Post by Ailera on Oct 15, 2014 10:39:32 GMT -5
I hated leaving the house. I felt nothing but frightened around the capitolites. Faust couldn't just let me do my errands or enjoy what they looked like regularly, which could be pretty sometimes. No, he had to alter them for me. Distort their faces, turns their hands into claws or something similarly inhuman. Make them too big or too disproportional. Sometimes I couldn't tell if Faust was making them look silly or they were, because sometimes they turned out to be the doing of the capitolite. Why someone would want to look like what a ghost would consider making fun of someone was beyond me. I was usually pretty good at ignoring what Faust did to other people, because I knew he did it to distract me and only that reason. He wouldn’t have made someone grotesquely fat if he didn’t know it would cause me to stare a little too long at them and get me in trouble. He wouldn’t walk a green blob down the sidewalk if he didn’t know I was jump away from it and offend the man. “I’m sorry, sir,” I imagine myself saying. I was good at imagining myself doing things. Maybe it was all the images Faust forced me to deal with.
Right now I was supposed to be picking up the woman that I worked for’s shopping. A lot of clothes, clothes which I would undoubtedly misplace multiple times before I got back to the house. Faust liked to mess with me when I had things to do, and it was really annoying, but I was too afraid of him to try and make him stop. I was too afraid of capitolites to ask them where the clothes were, but it was not like I could ask them anyways. Most of the time they simply ignored me if I approached them, anyways. I was not supposed to do that. I pass a bear, and take a few steps to my left to avoid coming in its sight. Faust wasn’t in too creative a mood, or he would have had something more obscure. Scary was for inside the house, obscure was for making fun of capitolites. I was now surrounded by bears. They were all sorts of colors. Green, orange, purple and bright red. Some of them had huge teeth that jutted out of their mouths, others looked fat or scrawny. I liked the purple one. She looked nice.
I approach the clothing store and pull out the note the woman had given me. After I take a few steps inside, a worker fails to approach me, so I look around. There were mostly dresses and furs, nothing I thought looked nice, and nothing that would look nice on a bear. Furs didn’t go well on fur, I assumed. Maybe I was wrong, though, I was never too good with fashion. Faust took up most of my life. I pass a rack of some sort of fur that must have been fake, for it looked like cow spots. Just as I do so, a very skinny woman with tight skin across her face rushes up at me, looking slightly irritated. I do not know what I have done, so I stare blankly at her for a few seconds before pulling out the note written to pick up the clothes. I still had no idea how much I would be carrying. She snatches the note from me and glances over it, then up at me. I smile, so she rolls her eyes. The action offends me slightly, but I don’t have a chance to give her any kind of offensive look in return before she leaves me to collect the clothes.
I can not describe my relief when she returns with only a clear plastic bag with multiple dresses inside of it. Nothing too heavy or bulky to carry, and since they were all together Faust most likely would not take anything out. He would just hide the bag. That way, when I got back, the woman would not yell at me for being over an hour late. Maybe thirty minutes, or maybe an hour if Faust really did feel playful. I take the bag from her, smiling and trying to thank her with just facial expression, but I doubt she notices. She has already rushed off to see another customer. The store was beginning to get busy, so I slipped past a few chatty women by the fake cow furs and out the front door. The sun immediately hits my eyes, and I put my hands up to cover my face. Just as I do, the clothes disappear from under me and I hear the familiar laugh of an until now silent Faust. I sigh and glare at the sky, frustrated, even though I had expected something like that to happen.
I begin to wander around, glancing at the clothing on the passing bears every now and then to make sure they hadn’t taken anything out of the bag. I could not risk losing the clothes, or I would be in a lot of trouble. I had lost things before, and I always got in a lot of trouble. I look under benches and in bushes, wondering where Faust could have decided to hide the woman’s things this time. I assume forty five minutes pass before anything happens. Faust shows up to warn me a peacekeeper had his eye on me. I let my thoughts project onto him, as I had recently learned how to do, and he knows that I understand. Before I can relocate and keep looking for the clothes, I feel a strong hand on my arm. I jump, startled, and am turned around forcefully by the person, and squint my eyes to get a better look at the peacekeeper that had grabbed hold of me. He was older, and he looked like he was not going to let me go and tell me not to meander anymore. He was going to get me in trouble. I hated him already. I hated Faust, too, for hiding the woman’s clothes. Now I would never find them.
“I think you are the one we have been looking for,” the man says. “You’ve been away from your master’s house for over three hours and we originally assumed you had run away. You can’t just walk out like that. You will be punished for your actions, but it is not my job to handle that.” I flinch when he raises his other hand up to put it behind my back. I was scared of men like him. He laughs when I practice the action, but doesn’t say anything more on the way back to the woman’s house. When the bears look at me, I avoid their gaze, only glancing around occasionally in case I see the clothes. The woman knew I was going out to get her clothes, and she knew I took a long time! Why would she call the bad peacekeepers to come and get me if she knew I would be back soon? I explained to her before that Faust took the clothes. I made the mistake of thinking she was going to be a nice woman. I was so wrong.
“Faust!” the woman shout a little too loudly when she opens the door to let me in. I flinch when she calls the name. “You can not just walk out of my house! I sent you on no errand,” she claims. My mouth drops and she quickly slaps the under side of my chin to make me close it. She sent me out! After the peacekeeper leaves, I run for a paper to write down my explanation. While she reads it, I watch her face, which slowly grows more and more irritated, and slightly red. I furrow my eyebrows when she glares up at me from the paper. “You really are crazy, Faust!” another flinch. “When I hired you and found out you were only a little crazy, I thought I could handle you, but now I understand the peacekeepers’ warning. You’re a nut! I want you out of my house,” she says. I bow my head, disappointed that yet another person did not like me because they were not like me. They couldn’t see the special people. My father saw the special people. He was the only other person to see Faust. It made me feel so lonely sometimes.
I was out of that house by the evening, and just as I was leaving, Faust handed me the bag of clothes and apologized. I dropped them on the pavement as I walked away with the peacekeeper. It was back to wait until someone else needed me. I was surprised they hadn’t tried to figure out who Faust was. He was the real criminal, not me, who just did what she could to be normal. Some people would never understand what it was like to be able to see the real world. They were stuck seeing pretend things that always stayed the same and always made sense. Poor them.
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