#embarassingly that is an spn episode title

[tea-and-typos]

The poker table sat four. Around it, Juliet and Beatrice were attempting to play a high-speed game of uno, a struggle when the two other players had to be repeatedly reminded they were playing. Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother and Cinderella’s Evil Stepmother had recently reconnected after their long and complicated divorce, and now were spoiling a perfectly good game with their inability to focus on anything aside from each other.

‘You can’t put a skip card on top of another skip card!’ Juliet kicked the table leg nearest to her, causing the precarious discard pile to wobble, but not quite fall. ‘It skips your go, that’s the whole thing.’

‘Yeah, but I’m stacking?’ Beatrice, who had argued the exact opposite point earlier in the game, popped her chewing gum obnoxiously. ‘Back me up here, Manon.’

Manon, Cinderella’s Evil Stepmother, waved her hand distractedly, accidentally flinging her unlit cigarette across the room. ‘Yeah, whatever Beatrice said.’ She lazily dropped her hand on the table, the uno cards spilling out like a bright yellow fan. Evidently Juliet had shuffled badly. ‘We’re being narrated, so I’m going to go.’ she said, raising a middle finger pointlessly at the sky. Obviously, no one would be watching her from up there.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Juliet flung her own, significantly smaller hand down. ‘How can you always tell when it’s happening?’

Manon elegantly plucked her silver cigarette case from her breast pocket, and an engraved zippo from her coat pocket. She offered the cigarettes round the table, and then offered the lighter about. Fictional characters didn’t tend to get lung cancer unless it was to further the plot, and then it hardly mattered if they smoked or not. Consequences were thematic as opposed to sequential, reflecting on page actions as opposed to off page ones.

‘My theory,’ Manon said, blowing a deeply impressive smoke ring across the table. ‘Is that because plays don’t have narration, you don’t pick up on it.’ ’

‘Mine does.’ Juliet said sulkily, sinking down in her chair and folding her arms. This was true, Romeo and Juliet did have a narrator, however it was a nontraditional narrator, more for exposition than anything else. Within her source material, Juliet did not have her actions dictated by a narrator, meaning she was largely unaware of when it happened now she was part of the public domain.

‘Still.’ Manon flounced off, leaving a puff of smoke behind her—a trick that made the Fairy Godmother weak in the knees. It certainly caused her to leave the poker table and walk after her ex-wife/current squeeze, for activities that would not make it into versions of their story aimed at children. 

‘Fucking fairytale bitches think they’re so special and timeless.’ Beatrice spat her gum on the floor unceremoniously, before putting on a high voice, ‘ooh I can just somehow magically tell when I’m being narrated, oooh I’m going to seven divorces.’ Her impression of Cinderella’s Evil Stepmother was neither accurate nor particularly amusing, but Juliet laughed anyway.

‘Evil Stepmother and the Seven Divorces, coming to cinemas near you.’ Juliet put on a terrible announcer voice, before pulling out her Magic: The Gathering deck. ‘You had a remake more recently than any of the Cinderella crowd, anyway.’

‘It was shit though.’ Beatrice pulled a pouch of tobacco out her pocket, rolling a cigarette because it gave her more hand movements for the narration to ground her speech in, and when being narrated a character exists to serve the narrative. Fictional characters are malleable like that, to a certain extent.

‘You’re lucky no one really cares about your play, next thing you know they’ll do a garden gnome retelling.’

Beatrice rubbed the tobacco between her fingers in preparation for rolling. ‘First of all,’ she said, licking along the shiny strip of her rolling paper, ‘loads of people care about my play. Recent film adaptation was terrible, but I still got one.’ She smoothed the cylindrical tube of tobacco together, and stuck it between her teeth as she patted her pockets down for a lighter. ‘Second of all, Gnomeo and Juliet was better than the Leonardo Di Caprio film you’re so fond of, and I won’t hear a word against it.’

Juliet slid a lighter across the table, and Beatrice took it, lighting the cigarette continuing to speak around a mouthful of smoke. ‘It’s funny how much copyright law changes our way of life. Or whatever it is this is.’

‘Not really life, not really death.’ Juliet shuffled her Magic: The Gathering deck. ‘Lots of time to play card games.’