Twilights

Emily has been "bitten" by Stephenie Meyer's novels. Here's my take:

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The drawer was dusty and cold, and Vincent couldn't wait to leave it. He wanted to see again another glimpse of Beatrice, whose smooth, translucent skin normally would have been such a temptation for Vincent's kind. But Beatrice's was not. He knew he could never treat her like he was supposed to: he could never bind her to other papers, like his family insisted he should. He was a paper clip and she a piece of paper, and their union, if it happened at all, was to be violent and swift. This was the script destiny had written for them. But Vincent knew he could revise the script! (He was a close observer of the man's whose drawer he inhabited--the man who made marks on papers, crossed out some, made more marks). Yes, he would revise the script of his destiny: he would never clip and bind Beatrice against her will. He would try to make her fall in love with him, but it would be her choice. If she attached herself to him, it would be Beatrice who chose this fate. The air in the drawer was stale. Vincent was growing restless.

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Mordecai lurked near the base of the lamp, the springs in his jaw poised to snap shut at the slightest agitation. He had been on edge lately. It had been a while since the man had used him--been a while since he'd seen the man at all--and Mordecai felt worthless, old, forgotten. He remembered the days of productivity, when the two had been a team: the man feeding Mordecai papers, and Mordecai biting into them to join them with his sharp metallic teeth. To bite into the man's papers was an act of love, of sacrifice, for it meant losing the teeth. There were replacements filed deep inside of him in a perfect row, but with each bite it was as if Mordecai had been bitten. He was both wounder and wounded. And now the man had disappeared, and with him, so had Mordecai's sense of purpose. He had begun to stare in his boredom and desperation at the printer, where he noticed a single piece of paper resting in the cradle, waiting for something to happen to it. A delicate ivory feuille he had to make his.

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Where had he gone! The man who punched at keys to make the pretty clicking noises! Beatrice was lonely and scared. She was the youngest member of her family, but all her family members had left home long ago. They had been swept up with a whir and a whoosh into the machine and had come out with the exotic, mysterious tattoos. Beatrice had watched the man gather them, one by one, into a stack or stacks: the smaller ones were joined by clips; biggers one by staples. Beatrice had waited patiently for her turn, had tried to project an image of calm and peace to her siblings. But deep inside she was tormented by haunting questions. What would her marks look like when her time came? Would she be sorted into a small or big stack? Would she be joined by a clip or a staple? This last question caused her the most agony. Which would she prefer to be joined by? One was lithe and long, elegant and gentle and graceful. She had heard him moving around in the drawer. The other was compact and quick and cold, snapping, sharp, pinching. She had observed him glinting on the desk. Both were beautiful and dangerous. Beatrice was a blank slate, a tabula rasa. She wanted to dictate the terms of her own surrender, but how could she? She was a piece of paper, and paper has no hand in its own destiny. Paper is a hopelessly passive species, drifting here and there, billowed by whatever wind or passion blows it. She would have to wait, even if she didn't want to. She didn't want to. In an act of rebellion she'd never known before, she tensed all the fibers in her being to move her corners. Slowly, slowly, her tips curled up and up and up. She would float on a current of her own making to the man's desk to choose her own fate--stapler or clip. The man would come back to find her gone. Carlisle was his name. The man could go to hell.

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