3/4/15

The lamps dripped pools of orange light from the ceiling of the parking garage. Through these Seba waded to his car, the first to leave after practice in the evening. The night before the Wildcards had suffered a painful 17-point loss in Pittsburgh, the sixth of the past seven games that they had lost. The astounding streak in which they had defeated the top teams in the league was a month behind, almost forgotten amid the preparations for future games. Seba tried to silence the nagging voice inside that likened his efforts to saving the Titanic by bailing it out with a bucket.

Unlocking his vehicle, he pulled open the door and dropped his body into the driver’s seat, slumping his head against the steering wheel. Missed shots, falls, and opposing baskets swirled in his mind’s eye, a kaleidoscope infuriatingly spurning the aesthetic. He needed to disentangle his thoughts.

But for some reason, the prospect of returning to a dark door, a dark apartment, a dark bedroom in the dark night induced within him a lurking, inexpressible dread. It was like the first time he tried to swim: his head submerged, he sucked in a couple gulps of water before, coughing, he returned to the surface. When invited to swim from that day on, he declined. Going home, navigating through the streets swamped in glaring lights, gave him the same sense: drowning.

Seba had to get away. For now. He pulled out his phone and punched in directions to the overlook outside of the city. He knew the way, but he wanted to get there as quickly as possible without relying on the chaos in his mind to sort itself out.

Twenty minutes later, the lights of the city fell behind him. Before him, only his car’s headlights served as a reminder that the outside world existed.

Twenty minutes after that, he had parked and exited his car. Bare feet crunching the gravel and sweatshirt hood pull up over his head, Seba walked away from the small parking lot, pitch-dark now that his car was turned off. To the left the dissolute bubble of the Sin City’s halo rose up behind a rise; in front and to the right, specks of light glinted in the distance. The stars speckled the sky above, the smear of Milky Way hardly visible beside the full moon. Seba clamped his arms tightly to his torso to conserve warmth against nocturnal desert’s arid chill.

Early on in the season, when the incessant insistence of Vegas had gotten to him, he discovered this place. Though he knew losing sleep was unwise, he found himself out here alone at midnight more often than he liked. Perhaps it was the bigness of this wild, cold darkness that enabled him to return to the small, ordered warmness of his apartment.

He did not know. What he did know was that it helped. The lost sleep was compensated by the night wind leaching away his stress along with his body heat.

Too bad, he mused tonight, that I’m an endotherm.

Cycling through a variety of sitting positions atop a picnic table, on a bench, and on the dusty ground, he finally returned to the car, shutting and locking the door behind him. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

The toucan awakened to a blurry greyness and a very cold beak. Blinking, he cleared his vision and found dawn nestled in the eastern sky. Despite the fogginess of his mind and the cramp in his neck, he glanced down to find that he had somehow fallen asleep here and stayed all night. With a shake, a fluffing of feathers, and some brisk beak-rubbing to generate heat, he twisted the keys in the ignition and got ready to drive back into the city.

To where, though? Had he not fallen asleep, he would have returned to his bed. Now it was too late for that.

Within the hour he found himself back in his parking spot at Fremont Palace. Long before practice was to begin. He leaned his chair back and curled up, setting his alarm for a couple hours later. Having shut out the garage’s lights by cinching the pull cord on his hoodie, he drifted off into a shallow half-sleep. His last thought: may as well get some extra morning practice in before the game tonight, eh?

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3/5/15

The day’s practices sped by in the sharp haze of sleep deprivation. At their end, Seba collapsed back onto the courtside bench and squirted water into his beak. He was trying to massage the fatigue out of his eyes when clacking footsteps and a voice came up beside him.

"Hey, Seba? Do you have a minute?"

Seba recognized the voice and cracked an eye to see a striped shoulder beside him. "Hm? Yes? What is it?"

Sluggy lowered herself to sit at Seba’s side, concern evident in her tone. "Do you have something you want to talk about?"

“About what?” Seba said. The question caught him off guard: something gnawed at him, cierto, but even if he could articulate what it was, he was not inclined to discuss it. “I am mostly hoping that tonight we play better than in recent games...”

The zebra gave Seba a skeptical look. “We’re all hoping that. But you haven't been yourself lately. You've been pushing yourself all the time, you look like you've barely been sleeping... Frankly, I'm worried about you.”

The toucan snapped his eyes open in an attempt to mask his exhaustion. "I have been doing my job. At least, I have tried.” He paused. “And it is tiring."

“Of course you are, and of course it is. We’re pro athletes,” Sluggy responded with a reassuring smile. Seba felt exposed. "But what do you do when you're not working? How do you unwind? Me, I raise gastropods... You know, slugs." She crawled a finger slowly down a forearm in imitation of one of her pets. “Babosas!” She had liked the word when Seba had taught it to her.

Seba turned, looking into Sluggy’s eyes for a split second, his brow furrowed. His gaze immediately darting to the finger slug, which now probed the air in his direction. He opened his beak to speak, only to close it again. "Hm." He did not have an answer to this question.

Sluggy arched her eyebrows. The slug became a finger again. "Who do you... hang out with? Weren't you living with your cousin for a while?"

"Um..." At least now he had something to latch onto. "Bueno, I lived with him while I was in college. He had an extra room and lived nearby... it was a good arrangement."

"And before then?"

"Before then? Before then I was at home. In Argentina."

"With your family. I remember the picture from All-Star Week. There's a lot of them."

The corner of Seba's mouth twitched up, his attention seemingly elsewhere. "Heh. Yes. There are nine, including me."

She leaned in a little closer. "And now you're on your own. Aren't you lonely?"

His imagination jogged back to the dark apartment. His response came one beat too late to be convincing. “I am okay.”

To his dismay, the lie was apparently more unmistakable in speech than in thought. He found himself wondering how many more thoughts he had accepted simply because he had not been forced to vocalize them.

With a friendly grin, Sluggy stood and laid a hand on Seba’s shoulder. He felt a frisson spread from the touch, embarrassingly causing his feathers to fluff. Sluggy didn’t give any indication that she noticed this. “Just so you know, Casa QuaaJazzCon is always open to friends.”

Retracting her hand and without waiting to register Seba’s reaction, the zebra pivoted and trotted off to the women’s locker room. Seba stared after her as she vanished into shadow.

The clanging mental alarm bells, triggered when Sluggy so tactfully broke and entered, were impossible to quiet. But Seba unexpectedly found phrases from their conversation ringing in countermelody...

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Little collaboration with kintomythostian, terribly overdue. Part 2 to come sometime soon!

Sluggy Quaatsch is © kintomythostian
furrybasketball was created by buckhopper