(no subject)

[godzillabutworse]

Who: Nisha Lewis
When: Tuesday Afternoon
Where: Fox Trail
What: Nisha gets a package.
Warnings: Language, ofc.

A Chick Tract is a little comic, about the size of two matchbooks laid end to end, that tells you in entertaining detail exactly how your sins are going to drag you to hell. You find them stuffed in the shelves at stores. Get them handed to you while walking down the street in any city with a population larger than 10,000. Find them beneath your windshield wiper when you leave Bob Evans. They're badly drawn. They’re hateful. They’re ubiquitous.

They're also hilarious.

But, Nisha Lewis, three wolverines pressed into the shape of a teen girl, McRib-style, has some moral qualms about giving any money to those fuckheads. So she quickly dispensed with her original idea of purchasing seven hundred and fifty of them and instead opted to download their free PDF catalogue during a trip to the computer lab, print off one copy, make ninety-nine more copies with magic and then owled the lot of them in five, twenty-copy installments to her brother’s Brooklyn apartment over the course of five days.

Because she doesn't want to get kicked off the quidditch team but she’ll die if she’s not driving someone crazy. It’s a condition.

On day seven, there’s a return owl. It doesn't come at breakfast with the rest of the post because it doesn't need to. Alba knows her way around Gooseberry. And she’s spent a lifetime tracking down and making deliveries to and for dumbasses with gorgeous hair. Which is why she absolutely nails dropping a package on Nisha’s head from ten feet above, surgical in her precision.

The large semi-spherical plain-wrapped thing bounces off the sophomore's head, tangles briefly with her ponytail as it falls and rolls into a pile of brilliantly flame-colored dead leaves nearby.

This is not, typically, the sort of thing you don't react to, but it does take a moment to provoke response. There is a moment where Nisha stands shocked and motionless, rebooting before she looks up. Above, the massive owl flaps its wings.

With a furrowed brow and fingers that first touch her head before weaving themselves into her hair, Nisha shouts, “Albatross! Eat shit!”

Alba will not oblige the request. Her job is done and she is off to visit old friends in the owlery, leaving Nisha to pick up the slightly oblong parcel and brush damp crud off of it as she turns it over. Even after miles and miles of travel in probably poor weather, the package still smells faintly of baking spices - well, baking spices and also dirt and autumn-y death, now. It’s light in her hands and a shake produces a faint papery rattling sound. Truly, a mystery.

With care, she unwraps the package. Later, when she reports on the contents to her brother, she’ll imply she tore it open and almost broke whatever's inside, but for now, cautious curiosity wins out.
When she unfolds what turns out to be the front flap, there’s an awful face staring back at her. Tiny eyes and an open maw, the pronounced underbite lined with a row of jagged teeth. She frowns at it.

Liberating the ugly handmade thing from the brown paper package, Nisha immediately recognizes it as an anglerfish. Upon closer inspection, she recognizes the mottled reds and yellows and blues of its skin as copies of the free catalogue, cut into strips and made into papier-mâché.

Jesus fuck her brother has too much free time. Is this what adulthood is? Doesn't that asshole have two jobs?

She tilts the art project up and peeks inside the mouth, noticing more stuff inside and having never once in her life given any thought to not putting her hand in things lined by teeth (paper or otherwise), Nisha reaches in.

“STOP.” Her brother’s voice shouts from the fish’s mouth, loud enough to startle a sparrow in a nearby tree. And Nisha, too. With a whole body jerk, she shrieks and fumbles the fish. As it hits the ground, she erupts into nervous giggles that build and build until she doubles over, hands on her knees, wheezing.

This goes on for a while. Every time it starts to slow down, she looks at the ugly paper fish and starts to titter again and before long she just plops down on the trail with her papier-mâché howler fish and laughs until she cries. She hardly notices the cold against her legs.

Once she’s calmed down, Nisha sticks her hand in the fish’s mouth again.

Her brother’s voice sternly repeats its one word request for her to quit her bullshit.

She jumps. She snorts. She does it a third time. Same result. At least, in that attempt, she manages to snag a large green envelope from the fish’s hollow gullet.

This letter is not treated with the care of the larger package. Making a tiny, giddy noise, a bit like a honk, she tears it open and dumps the contents into her lap. A sticker sheet of cats licking their butts. A CD labeled “Stop Fucking Taking My CDs I Can’t Afford It Anymore, Vol. 3.” A stack of graph paper with tons of dense number crunching and a pink post-it note.

Nini,

Fuck’s sake. Cut it out. And take better notes at the games, there’s like no good data here. Also, don’t die in Japan, okay?

Be good,
Zav

Nisha’s face scrunches against a smile, mouth pinching. She sticks her hand in the fish’s mouth, again.

“Stop!” It shouts, insistent.

She wonders if Tally and Marie could sample this for a song.