To A Flame
By Missy

SERIES: To a Flame

PART: 1 of 1

RATING: PG (Adult thematic material)

PAIRING(s): None - Squiggy character study.

DISTRIBUTION: To LW, Myself  so far; any other archives are welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine.  Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"

 

Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!

CATEGORY: Character Study

FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!

SETTING IN TIMELINE: Milwaukee

SPOILLER/SUMMARY: Squiggy, stuck doing a particularly annoying psychological test for extra cash, finds his mind wandering back to his mother - about whom he's told the tester a bit too much.

NOTES: Something Squiggy in honor of Cheshyre's birthday.

 

***

 

The room smelled like orange blossoms. 

 

He hated orange blossoms - it was his mother's fragrance.  She used to slather it all over herself before she'd go downtown to prowl the Front Street bars for businessmen on convention holidays.   Invariably, she'd lock him in the closet and leave him there for the night.

 

Sitting between her winter coat and his own, he'd talk to the moths.  They all had names - Edgar and Mark and Dave.  No chick moths!  They were his friends, until he found Lenny.  Until he learned in biology that moths had very short lifespan.

 

When his mother found out what he was doing, she started chaining him to the radiator.

 

To Squiggy, it was no big deal.  She never really hit him, after all.  Heck, sometimes she even gave him respect.

 

Until she got married and he became her servant.

 

He hated the woman.  He loved the woman.  She sucked the life out of him, and he had to move away.

 

He felt like his lifespan was running out at the moment.  Doctors had a way of making him feel like his time was nearly over.  He stuck out his jaw and tried for defiance.

 

Why had he agreed to do a psychological experiment?  He was fine with taking weird things and having strange implements attached to his body - but letting some researcher poke around in his mind?  He had to be crazy to do that.

 

Hmph.  It was all Lenny's fault, anyway.   He saw the flier.  I was his idea.

 

The door opened, and Squiggy shot forward in his seat.  Desperately, he pushed fingers through his slicked back hair, stuck out his jaw, leaned sidewise.  Tried to look as tough as possible.

 

The lab-coated young man sat down behind his desk - red-headed, at least ten years his junior, with the most serious of looks on his face.  Squiggy quieted, stilled, and said absolutely nothing as the younger man read his file.  After a good fifteen minutes, he shut the folder and looked Squiggy in the eye.

 

"So, Mister Squiggman....I understand you resent your mother."