My entry for this years writers jam, and I chose the prompt of legacy (sort of blends in with defiance too). Uhm, not much to say. I made up this world and these characters on the fly lmfao, take what you will from this.
In the office suite high in the Custerdome, Sally Sul-Sul saunters over to the black leather leisure chair and plops her ass down. Red spandex pencil skirt hugged around her shapely hips just as tightly as her label logo top. She had to wear it, it was the first thing she received when she got a ‘pardon’ from her latest rehab visit. The fabric is some cheap polyester, the logo just as haphazardly printed on. It would be faded and peeling in only a few washes.
It was a slight towards her. Maggy knew how much she hated cheap merch. When Sally fantasied about being a famous singer whose name alone people would want printed on a shirt, she’d never want it to be some cheap shit that would make people itchy.
Little mind games like this is why Sally wasn’t anywhere close to kicking whatever it was that she was sent in for this time. Pills wasn’t even specific enough anymore. At age 26 she’s had them all, desperately searching for whatever made her feel closer to home. To feel closer to that own version of herself she idolized so hard for back then. She had all the money in the world to just quit it all and go back home now, but she knew she couldn’t do that anymore.
She’s back in this miserable room. Really it’s no different than the rehab center. Sterile bright lighting that lets her see every nook and cranny of her skin turned scaly and flakey from neglect. Disembodied scratching type noises from the floor below. Unwritten rules of ‘etiquette’ that were downright cruel to enforce on someone ready to throw themselves off a building for the right kind of high.
The main difference was all of the pictures on the walls of people who came before her, people all managed by the siren behind the desk.
Her puppet master, if you will. It was a grim reality of entertainment. It was bound to happen to her. Everyone back in her small midwestern flyover town warned her about types like her, and she glares from beneath her stringy red wires of hair that loom over her eye, making her feel like a peeping tom in her own damn body. His nose twitches when the smoke hits, and her lets out a sigh.
She lights a cigarette and stares her manager down. “Thanks for the bail out.”
“…again.” She finishes.
There’s another pause.
She takes another drag of her cigarette, “You know, Maggy-“ She spits her name, “I’m not in 3rd grade anymore, you aren’t my teacher. You sure as hell ain’t my mom. Don’t expect a ‘ma’am’ or miss whatever the hell your last name is.” She flicks her wrist, “You could’ve left me in there while you went and found another girl with a half decent voice.”
She doesn’t beak her pose, her stipples hands rest as a grand pyramid on the mahogany desk, “I wonder, what was your aim joining this industry, Sally?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you want to end up like this?” She tilts her head, bowing her brows upwards curiosity. The cold, hospital like florescent lights accentuate her sharp features. With the white suit and slick black hair, she looked no different than one of the nurses in the rehab center. “You’re my perfect pop sensation.”
Sally huffs, a wry smile twists on her face as she shoves the cigarette out on the felt of her chair, “Yeah? This is the perfect pop sensation.” She gestures at herself.
“No, no.” Maggy sits up from behind her desk, and walks down the room to where Sally is sitting. Sally’s eyes dart up, and they lock together. As unsettling; as soul rattling as it is, she can’t break contact with those shark dead eyes.
She can’t loose another one of her games.
“You’re my perfect pop sensation.”
From her peripheral she can see Maggy’s new collection of plaques that had Sally’s face plastered all over them. A personal wall of fame. Proof of her own hard work paying off when she didn’t even need to leave the room. Sally did the hard work. She performed. She dealt with the looneys and ducked all these fans and still couldn’t take the pressure well enough to avoid turning to Xanax.
All while Maggy sat back and sucked up all of the rewards. When Sally went platinum, she went platinum. She can see the cover of her first hit single, bright, veneer white photoshopped smile surrounded by her ruby red smile. The ring light only made the light in her eyes shine brighter than ever.
“But you’re not that unique.”
Those words would sting that version of her in the photo. More like mortally wound. Like a wolf snatching a rabbit by its neck, running off into the woods where she would then devour every last bit of her until there was nothing left. Bones, hair, all the nasty organs that get ripped out of you when you’re a kid. Everything. And, legally speaking, she’d have every right to do so, according to some piece of paper she signed all those years ago as a doe eyed 22 year old. She’d be seen as America’s example of Millionaire women.
