*GULP*

Eyes closed, fingers crossed, I'm handing it over. 

Taggitenreadit. Pretty pretty please?

I'm posting the first part of a story I'm working on. Before you proceed, you must promise to comment. I don't care if it's only one word - I just want to know what you honestly think. Except still be nice. But comment regardless. I command thee. (I will be sneaky and check my page views and compare them to comments to make sure you all did. Don't think you'll get away with it. -_-  )

Chapter 1: Of Dangerous Bifocals
{Part two of chapter one to follow in a later post.}

Wind snapped through the grass with angry speed.

            "Nope," Maleya muttered darkly. She slid her fingers across the screen and tapped a different tab. Another tap and a keyboard appeared below codes dictating grass texture and strength. With one fingertip, she highlighted a section of code, deleted it, and typed something to replace it. She grabbed a pair of bulky, thick-lensed bifocals and slipped them on over her own tiny glasses. Tapping the screen again, she changed the control from touch to voice.

            "Wind snapped through the grass with angry speed."

            The bifocals – screens in reality – glowed for a moment, then grass appeared in them, waving and bending under a heavy wind. Maleya watched five seconds of footage before the motions began to repeat themselves.

            "Um...." she searched desperately for a word or a sentence that would keep the story going. “The two field mice were...were...unperturbed by um...the fury above them." Images flickered belatedly across the lenses. Two something-or-other’s blobbed together sheltered by the waving grass. Maleya grabbed the microphone and pulled it as far from the touch-screen as the limited cord would allow.

            "The mice scurried!" she exclaimed trying to keep her tones natural. Frustration was taking over. The blobs in the vision of the bifocals shrank and became detailed images of the tiny rodents specified. With deft fingers she took control of the screen again, delicately dragging an iconic marker back to the first word, which had appeared on a digital paper with handwriting coded to her own.

            "And...open book." This time she paused the pantomime before the mice came into the story. Sky: blue. Grass: improvised mixes of green and tan. Soil: barely visible through the thick growth. Slowly Maleya nodded. Tap. Story deleted. Maleya removed the bifocals and slipped them into a soft velvet bag.

            "Now..." Maleya dug a sloppy sheaf of notebook paper out of a drawer in her desk and began to read it aloud to the screen.

            Maleya was a writer. Well, really she was a renegade. But she was supposed to be a writer. Writing was what she did. It was what she knew. It was her passion. Everyone knew Maleya was a writer. Even Maleya did. But that didn't change her mind about anything. It just scared her.

            Barley wasn't an anything yet. He would be, soon enough. Everyone knew that. He'd be an expert in something. He'd be the talk of the town. He'd learn from the best and improve on their methods, until he was the best. But he was still trying to figure out which pert to ex.

            Well, currently he wasn't figuring anything about exes or perts. Barley was rather viciously concerned with knowing. He seemed to always know what was going on with everybody in the family. It was his business, somehow. He'd pop up whenever anybody had an idea, or a new plan, or a change of plan, or a challenge. He was always the first to know. How he knew when to pop up was a mystery. Most likely he had programmed his intuition to sense that sort of thing – that time when someone is bursting with an idea or nervous about an appointment and just aching to tell someone. It wasn't an annoying thing. Barley was the family calendar. It was his quirk. Everyone had one of those too, just like they had an area of expertise. Things just were that way.

            There was really nothing wrong with the way things were. Everyone was an expert at something and their expertise usually became obvious when they were 10 or 11. Everyone had a quirk, and it always lasted at least a year or too after you became an expert (only cropping up occasionally thereafter.) Everyone was beautiful in some way. If you didn't have soulful eyes, you were bound to have beautiful lips. If you didn't have those, well your complexion was probably perfect. More people than not had several of these handy features. Most people only had a limited amount of techy stuff. It was typical. But the Hominy family had a bunch of tech knowledge and equipment. That part wasn't supposed to be that way. Only Maleya really took it too far though. But no one knew, so even though it wasn't supposed to be that way, it was, and it didn't matter.

***