The Oracle

Just for funsies.

           The young man looked at the number on the door of the house in front of him, then at the name of the street on the sign to his left, then to the piece of paper in his hand and back to the door and the sign.  There was no doubt about it - this was the address he had been given.  He wasn’t sure what he had expected when he was told that he was being sent to see the Oracle.  But it certainly wasn’t… this.

            The man started slowly down the cracked cement sidewalk that led to the front door of the house, casting a dubious glance at the mailbox as he passed it on his right.  The metal box had been unceremoniously ripped from its wooden post and pounded flat with a hammer, then nailed back to the side of the post.  The word “NO” had been painted across its surface in bright red capital letters.  The rest of the yard and the house were much less remarkable, albeit rather unkempt.  The lawn appeared to not have been cut for several weeks, and the evergreen hedges that lined the house’s front walls were haphazardly throwing up overgrown shoots in a way that gave them a fuzzy, almost monstrous appearance.  The house itself seemed well put-together, though, with no signs of dilapidation or abandonment.  It was just… messy, as if its owner were someone who was not particularly concerned about outward appearances.

            The young man trudged up the front steps of the house, coming to a stop on a faded brown welcome mat.  His trepidation mounted as he stared at the door before him.  It was painted a solid shade of medium gray, a rather uninspiring contrast to the dark red bricks of the wall around it.  Attached to the door with duct tape was a large white sign made from a poster board painted by hand with sloppy black letters.  It read:

If you’re here to kill me,

Leave.

If you’re the pizza delivery guy,

The money’s under the rug.

If you’re my ex-boyfriend,

There’s a semiautomatic rifle pointed at your head.

If none of the above applies to you,

Come on in!

            The young man’s eyebrows rose with apprehension as he digested the sign’s message.  Finally, with a sigh of resignation, he reached for the doorknob.  The young man turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped into the house.

            The first thing he noticed was the smell - a heady combination of microwave popcorn and leftover pizza, mixed with the stale odor of unwashed laundry and the cloying scent of cheap bottled air freshener.  The man wrinkled his nose in disgust and made his way down the unadorned front hallway into the house.  The hallway soon opened up on either side, with a small kitchen area appearing on the left and a living room on the right.  The man’s eyes widened as he stepped cautiously into the living room.  The place was an absolute mess, with food wrappers, dirty clothes, and random papers scattered in every direction across the floor, and huge stacks of books taking up any remaining space.  The walls were covered with posters, some bearing breathtaking views of vast canyons and forested mountain peaks and other scenes of natural beauty.  Others seemed to be hand-made, much like the sign on the door, and bore peculiar messages like, “It’s a pirate’s life for me” and, “I have to be here, but I’d rather be questing.”  Some sort of high-action TV show was playing on the widescreen television hanging from the opposite wall, and a threadbare old couch, made of fabric that was the most hideous shade of green the young man had ever beheld, stood facing the screen.  Draped over the back of the couch was a soft blanket emblazoned with the image of a giant, fuzzy gray kitten.  As the young man stared at the blanket, wondering how a photograph could be portrayed with such detail on so fluffy a material, he was startled by a sudden, loud crunching sound coming from the couch.  Only then did he notice the bare feet hanging over the couch’s left arm and realize that there was somebody there.  As the man watched, the feet disappeared as a figure rose from the couch, muted the television with a remote control, and came around to face him, munching loudly on the large apple it held in its hand.

            The figure was a teenage girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen - about the age of the young man.  She was wearing baggy black sweatpants and a thin, magenta-colored athletic tank that revealed glimpses of the gray sports bra she wore underneath.  Her brownish-blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail from her pale face, and her thick, angular eyebrows were raised high as she regarded the figure standing before her.

            “So… you’re the one they sent?” the girl said, more of a statement than a question, really.  “Five foot nine, one hundred fifty-two pounds, afraid of your sister’s giant teddy bear when you were three?  The one who’s been traveling with the group that’s looking to save the world?”

            “Um… yes,” the man stuttered, a bit taken aback by the girl’s directness - and the fact that she knew so much about him.  “Are you… the Oracle?”

            The girl’s eyebrows rose even higher in an expression of disbelief mixed with no small amount of disdain.  “Sorry,” the young man muttered, turning red.  “Stupid question.”

