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This is about two women, but it's a little bigger than that. You won't see it in here much, but it's a part of a much larger story that I'm working on.
That one's going to have to be a novella. One of the nice things about Lit is that you can usually find a category that you'd like to read.
But the world isn't like that.
The main story will have some different things going on in it. This will be one of them. There is going to be at least one and maybe two other parts that would fall under this category.
But there'll be others which won't.
There will be a couple of hetero relationships, and likely at least one gay male one.
So you can see that I couldn't just put it in several categories, since people who wanted to read the whole thing would have to look for it.
This is just a sampler, I guess, but it has a resolution. You just ought to know that these people are also running through the main story.
So, the characters:
Jodi-Lynn McLeod is a single mom working her ass off.
Su-jin Kim is a bookkeeper who has hired on nearby and will begin work on Monday - this takes place on the Saturday, and she just arrived in town the afternoon before. She studied English and speaks it well - but that was in a classroom. She does well in real life, but if she's stressed, some of the smoothness often falls away because this isn't a classroom. This tendency will fade considerably as she spends more time in her new home.
The rest are bit players, but Bobbi Sorrensson is Su-jin's new employer. She's a successful and hard-working pilot.
Jane is Bobbi's younger adopted sister, also a pilot, but she will head up the company's agricultural division one day soon.
Tyler is a little sweetheart and the young son of Jodi.
I hope this is enjoyed.
This is a totally fictional piece with no real individuals intended to be depicted. Likewise governments and service arms of governments. It's just a story.
0_o
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A large old farm outside of Angel Fire, New Mexico
Tyler McLeod was something of a curious and inquisitive guy. The world looked shiny and new to him, just because it was a bright morning and also because it still was fairly shiny and new to him at just shy of a year and a half old. He was engrossed in looking at a bird at the moment. He didn't know what it was doing, but it was walking through the grass - and running for short distances once in a while too.
He watched it lean down and then then straighten up, almost always with something to eat. He looked down and didn't see anything like that. He just saw the bottom of his playpen and some of his toys.
He watched as his mother Jodi-Lynn Mcleod walked by, pushing the mower.
"You be a good boy for Momma now, Tyler.
I don't want to be doing it this way at all, but Miss Rose isn't here to watch you for me today. She and Mr. Sorrensson been real nice to us, lettin' us stay here with them. They're outta town on a little vacation but that don't change a thing for me. I gotta look after things."
Tyler didn't mind at the moment. He went back to looking at the bird, but it had gone. He saw another one, or maybe the same one, but it was farther away.
Then he looked at the sides of the playpen and the mesh netting and the things that held it up and stepped over there.
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Su-jin woke up and saw a sliver of the morning sun coming in through the window past the edge of the curtains. She looked at Jane and saw her sleeping soundly and decided against waking her first thing.
She got out of bed and after a pee, she checked the fridge and the cupboard and decided that a cup of coffee might be a nice way to start things. She'd rarely ever had any back home, but ...
She quietly filled the kettle and turned it on before she pulled a satin robe out of one of her suitcases and held it out. It might be a bit much for around here, but she hadn't noticed much of any activity through the windows. It was black satin where she would have wanted silk, but it was what she had for a housecoat here. There was a large, blood-red Chinese-style dragon over her shoulders and some writing, but it was in Korean and she doubted that anyone here would know or care much about the Luck Fighting Club.
To Su-jin, it was a memory and little more, though now ... for some odd reason, with it on her shoulders again, it made her feel ...
When the kettle clicked off, she made herself some instant coffee and looked back once at Jane's bare bottom on the bed. It was worth a soft smile.
She opened the door and smiled at the new day.
It was gorgeously sunny, maybe eight o'clock and she was here and she had someone who really cared about her and ...
She ran out of things then and just sipped her coffee for a moment. She noticed that the lawn here was huge and well-tended. It looked like a golf course green that she'd seen once on TV. It looked even better than that, she decided, since it wasn't on TV.
She looked around, wondering just how far this large lawn really went. She saw the big farmhouse then. She didn't know what farmhouses looked like here, but this one was huge to her mind. She couldn't even see the back of it for the trees there.
She turned around and she could see the road out there, really out there.
Then she saw the post.
She stared at it for a while. It was just a single post standing up out of the ground in front of her house -the one that Bobbi had said was for her use. It stood maybe five feet tall and it was square-ish and about four inches thick with a wooden cap on the top to keep any rain out of the grain of the wood. There were a couple of holes bored right through it near the top.
