Vhalar 25 722 (Morning)
Eternity sat at her desk with a quill pen in hand. It was morning but she was already yawning with boredom. The thought of writing her own song popped into her mind last night and it turned out she didn’t have a single creative bone in her body when it came to writing. Her handwriting which was sloppy, which was a given because she didn’t have a job that required her to write. She used to have good handwriting when she was a child. She thought fondly back on the memories of her father complimenting her. He’d have smacked her upside the head if he saw how uneducated Eternity turned out to be.
It brought a tear to her eye to think of her father and she wished she could put her feelings into words. She titled her song ‘Sad Love Song’, thought about it for a moment, then scratched it out. She tried ‘Miss You Dad’ but she scratched that out too. She thought of a few more but she couldn’t think of one that would do her song justice. No title would ever be good enough because she hadn’t written a single line for her song yet. She realized how silly she was being and tried to think of some lyrics. She only knew a handful of songs so she didn’t have much inspiration to draw from.
Completely clueless, she tried singing the words “This is my sad love song” a handful of times using different tones. It was not pleasing to the ear. Writing a song turned out to be far too much for her to accomplish for the time being. It was humbling for her to accept this and set aside the new quill she’d bought just for the occasion. She had wanted to bring something to her instructor and get some feedback but so much for that.
Eternity moved on quickly from writing and onto chores. There were some clothes she needed to wash if they were going to be even close to being dry by the time she needed them at night for her date. She grabbed them and took a big whiff of them and found that they smelled worse than they looked. She’d kept them near the fire place and now they smelled like a mix of body odor and smoke. She’d only intended to wash the armpit areas but now she needed to wash the whole thing.
“Will these even be dry in time?” she wondered but then decided she didn’t care. She was either wearing that dress or she wasn’t going. She got to work scrubbing it with a mix of soap and water just like her mother had taught her such a long time ago. Eternity found herself tearing up again and wondered why her parents kept coming to mind. She didn’t often think about them because they’d so long ago. There was a time when she hated them for leaving her all alone in this world with nothing but strange relatives to take care of her.
Eternity wiped her tears and looked for a spot to dry the clothes. She’d wanted to dry them near the fire place because that was the driest spot on her property but she didn’t want to smell like smoke. She opted to hang the dress on a windowsill that faced her back yard. “I should probably try to dry and keep my clothes away from smelly things, especially the ones I wear when I’m thieving,” she thought. She wasn’t so clueless to think that her scent didn’t matter but she typically didn’t have to worry about strangers on the street or drunkards at a bar smelling her. Now that she was contemplating breaking into businesses where there might be dogs, taking these precautions made more sense.
When laundry out of the way Eternity was shocked to see how much time she had left. “Oh that’s right, I didn’t write a damned thing,” she said. “I know, I’ll go get that.” She smiled and hurried off to the chest at the foot of her bed. She picked it open because it was comically faster than finding the key. She gave it a good kick and the lid popped open allowing her to dig into it with her hands.
“No, no, no,” she said absent mindedly as she tossed things from the chest to her bed. Then, she found the wig she’d been searching for. A little more digging later and she found some lipstick as well. It’d been so long since she’d got the lipstick that she didn’t remember where she’d bought it, but the wig had been procured recently. It was a red wig with long hair. As soon as she’d seen it it’d reminded her of her fire-y dream. She felt like it was going to important to her to make her head red someday, though she couldn’t explain why.
Eternity had stupidly neglected to try the wig on at the store. It was one of the cheapest places she’d ever been to and had been rushed to make a purchase and move along. She realized that the wig was not going to work out as soon as she put it on her head. For one, she didn’t know how to properly wear a wig so her own hair mixed with the wig hair. “What the… how in the… fek,” she said while she adjusted it over and over again. All she ended up doing was tangling up the wig hairs and she did not have the patience to comb out the knots. “Are wigs only for people with very short hair,” she wondered. She put the wig back on her head while she held her in an elevated position behind her head. The wig was a lot more believable, but Eternity would have to find a way to hold her hair out of the way.
“Maybe a bun would make it better,” she mused, “but then won’t it show as a big bump on the back of my head and make it obvious?” she sighed and tossed the wig aside. She’d have to go ask the salesman for a proper demonstration, or one of her female neighbors for advice.
“Don’t let me down,” she told the lipstick as she smeared some on her lips. It wasn’t pretty and the natural shade of her lips didn’t mesh well with the coloring of the makeup. “This whole morning has been a series of disappointments, hasn’t it,” she said to herself as she tried to make the best of the situation. She took a cloth and wiped away at the excess that she’d applied and then she dabbed at the lipstick until it wasn’t so prominent. After pursing her lips it didn’t look all that bad, though she would have looked better if she just wiped it all off. Now it was time to head to her singing lessons. She'd found a new instructor since her last instructor was kind of annoying.
“I’m sure my instructor is going to give me an earful,” she thought with a sigh before walking into the singer’s residence. And that she did. As soon as the instructor saw the lipstick she burst out laughing and wouldn’t stop until she drank a full cup of water.
To Eternity's dismay the instructor was similar to the last. Eternity had picked her because she could at least speak common, unlike her last one, but she was not a good teacher but any means. She said “you messed up your makeup. If you try to get man like that you'll have no luck. If you want man you should wear shirt like mine, no need for face paint.” She giggled uncontrollably while pulling over everything they needed for the lesson. This lady was an absolutely terrible teacher and she had just winging it with this lesson.
“Today I will teach you scales. But when I learned them they call stairs, I think.” She paused to think about how to explain what a scale was, what an octave was. She was at a loss for words. She sang a low note then sang the same note one octave higher. It took her a few tries because she hadn’t warmed up but when she got it she snapped her fingers and said, “like that. That note was same as high note. You get it?”
Eternity nodded and said, “they sound the same, right?”
“Yes!” she said enthusiastically. “It sounded the same. It can be lower, higher, but… it's the same note. Now let me see…” she started with a low note then sang a scale that went all the way up to the next octave. She did it again and counted with her fingers that time. “Yes, there are seven notes. Bottom to top counts eight notes, but seven notes in total.”
Eternity looked at her strangely. It didn’t make sense. Then the instructor said, “there are seven notes. But the first note is the same as last so eight notes.” Eternity pretended to understand and nodded her head slowly. The lady went on and said, “let’s do. This important girl. If you don't know this you will never sing good.”
The instructor led the scale and always seemed to start on a different note. She often sang flat or sharp scales because she was not a particularly talented singer. She thought the whole point of the lesson was to show that the notes repeated and that there ought to be eight notes in an octave. Compared to the instructor, Eternity was much worse. She just mimicked the tones as best as she could and tried to understand why this was so important. The woman never went into further detail and Eternity was too embarrassed to ask for fear of being made fun of even more. At least she felt like she was getting better, and that’s all that mattered.
[Template credit to Pyrre]
