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smackenzie"Just hang out," Marya told Oscar. "Watch me disassemble. Be glad you can't help me pack the car - it's going to be a bitch and a half."
Oscar didn't seem any less worried that she was going to leave him, but she wasn't sure how else to reassure him. She finished unscrewing the hihats from the stand and packed them in the fabulous padded cymbal bag she'd gotten free when she bought the cymbals. In a way she was very much her grandmother’s granddaughter - both Maryas really loved a good deal. Her cymbals were Zildjians and not cheap, but they sounded great and she'd had them a while, and besides, the pack came with its own padded carrying case, and you couldn't argue with that.
She unscrewed the two crash cymbals from their stand and packed them away, followed by the 20" ride which always made her a little nervous to set up and take down. It was big and heavy and she didn't have particularly long arms and she was always afraid she was going to drop it on her foot and crack it or something. The fact that she never had didn't mean she wasn't still occasionally worried about it. Even good drummers could have bad luck.
She folded up the cymbal stands and put all the various screws and bits in plastic baggies so as not to lose them. Oscar tried to get in her way but she shoved him off.
"I'm not leaving you, don't panic," she told him again, which of course made no difference. Marya sighed. He was going to be like this until they were both in the car heading west out of town. Maybe she could get him to go outside or something, pray he found a butterfly to chase.
She leaned the cymbal bag against the wall, leaned the folded-up stands next to it, and dealt with the snare next. She got it off the stand and into the case with no problem, folded up the stand and put it with the others, almost tripped over Oscar, and attacked the toms. She did the standing tom first, even though it was the biggest and heaviest, because it was easy. You take the legs off, that's it. She was used to setting up and taking down by herself, and it still always annoyed her that she couldn't get any help with the rack toms. Especially now that Oscar was nervously getting in her way.
"Am I going to have to lock you out of the room?" she asked him. He just looked at her with his big mismatched puppy eyes as if to say Aren't I too cute to leave behind? Marya huffed at him, stepped around him, and went back to work.
She dropped a couple of lugnuts on the floor and seriously considered leaving the one that rolled under the guest bed. But no, who knew where she'd be able to find replacements? Or if she'd be able to find replacements. So she crawled under the bed, choking on dust, to retrieve the one errant piece of hardware. It went in a baggie with all the other small bits that came off the rack.
Eventually she managed to manhandle all the toms into their cases and disassemble the rack that held them. She wasn't sure why it seemed to be more of a pain in the ass than usual, but it was. She couldn't blame it all on Oscar, either. It was a weird feeling knowing that you were packing up your drums not to take them to a gig, but to take them on the road without any expectation that you'd ever return.
Well, she couldn't think about it now or she'd never get anything done, and if she never got anything done, she couldn't leave, and if she couldn't leave, she couldn't find her dad. And that was not something Marya was even going to admit as a possibility. So she took apart and packed up the kick pedal, packed up the bass drum, collected her drumsticks and the extra snare head she'd bought a couple weeks ago and the polish for her cymbals and the spare bits of hardware in case she lost something (or dropped a lugnut under the bed) and the entirely useless sheet music her dad had sent her three years ago. She tried to make a neat pile in the middle of the room, but she didn't really have the energy to stack the cases or really do anything besides push them together in one mass of disassembled drumkit.
But that was done, and she could move on to something else. Like, say, the fridge. The power had apparently come back on, because the fridge was humming like normal, and when Marya opened the door and stuck her head inside, it didn’t smell too bad. She thought maybe she should take everything out of it just in case, though.
There was a big old Coleman cooler in the basement, so Marya dragged it upstairs, washed it out, dried it, and started loading it with things from the fridge. Some apples, half a bag of baby carrots, a brick of cheddar cheese, a carton of orange juice, the cooked chicken and pork chops, the chicken salad, a gallon jug of water - almost empty - three jars of jam (strawberry preserves, orange marmalade, and Concord grape jelly). That was a lot of cooler for not a lot of food. She took the bag of frozen corn out of the freezer and dropped it in the cooler. She didn't have any of those re-freezable plastic things that you put in your cooler to keep things cold, so the corn would have to do. As a bonus, when it eventually thawed out she could eat it.
