All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 11: Tiger Teeth

Music Track List:

Nick Drake - Hanging on a Star

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David's POV

It was the end of the day, and I'd barely made a dent in clearing out the room. I had decided to divide the sundry of objects into two main categories: movable stuff and unmovable stuff. The unmovable stuff stayed put, obviously. The movable stuff, I sorted into: random cool shit that I could safely carry out of here without anyone noticing and sell online or keep for myself; random cool shit I didn't think I could get away with legally selling but also didn't think I could legally put in the school dumpster (like the jars of bloated human fetuses for example); and trash. 

While I was cleaning up, Pepper sat reading her never-ending supply of magazines and punctuating the incessant flipping of the pages with the occasional pop of her chewing gum. I tried drawing her into conversation several times, bringing her the latest news of my finds, but she seemed to be more enraptured by the cancellation of Castle, as featured on the cover of People magazine, than pairs of shrunken heads tied together with twine.

"What do you do, anyways?" Pepper piped up. Oh, I was going to have fun with this name.

"What – you don't know?" I stared her down, broom in hand, "Didn't Uncle Attie explain to you what the job is?"

"Oh, he explained what my job is: show up and rake in the cash. He didn't explain to me what your job is," Pepper said while swinging her legs back and forth, the strips of her naked flesh on her thick thighs peeking through the ragtag tears in her pants. She tore her eyes away from her magazine long enough to cast an accusatory glance at the broom in my hand, "But I think I can guess."

"It's complicated. You wouldn't get it," I said defensively and pushed the broom aside.

"Try me. Inquiring minds want to know," Pepper prodded.

"I'm attempting to prove string theory by using cymatics to create a visual manifestation of a sonic bubble that will allow us to test the tensile strength of the walls of our reality—"

"Never mind," Pepper interrupted holding up a hand as a signal for me to stop talking, "I don't want to know." She went back to her magazine, so I started to stack the rotting canvases of abstract paintings onto a dolly. Some of them might have been worth something if they weren't just disintegrating at my touch. It made me kind of sad. 

"Wait," I heard Pepper interject, and I looked back at her broad, fair face scrunching a freckly nose at me, "What the hell do you want to do that for?"

"If we can use sound to show us where the walls of the multiverse are thinnest, we may be able to create a portal that will allow us to have the ability to travel to alternate realities," I explained as if I was talking to a child, which I could very well be. Pepper had one of those faces that could be anywhere between the age of fifteen and twenty-eight. Eyes too mature and worldly for a teenager, flesh too fresh to be an adult.

"Explore alternate realities...what would you do that for?" Pepper grilled me further. What was this, an interrogation? 

"Well, imagine if we found an alternate reality in which there was a cure for cancer or untold advanced technologies..." I quickly illustrated while wiping the smut from my hands against my now soiled and filthy cardigan. Damn, now I was going to have to finally wash my precious until-now-unwashed indigo jeans.

Pepper interrupted my thoughts and sat up in alarm. "What if all you find are new diseases or nuclear holocausts and bring them back with you instead? What then!?"