. (mareas) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-07-15 22:33:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !great gatsby, *log, *narrative, clementine murphy, jude murphy |
Narrative turned log
Who: Clementine & Jude
What: Narrative/Log
Where: Gatsby
When: Ahora
Warnings/Rating: Nada
Last thing she remembered was the godawful weight of a man pressing her down, and it wasn't anything she had a lick of experience with, no point of reference. Just like nearly dying daily, and she woke up hurting everywhere, face bruised, lip broken, body hurting and covered in marks from blood and hands and spray that hadn't come from her at all.
She woke up naked, somewhere green and cool, and it felt like New York summers. She remembered those real well. Her momma had liked them when she was young, and she'd drag her little girls behind her in matching pinafores and dark curls, and folks would coo. They'd shop for days, and they'd stay at the best hotels New York had, chauffeurs driving all over and the concierge at their beck and call. Lore was older, and she hadn't grown up with none of it, but Clem thought life was made up of room service and Saks, and nobody would ever tell her different.
She couldn't move, too beat and swollen up to do it. She wasn't made of strength. She didn't like hurting. She wasn't a woman who, at twenty-eight, could just drag herself up and keep on walking. Adversity wasn't her companion, and she blinked open blue eyes and didn't move a muscle. Folks would come. Course folks would come, because folks always came. and they'd call her daddy, and he'd do what needed to be done, same as always.
But her daddy wasn't there, and she knew that too in her head, as a woman and a man peered down at her in the grass. The woman wore flapper blue, and he wore a suit, and she thanked whoever lived in those Heavens. Once that was done, thanking, as if she'd ever done a thing at Sunday service but look pretty and consider who to romance next, she laughed. Bruised, bloody, naked, she laughed, and the laughed turned into tears, and the woman whispered that she was sick. She laughed more, because in Las Vegas they would've assumed she was on drugs of some kind, but here the man ran off for help, after draping her with his coat, and the woman held her hand, and she couldn't find it in herself to say a damn thing.
The hospital was a real weird place, and the nurses looked all covered up, and she wondered if there were phones. She'd seen that movie once, the one about the man who threw the parties, but it had just been some dating pretense; she hadn't listened to a word anyone said. She, like her momma, liked her cinema in black and whites. It was an old thing from being a child she couldn't shake.
The doctor came, and he shone a light in her eyes and asked her things, but she was so damn tired, and she just couldn't oblige him with his questions. "Graham?" she asked, because that was habit now, calling for the person who'd keep her breathing when things went wrong, and she wasn't thinking about sinew between the man's teeth just then.
But Graham wasn't there. She knew that too. "Jude Murphy." The nurses looked at each other, and the doctor patted her arm like she'd suddenly become something important.
"We'll get him for you. No need to worry. Everything's going to be fine," the man said soothingly.
She knew that tone of respect. Folks used it all the time when they talked about her daddy. She closed her eyes. Everything would be fine now. No point fixing on the bad things, like her momma always said. No point at all.