She got a box from the basement - her grandma kept everything - and started filling it with the food she'd bought a couple days ago, when she went to the grocery store and there was almost no one there. Cans and cans and cans, milk in a box, unpeeled carrots, green beans, goldfish crackers. She balanced the tomatoes and bananas on top, and then started putting out everything else in the pantry that she thought she might need, that she could eat without cooking and that wouldn't spoil. She didn’t really think she'd be able to choke down a can of black bean soup without heating it up, and there was no point in bringing the instant oatmeal, but she had a couple cans of tunafish and half a loaf of bread and peanutbutter and marshmallow fluff and some Oreos. She packed the salt and pepper, the garlic salt, the cinnamon, the plastic teddy-bear bottle of honey, the small unlabeled jar of miscellaneous spices and seasonings that were so good on a baked potato. She packed the hot chocolate mix - it was Ghirardelli, it was even good plain if you stuck your finger in it when you needed a quick chocolate and sugar fix.
Marya put all the bottled water she'd bought on the kitchen table, and then got a paper grocery bag for the paper towels and some plastic silverware and the kitchen knives and the can opener and a pot and a frying pan. She wanted desperately to take her grandma's fancy silverware and the sterling silver serving pieces, but what good would they do? If she had space left over, she would take them. She'd never been particularly attached to her grandma's crystal and china, or the few pieces of formal dining ware, but there was a silver cup with her grandparents' names engraved on it, which they'd gotten for their wedding, and a little silver sippy cup that had been her dad's when he was a baby, and a big glass cake plate that she'd always liked. The cake plate was only twelve years old - young by Marya's grandma's standards - and handmade by some glassblower from northern California, and it had a red swirl that started in the center and spiraled outwards to eventually form the rim. Marya the First hadn't used it much, because it was too weird and modern for her, but Marya the Second, and Marya the Second's dad, had thought it was gorgeous.
Now Marya wrapped it carefully in a towel and took it into the guest room and put it on top of the case holding the largest tom. She wasn't sure what to do with it yet.
Now that the kitchen was done, she did the bathroom, which was stupidly easy considering all Marya needed out of it was her toiletries, the extra toilet paper, and a towel. Although there were also first aid supplies, mostly Band-Aids and Tylenol and a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a box of tampons. There was no way Marya was striking out into the great unknown - and this trip was looking more and more like the first exploration of an insane explorer - without any feminine hygiene products. She was not getting caught with her pants down, so to speak.
But it wasn't difficult to throw her toothpaste and assorted beauty products into a shoebox and take it into the kitchen to sit on the counter with the boxes of food. She brought the towel into her bedroom and just stood in the middle of the floor for a few minutes, the towel around her shoulders and Oscar sitting practically on top of her foot. She should probably pack up his stuff before she got involved in her clothes and knicknacks and things. Watching her pack up his chew toys and biscuits and his extra leash and the doggie nail clippers might reassure him that whatever reason she had for suddenly packing everything in sight, it also included him.
She dropped the towel on the bed and headed out to the garage, where his kibble lived with the extra leash and his backpack saddlebags thing and an unopened box of Milk Bones. Oscar also had a couple of barbecued pigs' ears and a random chew stick, and somewhere in the house was a squeaky stuffed fish that he liked to carry around but didn't seem interested in actually chewing on. She’d have to find it, because she didn't think she'd be able to stand his deprived little face when he couldn’t find it later. It was his security fish.
She put everything into another grocery bag except for the dog food and the saddlebags, which she left next to the cooler and hanging over the back of one of the kitchen chairs.
"Am I done here?" she asked Oscar, who now just looked confused. "I think I'm done here. Do you have to go out? I want to eat lunch. I'll let you out." She opened the back door for him, but he didn't seem interested in going. Maybe he really didn't have to pee. "Ok, suit yourself. I'm going to eat something."
