About Sirens for Laney

by Syd McGinley
12 pages / 5100 words
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc

Old college friend Charis comes to visit Frances at the worst possible time. She's trying to deal with the death of her lover, Laney, and with their anniversary, and she doesn’t need unpleasant and unwanted house guests. Can Frances figure out how to deal with her paranoid friend in this disturbing tale of lost love?

Sample

Ohio, 1990

Charis always said I was so mean because I was born a Scorpio in the year of the Snake. She talks crap like that; I try not to have too much to do with her these days. We hung out together in school and saw each on holidays during college, but I grew steadily less able to tolerate her idiotic ways. Her descent into New Age psycho-babble was the last straw. I’d put up with her neurotic fear of nuclear annihilation, and her infatuation with the theatre and every new trend that came along. But crystals and Birkenstocks?

Now there she was on my doorstep, three thousand miles from home. I'd been in an uncharacteristically good mood that day. I'm not a festive person, but even the barbed wire along East Third had looked Christmassy. I was fooling myself that the holidays without Laney might be bearable. No doubt having the Atlantic between me and expectations of good behavior was a major part in this. And now, damn it, here was my least favorite countrywoman waiting to be welcomed into my home.

“Ah, shit, Charis, how the hell are you? Get inside before we freeze.” See? I can be a gracious hostess, yet for some reason Charis pouted at me. A pout on Charis is like a simper on a drag queen.

“What?” I asked. “Believe me, if you weren't welcome I wouldn't ask you in.” Spurious logic had always worked well on Charis. She nodded and entered my home like the Queen Mother inspecting a coal miner's house.

After a few hours of updating me about her tiresome life — full of regional theatre gossip — her fake Cockney accent and pride in being a Londoner just demonstrate how desperately provincial Charis really is — she thought to ask how I was doing.