Time

[Fiction] Friday comes to you this week from a new home. This week's prompt:

"Drunk on _________.
Fill in the blank, then write a quick description of your character in that state."


I sit down before my legs give way, the magazine clutched in my hand as I half fall, half attempt to sit into the big leather chair. Ahhh … I can’t help but spin around in the chair that hugs me like a large and expensive glove. My head is dizzy, light – wafer thin echoes through my head, in correct Monty Python fashion. Yes, my head is wafer thin. I force myself to focus on the magazine cover. It brings me back to my faculties again. I stare down and two faces grin back at me.

I want to giggle because it seems so absurd, even as I sit here, in this huge office with a river view. We’re on the front cover of the Time Magazine … and we’re laughing, Tony and I, because we couldn’t take the photo shoot seriously. We would have been better off taking ourselves down the road to find a photo-booth. Yeah, a strip of three goofing off photos on the front cover of Time – that’s us, keeping it grassroots - simple.

Neither of us really took the ‘business’ too seriously – we just wanted a place to get ourselves published. Then this happened ….

“Time Magazine!” I exclaim out loud to myself, “I’m on the front cover of Time magazine’ and don’t think it sounds boastful or full of ego. I’m probably deluded though. Honestly, I needed the front cover of Time - to make this success real to me.

And I love the headline “Are these the most dangerous people in publishing?” You bet, I agree, if only to myself. We came, we saw, we conquered. Yeah baby!

I’m tempted to be vain, to look closely to see where Photoshop has touched me up. It reminds me of the days, eons ago, when I would get up close in a nightclub toilet mirror and attempt to touch up smeared or missing lipstick. At least Photoshop got my lipstick right. As for Tony he didn’t need to worry about a good hair day or a good lippy day. I should ask him what he was looking for in the front cover – wrinkles, a grey hair?

I grab my mobile and I send a rapid, slightly illogical SMS to ask Tony. There’s plenty of words that make no sense, but I don’t waste time fixing them. I want to get up and dance on the leather couch over the other side of my office, with a bottle of expensive French champagne in hand, swigging from it.

“MUM! Share the glue.”
“Huh?”
“Share the glue. Co-oper-ation,” he exaggerates, looking at me seriously from underneath his long golden brown fringe.
“Sure love,” I mumble and pass the glue stick over.

I look down at the magazine cover on the table.
“What’s this called again?”
“Collage?” I reply and stick the head down.
“Why is there a clock?”
“The magazine is called Time Magazine.”
“That’s a silly name for a magazine.”
“You think so?”

I run my finger over the cover, neatly torn off an old magazine. The date has been changed, now neatly handwritten as July 2008. My head is glued to one body and Tony’s to the other. I have Mike from Monsters Inc on repeat loop in my head .. “I’m on the cover of a magazine!” Next I pick up the first of two words, publishing, cut ransom note style from the newspaper, and stick it down. As I stick down the second word, I begin to hum.

“What’s that song?”
“From little things big things grow,” I reply absently.
“That’s a silly name for a song.”
“No sweetheart it’s not a silly name for a song,”

And I stare at the second word …. revolution!