ducks. Ducks of all sizes and shapes, colors, and smells. Your aunt collects ducks, and they have nearly taken over. You live with your aunt now (because the rest of your family was blown up in a bakery fuel-line explosion) and cannot avoid them. Everything in the fucking house that isn't nailed down , edible, or wearable, is a duck. The piano bench. The stereo. The salt and pepper shakers. The plates. Your toothbrush. The doorjamb.

No, you take that back. Lots of wearable things have ducks on them. Your pajamas. That fucking pink baseball cap. The ballet flats. If it hadn't been for Mei speaking up for you, your junior prom dress would have surely been ducked out.  You're pretty sure your aunt bought you tampons with ducks on them, once, but you're trying really, really hard to forget about that.

Years of morbid-pondering-and-quiet-sittings-with-your-aunt later, despite telling yourself that she means well (and because she was willing to raise you), the first night of your senior high school year, you are eating mac n cheese (with the duck pasta shapes) for dinner, and also trying really hard not to burst out cackling and screaming "Aunt Rita, WHAT IS WITH ALL THE FUCKING DUCKS? WHAT? WHAAAAAAAT?"

But it's getting pretty tough not to.

Instead, you start to stick your fork into the back of your hand under the table. That's what the Marquise de Merteuil said she would do in 'Dangerous Liasons', pretending she was all happy and smiling and flirty at the same time. Fortunately, you don't have to be quite so gay with your Aunt. She knows you have been a morbid teen (but likes jazz rather than industrial music), and although you are pretty in a way closer to Mena Suvari than Thora Birch in 'American Beauty', you like to fence and lift weights.

Yeah, you're a tad odd. But your family's blown up and your Aunt's life, which spills into yours, is filled with duckery.

Speaking of which, you were wrong about earlier.

The doorjamb is certainly nailed down, and that is not wagon-wheel-shaped pasta.

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Author guidance for This story

Hm. Somehow my earlier guidance was erased. My idea here is to have the branches ultimately use every category available here at Protagonize. You choose which genre suits you for your branch. It would be nice if, despite the branching, it used a gradual linear type change to the new genre, rather than "suddenly, Mei woke up and discovered it was all a dream. She was actually in 1855 looking for Doc Brown, wearing a lariat and spurs." Etc.

updated Jun 11 '09 by phestus_gold