            “Some people say there’s no such thing as a stupid question,” the girl replied.  “Those people are idiots.”  She took a few steps closer to the man, holding her apple close to her face with one arm while crossing the other nonchalantly across her stomach.  The young man noticed that the skin around the Oracle’s fingernails was ragged and inflamed, as if it had been bitten and picked at many times.  He also found his gaze unconsciously drawn to the shapeliness of her body, to her bare arms and the alluringly low cut of her tank top…

            “Hey,” the Oracle said sharply, snapping her fingers and pointing to her own face.  “Eyes up here, Lover Boy.”

            The young man blinked and looked into the Oracle’s eyes, which were a striking shade of deep blue-green.  “I’m, uh… looking for information,” he said.

            The Oracle took another large bite from her apple.  “’Course you are,” she mumbled through her full mouth.  “Follow me.”  She led him back into the central hallway, and, to the man’s surprise, straight into the adjoining kitchen.  There, the Oracle placed her half-eaten apple down on the island that stood in the middle of the room and walked over to the door of the pantry in the opposite wall.  The upper part of her body disappeared as she rummaged around within the pantry, muttering to herself.  “Come on.  Where did the stupid thing go?  I swear I had it out just yesterday… Ah hah!”  With an expression of triumph on her face, the Oracle emerged from the pantry holding a large, half-eaten jar of peanut butter.  The young man looked on in exasperation while the Oracle set the jar down upon the island and retrieved a pair of metal spoons from a nearby drawer.  She unscrewed the lid of the jar and dug in with one of the spoons, pulling out an enormous scoop of peanut butter.  She grinned to herself, then pointed to the man with the other spoon.

            “You want some?” the Oracle asked.  The young man shook his head, his frustration mounting.

            “I don’t want food.  I want the prophecy,” he said.

            The Oracle seemed not to have heard the second statement.  “’Kay.  Your loss,” she replied, returning the empty spoon to the drawer and closing it with her hip.  She put the peanut-butter-laden spoon into her mouth and cleaned it with one bite, smiling with pleasure as she swallowed the nutty deliciousness.  Suddenly, however, her expression morphed into one of discomfort, and she grabbed hastily for an open bottle of water that was standing on the countertop.  The Oracle tipped her head back and drained half the bottle in one swallow, grimacing as she forced down the sticky mass in her throat.

            “Blech,” the Oracle said once she had caught her breath.  “You know that feeling you get when you eat a bunch of peanut butter, and it gets stuck to the roof of your mouth, and you can’t breathe and stuff?  I hate that.  Your firstborn son’s adopted daughter is going to have arachibutyrophobia, by the way.  But she’ll grow out of it by the time she’s twelve.”

            Once again, the young man was taken aback by the abruptness of the Oracle’s statement.  But his surprise was soon overcome by his growing irritation towards the girl, who was leaning forward with her elbows on the counter, water bottle in one hand and apple in the other, smirking at him as if amused by his vexation.  She remained there for a long moment, staring at him with those vibrant blue-green eyes.  Finally, the young man huffed with exasperation and crossed his arms.  “Are you going to give me the information I need or not?” he asked, his voice bearing an edge of barely-restrained anger.

            “Of course I am,” the Oracle replied.  She took another swig of water and set the bottle and apple back down on the counter, then made her way back to the center hallway, motioning for the young man to follow.  “Right this way, Lover Boy.”

            The man did as he was directed, though with a dark scowl upon his face.  “Why do you keep calling me that?” he muttered, almost to himself.

            The Oracle had reached an open entryway at the end of the long hall.  She stopped and turned her head towards the young man, giving him a sly smile over her shoulder.  “You know exactly why,” she said.

            He had honestly no idea what she was hinting at.  Unless she was talking about… The young man’s face flushed with embarrassment as he followed the Oracle through the doorway.  No, she couldn’t know about that.  It was impossible.  He had never told a soul.

            The Oracle flipped a light switch as the two of them entered the room, and the young man blinked in surprise as he found himself in a tiny space that was absolutely packed with papers.  They were everywhere - in shelves against the far wall, spilling out of the filing cabinet in the corner, covering the table in the center of the room, and stuffed inside of innumerable baskets, Greek urns, plastic storage bins, flower pots, and other assorted containers throughout the area.  Many were rolled into slender scrolls and tied with ribbons and bits of yarn in various colors, although a great number were lying flat, stacked wherever there was space for them (and in many places where there really wasn’t).  There appeared to be some sort of wastebasket tucked beneath the corner of the table, although the man could not see it amidst the mountain of crumpled papers beneath which it was buried.  There was a cushioned office chair that could rotate and move on wheels beside the table as well, although, judging by the piles of scrolls and loose sheets upon it, it had probably not been sat in for quite some time.