She did give him fresh water first, and then she sliced up one of the tomatoes and made a sandwich with some butter. She couldn't bring the butter with her - it would melt first when the temperature in the cooler dropped far enough - but she could try and eat as much of it as she could before she left. It wasn't an entirely stupid idea.
words: 1874
total words: 22,132
Oscar didn't seem any less worried that she was going to leave him, but she wasn't sure how else to reassure him. She finished unscrewing the hihats from the stand and packed them in the fabulous padded cymbal bag she'd gotten free when she bought the cymbals. In a way she was very much her grandmother’s granddaughter - both Maryas really loved a good deal. Her cymbals were Zildjians and not cheap, but they sounded great and she'd had them a while, and besides, the pack came with its own padded carrying case, and you couldn't argue with that.
She unscrewed the two crash cymbals from their stand and packed them away, followed by the 20" ride which always made her a little nervous to set up and take down. It was big and heavy and she didn't have particularly long arms and she was always afraid she was going to drop it on her foot and crack it or something. The fact that she never had didn't mean she wasn't still occasionally worried about it. Even good drummers could have bad luck.
She folded up the cymbal stands and put all the various screws and bits in plastic baggies so as not to lose them. Oscar tried to get in her way but she shoved him off.
"I'm not leaving you, don't panic," she told him again, which of course made no difference. Marya sighed. He was going to be like this until they were both in the car heading west out of town. Maybe she could get him to go outside or something, pray he found a butterfly to chase.
She leaned the cymbal bag against the wall, leaned the folded-up stands next to it, and dealt with the snare next. She got it off the stand and into the case with no problem, folded up the stand and put it with the others, almost tripped over Oscar, and attacked the toms. She did the standing tom first, even though it was the biggest and heaviest, because it was easy. You take the legs off, that's it. She was used to setting up and taking down by herself, and it still always annoyed her that she couldn't get any help with the rack toms. Especially now that Oscar was nervously getting in her way.
"Am I going to have to lock you out of the room?" she asked him. He just looked at her with his big mismatched puppy eyes as if to say Aren't I too cute to leave behind? Marya huffed at him, stepped around him, and went back to work.
She dropped a couple of lugnuts on the floor and seriously considered leaving the one that rolled under the guest bed. But no, who knew where she'd be able to find replacements? Or if she'd be able to find replacements. So she crawled under the bed, choking on dust, to retrieve the one errant piece of hardware. It went in a baggie with all the other small bits that came off the rack.
Eventually she managed to manhandle all the toms into their cases and disassemble the rack that held them. She wasn't sure why it seemed to be more of a pain in the ass than usual, but it was. She couldn't blame it all on Oscar, either. It was a weird feeling knowing that you were packing up your drums not to take them to a gig, but to take them on the road without any expectation that you'd ever return.
Well, she couldn't think about it now or she'd never get anything done, and if she never got anything done, she couldn't leave, and if she couldn't leave, she couldn't find her dad. And that was not something Marya was even going to admit as a possibility. So she took apart and packed up the kick pedal, packed up the bass drum, collected her drumsticks and the extra snare head she'd bought a couple weeks ago and the polish for her cymbals and the spare bits of hardware in case she lost something (or dropped a lugnut under the bed) and the entirely useless sheet music her dad had sent her three years ago. She tried to make a neat pile in the middle of the room, but she didn't really have the energy to stack the cases or really do anything besides push them together in one mass of disassembled drumkit.
But that was done, and she could move on to something else. Like, say, the fridge. The power had apparently come back on, because the fridge was humming like normal, and when Marya opened the door and stuck her head inside, it didn’t smell too bad. She thought maybe she should take everything out of it just in case, though.
There was a big old Coleman cooler in the basement, so Marya dragged it upstairs, washed it out, dried it, and started loading it with things from the fridge. Some apples, half a bag of baby carrots, a brick of cheddar cheese, a carton of orange juice, the cooked chicken and pork chops, the chicken salad, a gallon jug of water - almost empty - three jars of jam (strawberry preserves, orange marmalade, and Concord grape jelly). That was a lot of cooler for not a lot of food. She took the bag of frozen corn out of the freezer and dropped it in the cooler. She didn't have any of those re-freezable plastic things that you put in your cooler to keep things cold, so the corn would have to do. As a bonus, when it eventually thawed out she could eat it.