“You know, I don’t want to be.” Sally says. “Too much work. You know- I started singing in Sunday school right? I was on the choir.” Sally recrosses her legs, “Said I had the best voice there when all I wanted to do was sing.”
“That’s what they-‘
“Let me finish my fuckin’ story first.” Sally holds her hand up, “Maybe if I sucked a little more it’d be someone else-“ She stops, “But that’d be cruel of me to think now, I wouldn’t want anyone in my spot.”
Maggy arches a brow, “Not even someone who could handle it better than you?”
“pfft.” Sally rolls her eyes, and her head as well, just for a little drama. It’s what she was known for, “That would just mean more work for you, right?”
Maggy tilts her head. Pitty fills her stupid grin, as she goes to pat Sally’s matted red curls, “You’re acting like I’m the reason you’re a junkie.”
“I have a friend back home whose mama said the same thing when he overdosed.”
“So I’m like a mom to you now? Aw-“ She sucks her tongue, folding her hands in front, “How sweet.”
Sally’s stomach just tightens. The urge to just stand up and walk out grows with each passing second. In the background she can see the red tower lights fade in and out, roughly two seconds between each motion. It’s the closest thing to a clock she has right now. It gives her the same feeling that she doesn’t have much left.
“What the hell are they doing downstairs?” Sally asks, stomping on the floor, “Are they doing construction this late at night?”
Maggy ignores her question. “Your birthdays coming up, right Sally?”
She isn’t looking at her anymore, her whole body faces the window now.
That pit in her stomach slowly morphed into something else. Something dark and twisted, it’s something she felt as a child watching a horror movie for the first time as a 6 year old. The only possible time where you could believe a clown in the sewer could legitimately come out to eat you whole.
Terror.
“Yes ma’am.” She has no clue why she thinks being respectful can save her from this now. She’s in to deep. She knows it. “I’ll be-“
“27.” She walks away from her, but she doesn’t feel any further away. She only feels like she’s getting closer. “A perfect age for an entertainer, especially a musician.”
For once, there were hairs on Sally’s legs to stand on edge.
“And you know, you’ve made a pretty good legacy for me to make a lot of money with.” She goes behind her desk, “I think you’re at the peak of your career right now.”
Sally flinches when Maggy ducks down behind her desk. When she pops up Sally expects that the jig was finally up up. Her body would be riddled with holes and her case would become the next unsolved musician murder. Maggy had more than enough to cover it all up, call it a drug overdose or a deal gone wrong. All by money she made for her.
The scratching grows louder, and those scratches are now accompanied with ghastly moans.
She slowly creaks her eyes open, but she shoots up out of her chair when she sees the floor beneath her split in two. Maybe she was already dead. They say you don’t even hear it, Because the floor is splitting in two right in front of her and all she can hear now is screeching. She peers down, and what she expects as fire is nothing but a barren, pitch black room with at least two dozen sunken in faces staring back at her.
Men, women, shit there were teenagers there too. Period fashion pieces once shimmery and smooth now hang ragged off their skeleton like bodies. Some cover their faces and howl in agony as the light hits their eyes, others just reach out for an escape they couldn’t hope to reach.
“Wh-what the fuck?”
“I don’t kill people.” Maggy chuckles, “That would be unprofessional.”
“So you stick them in a bare room in your penthouse office instead?” Sally blinks, “Like that’s much better?”
“They’re all names you’ve heard before.” She nods her head towards the wall, and sure enough the faces, as sunken and deformed as they maybe, were still very much the same people that were crying and moaning out for sweet freedom below them. “But they make me so much money even from down there.” She saunters back over to Sally, who steps back away from her as she comes closer.
Maggy closes her eyes with pleasure, “Honestly I’m jealous.”
“S-sure you are.”
“No really, I am.” She takes out a pack of cigarettes from her blazer and throws it to the pit below. Sally doesn’t want to look, but she can hear them shriek like she just threw a log into a fire pit. “Sculpting people into the perfect money making machines takes much more effort than simply having a pretty voice. You have to have a money driven mindset, it’s what decides who gets to be heard.”
She turns back towards Sally, “Peter Cockroach over there could’ve gotten worse with their addiction, ruin their reputations. No more money. Or Amy Explosion could gone sober, ride out her contract with me and do a half decent solo career. No more money.” She crouches down on her knees and reaches down to stroke the head of a zombie with a wig glued to her head, one stroke causes a chunk of fake hair and scalp to come right off with a pained howl.