She wondered what it's purpose might be and came up with nothing. She looked down and there were the remains of an old wooden trough on the ground beside it.
She walked over and touched the post and felt it's weathered texture for a moment before she pushed against it and felt it give a little bit. She pushed again and saw that it was firmly set into the ground, but it was old and the movement was from the wood of the post itself.
She sipped her coffee and her mind would have gone on to wonder about other things in the morning sunlight but she looked at the post again and something clicked. She went back inside, grabbed the key to her house over there and looked in the bottom kitchen drawer, remembering something that she'd seen there the evening before.
Rolls of tape, black cloth friction tape that looked a million years old, lots of it. She tried to pick one up and came up with a stack of at least six rolls. It was dusty and ancient. She doubted that Bobbi would mind, so she went back outside and began to apply it in a tight wrap, maybe eighteen inches long, starting at about the height of her shoulder and working down.
As she did, she thought back and decided that she hadn't done anything in almost eight months. She finished the first roll and started in on the second after another sip of her coffee. She thought about some exercises and warm-ups as she went, setting the task in her mind, now that she'd begun. In all, she put six rolls on and the post was now primitively padded a little bit. She pressed in with a fingertip decided that it would do for now.
Then she swallowed the last of her coffee and went in to change. Shorts, T-shirt, and the hair tie thing.
She wondered what was different now, but when she came out, there was the sound that had begun as she'd applied the tape.
She only knew that there was a motor involved. She didn't know what a gas lawnmower sounded like.
After tying her hair, Su-jin began. Sit ups, pushups, squats and bends. Stretches as it went on and then back to the beginning. When she felt that she was ready, she began.
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Jodi didn't like mowing the lawn without Tyler being in sight. She'd stopped and gone back to check on him twice and everything had been fine. But it didn't take long before the uneasy feeling began again.
She knew that some of it might be easily accounted for because of the horror movies that she used to watch forever. But that had been before. She didn't watch any at all now. She'd had enough terror-filled moments in her own life to last her a lifetime.
That was the reason that a girl from Southeast Texas had spent half of all the money that she had in the world to buy a clapped-out old Buick and left Beaumont at seventeen with two weeks left to go until her due date to drive north and west.
She'd had no one to turn to after her mother kicked her out when she couldn't hide the signs of her pregnancy anymore. Jodi-Lynn had worked shit jobs - whatever she could get and she saved as much as she possibly could, squeezing each freaking nickel hard enough before she parted with it to bring tears to Jefferson's eyes. She told no one about the money in her bank account and a little later, she was very glad that she'd been that secretive about it.
Any daydreams that she might have had of making a life with Tyler's father had been beaten out of her - twice. She'd almost lost the baby the second time.
She'd waited until he'd been put in jail and then she'd bought the Buick.
The car had died across the road out in front of this farm not far from Angel Fire, New Mexico. No one told her that you had to put oil in a car once in a while.
Now nineteen, she lived here, thanks to the generosity and good will of two people. She did yardwork for a living and it was growing, this little business of hers, though she cut the Sorrensson's lawns for nothing. She was ready to expand it soon and she had some plans on how to go about it. She had an old pickup truck and she had a couple of mowers and trimmers - all of them with plenty of oil in them.
As well, and probably most importantly, she had one friend in the world near her own age and that was Jane.
She came around the corner of the house and saw the empty playpen.
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It was coming back much faster than she'd have thought.
Su-jin worked her arms, punching and pounding the post. She danced, getting to know the feel of the rhythm again as she moved in and away, kicking, side-kicking, back-kicking, roundhouses, spinning back kicks, everything that she could think of, before moving in and using every striking technique that she knew a few times each, as fast as they would come to her mind. The only things that she really held back on were the kicks since she didn't want to risk a groin pull now.
Her kicks would take a bit of time to come back and there was no quick way around that, but she at least tried everything.
Just to see if she still had it.
She found a rhythm. Not necessarily the right one at anywhere near the right speed, just a rhythm. Since she needed a center for today, she decided on one thing.
The main thing for this, just to begin, was her rabbit punch.
But not individual ones. This was light and quick hammering to get her shoulders involved since you had to pull the punches too, wanting to see if there was a real chance to get her speed back, knocking on the door just to clear out the shame and the hurt and the humiliation and the rage and the cobwebs.
She danced forward, threw five alternating punches as fast as she was able at chest height and then lunged forward with a strike from the heel of her hand as she stepped in.
Out.
In.
Punches.
Out.