She got a box from the basement - her grandma kept everything - and started filling it with the food she'd bought a couple days ago, when she went to the grocery store and there was almost no one there. Cans and cans and cans, milk in a box, unpeeled carrots, green beans, goldfish crackers. She balanced the tomatoes and bananas on top, and then started putting out everything else in the pantry that she thought she might need, that she could eat without cooking and that wouldn't spoil. She didn’t really think she'd be able to choke down a can of black bean soup without heating it up, and there was no point in bringing the instant oatmeal, but she had a couple cans of tunafish and half a loaf of bread and peanutbutter and marshmallow fluff and some Oreos. She packed the salt and pepper, the garlic salt, the cinnamon, the plastic teddy-bear bottle of honey, the small unlabeled jar of miscellaneous spices and seasonings that were so good on a baked potato. She packed the hot chocolate mix - it was Ghirardelli, it was even good plain if you stuck your finger in it when you needed a quick chocolate and sugar fix.
Marya put all the bottled water she'd bought on the kitchen table, and then got a paper grocery bag for the paper towels and some plastic silverware and the kitchen knives and the can opener and a pot and a frying pan. She wanted desperately to take her grandma's fancy silverware and the sterling silver serving pieces, but what good would they do? If she had space left over, she would take them. She'd never been particularly attached to her grandma's crystal and china, or the few pieces of formal dining ware, but there was a silver cup with her grandparents' names engraved on it, which they'd gotten for their wedding, and a little silver sippy cup that had been her dad's when he was a baby, and a big glass cake plate that she'd always liked. The cake plate was only twelve years old - young by Marya's grandma's standards - and handmade by some glassblower from northern California, and it had a red swirl that started in the center and spiraled outwards to eventually form the rim. Marya the First hadn't used it much, because it was too weird and modern for her, but Marya the Second, and Marya the Second's dad, had thought it was gorgeous.
Now Marya wrapped it carefully in a towel and took it into the guest room and put it on top of the case holding the largest tom. She wasn't sure what to do with it yet.
Now that the kitchen was done, she did the bathroom, which was stupidly easy considering all Marya needed out of it was her toiletries, the extra toilet paper, and a towel. Although there were also first aid supplies, mostly Band-Aids and Tylenol and a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a box of tampons. There was no way Marya was striking out into the great unknown - and this trip was looking more and more like the first exploration of an insane explorer - without any feminine hygiene products. She was not getting caught with her pants down, so to speak.
But it wasn't difficult to throw her toothpaste and assorted beauty products into a shoebox and take it into the kitchen to sit on the counter with the boxes of food. She brought the towel into her bedroom and just stood in the middle of the floor for a few minutes, the towel around her shoulders and Oscar sitting practically on top of her foot. She should probably pack up his stuff before she got involved in her clothes and knicknacks and things. Watching her pack up his chew toys and biscuits and his extra leash and the doggie nail clippers might reassure him that whatever reason she had for suddenly packing everything in sight, it also included him.
She dropped the towel on the bed and headed out to the garage, where his kibble lived with the extra leash and his backpack saddlebags thing and an unopened box of Milk Bones. Oscar also had a couple of barbecued pigs' ears and a random chew stick, and somewhere in the house was a squeaky stuffed fish that he liked to carry around but didn't seem interested in actually chewing on. She’d have to find it, because she didn't think she'd be able to stand his deprived little face when he couldn’t find it later. It was his security fish.
She put everything into another grocery bag except for the dog food and the saddlebags, which she left next to the cooler and hanging over the back of one of the kitchen chairs.
"Am I done here?" she asked Oscar, who now just looked confused. "I think I'm done here. Do you have to go out? I want to eat lunch. I'll let you out." She opened the back door for him, but he didn't seem interested in going. Maybe he really didn't have to pee. "Ok, suit yourself. I'm going to eat something."
She did give him fresh water first, and then she sliced up one of the tomatoes and made a sandwich with some butter. She couldn't bring the butter with her - it would melt first when the temperature in the cooler dropped far enough - but she could try and eat as much of it as she could before she left. It wasn't an entirely stupid idea.
words: 1874
total words: 22,132
