stab Jacque with it. Instead, he slashed his own palm, and as blood gushed out in squirts, everybody jumped away, the entire room flattening against the walls covering their mouths.
And that’s when you knew.
He had it.
And if he had it, he must have given it to you.
About this story
Prompt: no prompt. In the challenge from FFM2022 the 23rd day was a team effort. Because I’m doing it four months later, I have no team!
Notes on the challenge
Each and every story published here has been written, reviewed, polished and published in less than 90 minutes. Which means you’re going to find spelling mistakes, ugly sentences and weird structures. I still hope you’ll enjoy them!
