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Other Mal story and sketches indexed here. I think from the voice that this is older [younger?] Mal - Mal back in time before her main story starts.
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Folding paper cranes had advantages as far as semi-constructive things to keep your hands busy go. For one thing it wasn't smoking, and given how much she still found herself wanting to just bum a clove and suck down the sweet heat, that was a plus. You've got to do something with all the flyers that people thrust at you on your way into clubs, because half the time they were badly-selected badly-designed ugly wastes of paper, and most of the rest of the time she already knew about the gig or the club night. It was habit enough that she didn't even look at her hands most of the time, just let her fingers make the familiar moves and her nails score neat lines, and for some reason it impressed the heck out of people, which she held was very rarely a bad thing.
She'd gotten the pattern down sitting in an airport lounge in Berlin with this cute Japanese boy from Idaho of all places. He was there with his parents, so it wasn't like they could sneak off and do anything more than flirt and chat a little while they all waited for the airline to make up it's mind if their flight was cancelled or just delayed forever. They'd been stuck there for hours, and by the end of that long night they were gritty eyed, grimy and giggling a little, and they'd left a whole Elle magazine's worth of shiny folded cranes flocking around the island of hard plastic chairs.
She'd looked up a couple of others, waiting out the rain in a public library in Edinburgh because when' you're planning on getting a stranger to take you home so you have a place to sleep it helps if you don’t look like a drowned rat when you arrive at the festival. A frog, that jumped if you did it right and used heavy enough paper, and a bat, which was mostly to tease romanti-goth types into cracking a smile. The frog was the funniest thing ever if you were stoned, especially when you had to capture it and disembowel it for roach material, and sliding a black bat across the table had given more than one pretty boy a reason to start talking to her.
Mostly though, she made cranes. Flyers, menus, newspaper, magazine pages, discards from other people's sketchbooks, one time a shadowy black and white eight by twelve model shot of Brina's ex. That had made Brina's eyes bright with tears and then with strength when she borrowed a lighter and burned it in front of an audience in the back room of Michaels and called the whole thing art. Mal never told Brina that she'd licked the ex's neck and whispered to him and that had been all it had taken to get him to go down on her in his car in the parking lot of a photographers warehouse a few weeks later. The elegant grey lines and dark eyes curling up in chemical coloured flames made a better image than the reality of black lipstick smeared on her thighs did.
***** ****** *****
Folding paper cranes had advantages as far as semi-constructive things to keep your hands busy go. For one thing it wasn't smoking, and given how much she still found herself wanting to just bum a clove and suck down the sweet heat, that was a plus. You've got to do something with all the flyers that people thrust at you on your way into clubs, because half the time they were badly-selected badly-designed ugly wastes of paper, and most of the rest of the time she already knew about the gig or the club night. It was habit enough that she didn't even look at her hands most of the time, just let her fingers make the familiar moves and her nails score neat lines, and for some reason it impressed the heck out of people, which she held was very rarely a bad thing.
She'd gotten the pattern down sitting in an airport lounge in Berlin with this cute Japanese boy from Idaho of all places. He was there with his parents, so it wasn't like they could sneak off and do anything more than flirt and chat a little while they all waited for the airline to make up it's mind if their flight was cancelled or just delayed forever. They'd been stuck there for hours, and by the end of that long night they were gritty eyed, grimy and giggling a little, and they'd left a whole Elle magazine's worth of shiny folded cranes flocking around the island of hard plastic chairs.
She'd looked up a couple of others, waiting out the rain in a public library in Edinburgh because when' you're planning on getting a stranger to take you home so you have a place to sleep it helps if you don’t look like a drowned rat when you arrive at the festival. A frog, that jumped if you did it right and used heavy enough paper, and a bat, which was mostly to tease romanti-goth types into cracking a smile. The frog was the funniest thing ever if you were stoned, especially when you had to capture it and disembowel it for roach material, and sliding a black bat across the table had given more than one pretty boy a reason to start talking to her.
Mostly though, she made cranes. Flyers, menus, newspaper, magazine pages, discards from other people's sketchbooks, one time a shadowy black and white eight by twelve model shot of Brina's ex. That had made Brina's eyes bright with tears and then with strength when she borrowed a lighter and burned it in front of an audience in the back room of Michaels and called the whole thing art. Mal never told Brina that she'd licked the ex's neck and whispered to him and that had been all it had taken to get him to go down on her in his car in the parking lot of a photographers warehouse a few weeks later. The elegant grey lines and dark eyes curling up in chemical coloured flames made a better image than the reality of black lipstick smeared on her thighs did.
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