#elba1

The iPod had been stolen about a year ago after a customer in Fist and Furious had flaunted it about. You didn’t see them too often anymore, but once Hilda had clapped eyes on it, she knew she wanted it. The fancy phones these days came with music players inbuilt. She didn’t have a fancy phone and couldn’t get one, since it required a contract she wouldn’t be able to afford every month. An iPod didn’t need a contract— of course she wanted it. It hadn’t been hard to get it either. Hilda went to the library every month to logon to their computers and update her music. It wasn’t very expensive for half an hours use and that’s all she needed to take what she was bored of off and add on the new songs she had stumbled across and kept a handwritten note of stuffed in her pocket. The system worked. 

Now, the headphone’s wire stretched in two directions, one in Hilda’s ear, one in Elba’s. Hilda was pleasantly high, the initial buzz of ethereum she’d taken having worn off to leave her feeling mellow and relaxed. Some days she chased the buzz, others she wanted this— to lie still, music in her ears, next to a friend. She clicked to the next song. Head turning towards Elba, in a way that tugged the earbud out of her ear, she said, as she fumbled to put it back, “It’s lucky I live in a fairly isolated cabin in the woods, ‘cause I played this on repeat for an hour straight last night. I have a new music obsession.” That couldn’t have been a surprise— every month Hilda was obsessed with someone new. 

The truth was she tried on more outfits that afternoon than she had for the wedding itself, and she still wasn’t satisfied with what she wore. First she cursed the lighting in the bathroom, then the spots on the mirror which she knew how to clean in her experience as a maid but didn’t, complaining about them instead when she stabbed herself in the eye with a mascara wand. She looked too young and then she looked too old and then she looked too pregnant and then she looked like she was trying to hide the un-hidable fact she was pregnant, and then Hilda’s friends were there. Out in the living room, just beyond the wood of the door. And she wasn’t ready.

In the mirror she watched her fingers comb through the long, shiny waves of her dark hair in double time. “They’re just some loser people from Bloodhearth, and in a few months you’ll forget all about them.” It wasn’t the comforting affirmation she’d intended it to be.

Because she was alone and because no one was looking she clapped her hands together and prayed oh my God please let them like me. She didn’t want to like them though. Well, maybe she did. It was a struggle to zip up the ill-advised heeled boots she wore over swollen ankles, but she did it and didn’t stumble when she made her grand entrance into… a pit of conversation that was already happening. No one looked up. She wished more than anything she could have a glass of champagne, or cry. “Sorry it took me so long,” she gestured down to the boots which were very stylish and expensive and a secondhand find that she would never admit to. “They don’t warn you how hard it will get to put your own shoes on when you’re pregnant.” Or maybe they did warn you, but Priscilla had been doing it on her own and had no ‘they’ to speak of.