            While the man remained at the doorway, his eyes wandering dubiously around the room, the Oracle walked right in, wading through the sea of papers covering the floor.  “Hm…”  she mused to herself, spinning slowly in a circle.  “Wonder where I put that one.  Hold on a sec.”  She made her way over to the shelves along the opposite wall and began rifling through the papers there, moving stacks from one end of a shelf to the other and shoving mounds of scrolls aside so that they rolled out of her way in a giant heap.  Once, she accidentally jostled a tall stack of loose papers with her elbow, and the entire pile came cascading down from the shelf to spill across the floor at her feet.  “Dang it,” the Oracle muttered, though she made no move to retrieve the fallen prophecies.  Instead, she waded over to the filing cabinet, where she rummaged around for a bit, drawing out scrolls and inspecting them for a few seconds before tossing them back into the drawer or into one of the large plastic tubs that stood beside the cabinet.  The young man crossed his arms impatiently, his frustration growing again.  The Oracle, however, seemed in no way perturbed by her highly inefficient search method.  In fact, she appeared to be rather enjoying herself.  She hummed and sang little snippets of nonsense while she dug through the papers, and every once in a while she would withdraw a scroll and hold it up with a gleam in her eyes, saying, “Oh yeah, this is a good one” or some other similar statement. 

The young man nearly groaned aloud as the Oracle stepped away from the filing cabinet and continued her search in one of the nearby plastic bins, the same bin she had just been discarding prophecies into moments before.  She moved on from that bin to the one beside it, and then to a large ceramic vase, and then to a blue canvas bag such as might be used for carrying groceries.  After a few more minutes of fruitless rummaging, the Oracle turned around, her brow furrowed in thought.  Suddenly, her face lit up with realization.  “Oh yeah!” she exclaimed.  “I remember where I put it now!”  She walked quickly over to the mountain of papers upon the chair and stuck her hand into its center, pulling out a small scroll tied with an orange string and causing several other scrolls to tumble down from the top of the pile as she did so.  The Oracle held the prophecy up to her face, peering through the middle of the paper tube with one eye.

“Yep.  This is the one,” she said.  She walked over to the man and handed the scroll to him.  Despite his impatience only moment before, he accepted it almost reluctantly, staring down with apprehension at the rolled sheet of paper tied with orange string.

“This is it?  This is the prophecy that will determine the fate of our quest?” he said weakly.

“Well, no.  It doesn’t ‘determine’ anything.  But it’ll give you a pretty darn good idea of how things will turn out,” the Oracle replied.  She kicked her way through the papers back to the doorway, where she stepped past the young man and continued into the hallway without pause.  “Turn off the light when you come, if you don’t mind.”

The Oracle led the man back down the central hallway until they came to its junction with the living room.  There, she turned around to face him directly.

“So… what’d they give you to give me in terms of payment?” she asked.

The young man blanched.  “They… they didn’t give me anything,” he replied, racking his brains to remember the exact words of the instructions he had received from the other members of his group.  They had provided him with the address and told him he would be obtaining a prophecy from the Oracle.  They hadn’t said anything about payment.

The Oracle shifted her weight to one foot, resting her hands on her hips.  “Well,” she said.  “Do you have anything for me?  And no, half-empty packages of spearmint gum do not cut it.”

The young man sheepishly withdrew his hand from his pocket, where he had indeed been fingering the tiny box of gum.  The Oracle noted his embarrassed expression and grinned.  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, crossing her arms.  “I’ll let you off easy this time.”

“Thank you,” the young man replied with a sigh of relief.  “And thank you for the prophecy.”  He started for the front door as the Oracle saluted in response and made her way back into the living room.  The man had almost reached the door when he heard her voice behind him.

“Hey, Lover Boy,” the Oracle said.  The young man stopped and turned to face her.  She was kneeling on the couch, her forearms resting on the fuzzy kitten blanket spread across its back.  “That girl in the group you’ve been traveling with?  The one you have a major crush on?  Try looking at her face more.  Talk to her.  Listen to what she has to say.  Girls want to be loved for what’s in their heads, not what’s down their shirts.”

The young man reddened a bit at the Oracle’s statement - evidently those secrets could not have been kept secret from her - but nodded wordlessly in acceptance of the advice.  The Oracle flopped down on the couch and unmuted the TV, indicating that the conversation was over.  The young man turned back towards the door.  He was just about to open it when he heard the Oracle’s voice again.

