Five minute Fiction: Rehearsals

The lines were so bad, they sounded trite.

"Maybe we should try a different approach," he chided, although anyone with half a brain could see the truth behind his statement. It was less a call for revision than it was a half-veiled attempt at finding allies. They had been working on the scenario for the last three hours and it was getting clear to those who were still half-heartedly trying to make the lines work that the others had long given up.

"How about we approach this with a bit more de Saint-Exuery, and a bit less Amy Tan?" came a suggestion followed by another and another until it was very obvious that the suggestions all implied a total rewrite of everything that had been rehearsed so far. The group was merciful, still, and offered more and more suggestions without directly stating that which had begun to get more and more obvious: the whole idea really simply sucked.

"Less Ellis? Less Morrison? A touch of David and Gaiman in one?"
"How about something more... King-esque, minus the dead bodies and monsters, of course."
"A slight hint of Tsiolkas? No? No agressive anger and sex then?"
"Braine? E. Kelly? Yoshimoto? Barker?"

"STOP!"

Everyone in the room stared at him as he struck the stack of papers on his desk. The leaves swung into the air and lazying pirouetted down to the ground with soft crunchy sounds. No one said a word. No one uttered a complaint. Or an opinion. After all there was no one there in the room but him.

Him and his many ways of thinking born from a lifetime of role-playing games and telling stories.

"Stop..." he whispered, this time more conscious he was whispering it to himself, "... thinking for now. And just... relax.."

He sat on the floor and felt the cold stone beneath him. He remembered he hated the cold and rose to his knees, taking the time to pick each fallen sheet of paper up, then carefully stacked them on top of one another again. He felt tears brimming behind his eyes, that was certain, and he felt them slip past the self-conscious guardians that urge him to wipe them away; he let them fall anyway.

There was no one to see him crying after all.

Who would have thought it would be this hard to rehearse telling someone how you really feel?

[finally done with work. decided to write this before i left as an act of exorcism of the stress work has buried me under. hope it was a fun read. i'm going home! yeeehaaa!]