[pushing daisies] these are not wrongs to right
A/N: It's certainly been awhile since I've posted anything that I've written. I started writing this particular ficlet awhile back, but it didn't take me until last night to finish it and polish it up. This is just a short little thing to get me back into writing more regularly.
these are not wrongs to right
pushing daisies. ned (brief ned/chuck). g. 491 words. "the norwegians"/"window dressed to kill".
this was how it should have been before city morgues and crime scenes became something of a second home. he never did like complications and raising the dead inevitably brought complications into his life.
---
He couldn’t recall the taste of his own pies until now. Fresh fruit was never fresh fruit, only fruit that had once been ripe and living but were now rotting and sprouting patches of mold before he made them fresh again with the touch of his hands. Really though, he hadn’t savored the taste of a pie, any pie, since his mother had died.
And he liked it better that way.
He baked them, sure, but he never ate them.
Baking them was his niche, his way of pounding out lingering childhood issues with every rolling of dough and the occasional chopping of fruit. He had grown used to this process, of the dead fruit in the locked storage room in the back of the building, the way that peaches and pears and berries of indeterminable shapes and flavors would plump in his hand as they ripened back to edibility. It was a process – his process, one he had settled into comfortably for years, before his talent for waking dead things became a hurricane of complications and he never did like complications.
He remembered a point in his life in which he questioned his need to make pies (after all, the image of pies is synonymous with home and by extension his mother and by further extension, his father – complications again). Perhaps it was some sort of misguided attempt to feel closer to his mother, his way of dealing with emotions that he had long-since repressed or ones that he had difficulty with facing head on.
Truth be told, baking pies was the only thing he felt like he was good at, besides being able to wake the dead, which is a talent he wished he’d rather not possess.
Communicating with fruit drew fewer questions.
“This is weird,” Chuck said, her nose crinkling not even half way through the undertaking of trading out decomposing pie ingredients for unblemished new ones in the storage room.
She says “weird” in a tone that implies that neither of them were frequent observers to the strange and unexplainable.
Weird, maybe, in context of everything else, but he considered the rearranging of the storage room to be a restoring of a natural order. This was how it should have been before city morgues and crime scenes became something of a second home.
He takes a large bite out of one of the plump peaches sitting in a bowl nearby (peaches were his favorite, he had discovered, never bitter and always sweet).
“It’s how it should be.”
It takes a poor choice of words and a hypothetical pep talk from a socially inept taxidermist to realize that his attempts to be normal were largely abnormal.
He found it difficult to continuously resent something that despite often containing messy variables and brief bouts of heartache when it also gave him the one thing he couldn’t live without.
And that had to count for something, he thought.
these are not wrongs to right
pushing daisies. ned (brief ned/chuck). g. 491 words. "the norwegians"/"window dressed to kill".
this was how it should have been before city morgues and crime scenes became something of a second home. he never did like complications and raising the dead inevitably brought complications into his life.
---
He couldn’t recall the taste of his own pies until now. Fresh fruit was never fresh fruit, only fruit that had once been ripe and living but were now rotting and sprouting patches of mold before he made them fresh again with the touch of his hands. Really though, he hadn’t savored the taste of a pie, any pie, since his mother had died.
And he liked it better that way.
He baked them, sure, but he never ate them.
Baking them was his niche, his way of pounding out lingering childhood issues with every rolling of dough and the occasional chopping of fruit. He had grown used to this process, of the dead fruit in the locked storage room in the back of the building, the way that peaches and pears and berries of indeterminable shapes and flavors would plump in his hand as they ripened back to edibility. It was a process – his process, one he had settled into comfortably for years, before his talent for waking dead things became a hurricane of complications and he never did like complications.
He remembered a point in his life in which he questioned his need to make pies (after all, the image of pies is synonymous with home and by extension his mother and by further extension, his father – complications again). Perhaps it was some sort of misguided attempt to feel closer to his mother, his way of dealing with emotions that he had long-since repressed or ones that he had difficulty with facing head on.
Truth be told, baking pies was the only thing he felt like he was good at, besides being able to wake the dead, which is a talent he wished he’d rather not possess.
Communicating with fruit drew fewer questions.
“This is weird,” Chuck said, her nose crinkling not even half way through the undertaking of trading out decomposing pie ingredients for unblemished new ones in the storage room.
She says “weird” in a tone that implies that neither of them were frequent observers to the strange and unexplainable.
Weird, maybe, in context of everything else, but he considered the rearranging of the storage room to be a restoring of a natural order. This was how it should have been before city morgues and crime scenes became something of a second home.
He takes a large bite out of one of the plump peaches sitting in a bowl nearby (peaches were his favorite, he had discovered, never bitter and always sweet).
“It’s how it should be.”
It takes a poor choice of words and a hypothetical pep talk from a socially inept taxidermist to realize that his attempts to be normal were largely abnormal.
He found it difficult to continuously resent something that despite often containing messy variables and brief bouts of heartache when it also gave him the one thing he couldn’t live without.
And that had to count for something, he thought.