“Hey, Lover Boy,” she called, not even bothering to face him or turn down the volume on the television.  “One more thing.  You know all that stuff about saving the world and all?  Don’t mess up.”

The young man nodded again.  Smiling and shaking his head in incredulity and amusement, he turned the doorknob and opened the door.  He pulled it shut behind him as he stepped out of the house, taking a deep breath of air that seemed crisp and fresh after the pungent odor of the Oracle’s living quarters.  He stared at the scroll in his hand for a moment, letting the possibilities run wild in his mind, and then deposited the scroll in his pocket.  The young man made his way down the house’s front steps and over the sidewalk, striding past the mutilated mailbox and whistling as he continued on down the street.

Author's Note

So, I wouldn't call this my best work, but it was fun to write. There is no backstory for either of these characters - they were just created for the sake of the scene. If for any reason someone wants to take this and develop it into a full story or whatnot, feel free to do so! Leave a link to it in the comments below - I would love to read it!

Reviews

[Érenn]

HMM since I enjoyed this write so much I will be talking about all the aspects of this write.The Author's Note has already made it clear that there is no backstory and but does no future developments on this story from you side also hold true? For if it does, then it's a shame really. Would have loved more of this. Knowing my mind It's already creating a plot continuation on this one. OK now I will be giving you my views on the write itself based on a few criteria:

Language: No grammatical errors found as far as I could see (Though I also have this magical ability to ignore grammatical errors, still pretty sure there weren't in this one) Your vocabulary is very good, you have used words which invoke such imagery along with fact that they are not your ordinary words which one hears every now and then in a conversation. A very sophisticated write. You do a very good job when it comes to providing detailed imagery with your write, very smooth.

Story quality: 9.8/10 Good flow throughout the story. You have kept it interesting in most parts. Love the snappy humor and the tongue in cheek lines you have. Dialogue delivery although very less is done with quite eloquently. Does a good job in portraying the personality of a character. Whether Lover Boy or the Oracle (sorry Lover Boy just sounds so much more fun than the Young man). I like how you have also done a wonderful job in creating the ambience for the whole write. I felt I was transported there and I was experiencing all of it myself.

Characters: Good character builds here. Nothing on the Character development side since there wasn't much script or events for such things to take place. But you have done a wonderful job giving them the distinct personalities they have. And the description of the characters is very precise and invokes imagery quite easily. The emotional roller-coaster Lover Boy goes throughout the progression of the story is portrayed quite nicely. The Oracle is the humor and the binding agent of this write, so good job there.

Drawbacks: Since you would take the pains of describing every single minute so vividly, it drags the story down in terms of pacing, which does not help. True one would end up feeling how Lover Boy might have felt but it still can become annoying. And problem is the humor then in this story also suffers because of this dragged down pace. You should mix it up a little so that the write does not start becoming monotonous. But that's the only thing I can state as a downer.

So you have done an excellent job with this Story Alicia, God I feel like doing a collaboration and working on this one, but alas I am in a middle of a battle with time and writing stories will once I achieve a truce with time. This was indeed one of your more enjoyable pieces and the light hearted feel throughout this write was the best thing about it ^^ I really want to see you produce more on these same lines in the future as well. ^^ Thank you for sharing ^^

[AliciaB]

Wow! Thanks for the awesome, extremely extensive review! :) My tendency to go a bit long on the details seems to be a common thread in the feedback I'm getting on this one... maybe that habit is better suited for use in longer works, not short stories like this one. Or maybe I just need to rein it in a little bit. I really appreciate you taking so much time to review this. Thank you so much, and I'm glad you liked it!

[Stan Lee]

Made me laugh. This is crazy in a really good way! Really enjoyed the characters and your great descriptions. Thanks for sharing. :)

[AliciaB]

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[barleygirl]

This is a very original piece. I love the way you take your time describing EVERYTHING in minute detail, many of which are quite startling & vivid. My only drawback was when the Oracle is looking thru all the papers & scrolls in the other room. Even tho each little detail is brilliantly crafted, in total, this part of the story started to make my eyes glaze over, becuz it just went on & on & on too much. Another thing I loved about your story is the distinct irony between what we all expect an "ORACLE" to be like & to live like, contrasted with this messy irreverent hoarder. Nice job of tongue-in-cheek writing.

[AliciaB]

Thank you for the review! Yes, I agree that that part of the story may be a bit tedious... now you really understand what the young man was feeling! :) I appreciate the input!