Sally bites her lip and takes another step away, Maggy just tilts her head.
“What’s wrong? You could’ve said no.”
“I was just a kid.”
Maggy’s smile drops to a frown like porcelain on a tile floor. “You’re a legal adult.”
“A two year old adult.”
“That’s a cute way to put it.”
Before Sally can back away her wrist is caught in a vice grip, and Maggy yanks her closer. Never has walking on stilts felt more accurate, as Sally could feel her ankle wobble as she’s pulled right to the edge of the fake cliff.
“Can I ask you something then?”
Sally always had a way of making Maggy laugh, and she must’ve found that funny. She closes her eyes and smiles delicately. It’s such a good look on her face. She almost looks human again. That’s what Sally thought she was above all of the other people she could’ve been managed by.
“Of course.”
“Is that all you wanted out of this job? Just money?”
There’s a pause, filled with anguished moans and pleas from souls long neglected.
“No love for music? I could even get it if you wanted to make the media something only your twisted mind could enjoy, but is it all for money?” Sally looks desperate, “The world will go on when you die too, you know. Why keep doing this?”
“They won’t look for that when someone like me dies.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“It’s how the industry works.”
“The industry can change, you know?”
That soft smile twists back up into a grin. “That’s what every kid like you thinks.”
Sally’s eyes flick towards the hole in the ground, watching the writhe and climb on top of each other like crabs in a bucket. She looks back at Maggy, and like a static shock she acts on impulse.
It’s all to quick, a subconscious action that one could only do in a time of dire straits. Maybe Maggy expected her to stand there just a little longer. Maybe she expected another noble sounding quote that wouldn’t have meant anything if Sally just walked away along time ago. Sally knows that nothing she’ll do will matter in the future if she was to not leave this room before sunrise.
Her free arm lurches forward and her hand grabs blindly towards Maggy’s neck. Whether or not she actually grabbed her didn’t matter, it caught Maggy off guard just enough for her to fall in the right direction. Tumbling on her high heels, Sally barely escaped the same fat eof tumbling down into the hole, falling to her knees as the older woman clung to her for dear life.
It was too late. She screams, and those screams only pitch up in shock as her old talents quickly swallow up her body with their own.
….
Sally’s heard all about how optics mean everything in the entertainment industry, but she always felt there was more that. Optics mean little to her. Maybe it was just how she was raised.
And with the gratitude of several families that were desperate for answers on where their love ones could’ve gone, Sally was pleased to learn that her intuition was correct after all. It was enough to buy up some extra space in her hometown for several new residents to be able to live comfortably.
Some of Maggy’s old clients needed more space than others. Some of them couldn’t talk. It took some of them weeks to get out of that hole in Maggy’s old office, but time can heal all wounds, and Sally felt like they had all the time in the world.
“How you feeling, miss Explosion?” Sally asks. Amy was fixated on the remote, clicking all of the buttons with experimental vigor, watching the screen carefully to see what each of them does.
“R-remotes changed alot.” She mutters.
Sally just nods her head, “Take all the time you need. I got a TV for just about everyone.” She walks away and heads over to the communal dining table in the middle of the room, seeing Adam Cockroach and Tim Xiaoming eating their lunch as they talk about their day in still rather scrambled English.
Sally smiles in content. Later tonight she’ll give them all a nice concert, singing to them while they do nothing but listen. Pulled out of the ground, they can now rest peacefully.
“It’s not easy to find something worse than death.” She sighs to herself, walking over to the window by the counter. It’s been a few weeks, but she now knows how to truly appreciate where she came from. No more skyscrapers and bright billboards cluttering her view of the mountains.
She lets out another breath, now, it feels easier to do. “No wonder why I went insane over there.”
‘No wonder why they did too’.
Maybe they all fell for the idea that a their name was only worth something when it was made far away from home. That you have to be surrounded by strangers and fake faces and people who will rather lock you away forever if it put another 0 in their bank account. Her birthday was a week ago, and she spent it relocating everyone trapped to her home town.
Sally looks over at the shack in the distance, knowing one day she’ll have to confront the demons she created.
A legacy of kindness and compassion, that includes compassion even to those who tried to hurt you. Who tried to snuff out talent when it was convenient to them.
‘This is different’ she thinks, walking out of the room, leaving the former musicians to themselves. They liked their personal space. ‘This is what had to be done’.
