Meg Callahan (setinstone) wrote in the_colony, @ 2010-08-12 10:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | ^ week 19, meghan callahan |
Week 19: Tuesday
Characters: Meghan (and Sarge)
Location: The Farm- Time on the Radio
Summery: Only hours after Derek kissed her, Meg's thoughts get the better of her.
Rating: PG
Like usual, no one was listening.
Meg sat in the driver's seat of the currently stationary vehicle: one of the only times in her life she'd ever been in that particular position in a car. When she first started filling shifts listening for someone to respond to the looped message, she made it a point of habit to sit on the passenger side, since the feel of the car-door to her left just felt... weird.
Now, she was used to it. Or maybe she figured it just didn't matter anymore.
..southern Oregon. If you are searching for friends or family, please switch to channel three and...
Her own voice squawked at her, over and over, tinny and hollow from the speaker of the CB under the dash: a surreal reminder of when she'd recorded it weeks ago. The atmosphere in the car was cold and still, besides the sound of Sarge's snoozing. He was curled up awkwardly on the passenger side of the bench seat. Meg's fingers were cold, and tried to keep themselves (and her brain) busy with the idle maintenance of the guitar across her lap.
It'd been a... long, confusing night. Derek and her had been up with guard duty, and like usual they fell into their routine of bickering. Then he dropped the bomb about wanting to head out on his own.
And then he kissed her.
The experience left her shaken, confused and all around electrified. She left him in the kitchen at three in the morning, not because she was tired, but because she couldn’t think--and when she did fall asleep, the whole thing triggered the return of her old nightmares. She woke up to the tight, twisting hurt of homesickness and crushing guilt constricting her chest, and it stung her eyes with tears soon after. Thanks to her glasses, at least no one at breakfast noticed (or they hadn't said anything about it), regardless of the fact that the blind woman was a bit quieter than usual that morning. The fact that the former law student was still asleep was actually a blessing. Food and a shower had helped to drown the memory a bit, too.
However two hours after the fact, her husband's voice still echoed in her thoughts, and the tuning strums of the guitar strings weren’t holding back the gravity of the pressing issue. Michael was dead. She had to keep telling herself that: after being married to the man for nearly ten years, their abrupt separation the last December (Christ, nearly to the day) had left a whole in her heart that she had to fill with something. Closure. Only in the last six months had she allowed herself to try and believe it.
And now, there was Derek: a man she respected, but it was no secret that they picked at each other constantly. She knew she didn’t want him to leave the farm for fear that he would essentially be walking off the edge of the planet (out there was death, plain and simple), but when the conversation was cut short by his lips suddenly against hers...
Meghan sighed and flattened her palm on the strings--silencing them. She forced the tactile memory out of her head.
"You miss Papa, baby?" Her low whisper hung in the chilly air like frost. Sarge's tags clinked, betraying movement, though not much. She reached across the short space and set her hand on his flank, kneading the slightly baggy skin as much for her own comfort than for his.
"Me too..." She said in a voice heavy with breath. She leaned her head back against the rest, and clicked her wedding ring against the wood of the guitar, lost in everything for the moment.
When the thought struck her, it popped in her head like nothing out of the ordinary: just another notion out of the blue that seemed perfectly rational to Meghan. Some people called it initiative. Others called it a distinct lack of concern for protocol. Meg didn't really care either way: her mind was made. Fueled by her sudden determination on having something concrete to concentrate on, Meg leaned forward with a probing hand tracing its way along the dash to the CB console, where she found the witch-hat knob that switched the channel. It clicked to the right: the recorded message on loop abruptly stopped, followed by that distinct hollowness of radio silence on channel three. From the knob, she grazed the radio workings to the hand held microphone chord, and held it steady.
The large wooden instrument in her lap made things awkward, but she managed: her other hand searched the top of the dash for the desk-top transmitter they had found in the trunk--not very adapted for car use--but that’s when it was moving. With Meg at the wheel, they were stationary, and the dash acted much like a desk.
She plugged it in the console and positioned the transmitter on the flat of the dash: a Braille copy of The Road (ironically, the only book in Braille she’d managed to pack from her parents cabin) was set on the button, holding it down.
Meg leaned back in the seat and repositioned her guitar: long, tapered fingertips moved over the strings in expert precision and memory, playing the song she’d been playing the night she met her husband nearly fifteen years prior: the song she loved playing more than anything in the world. Dust in the Wind.
Over the CB, spreading to however far that damn thing could reach across a country thrown into the dark ages, Meg played a last tribute to her husband. Tears dropped from her lashes in slow succession as the minor chords echoed into dead radios for miles around--over and over and over: trying so hard... but just unable to bring herself to really, truly let him go.
[Lyrics by Kansas]