Tin Universe Monthly #13 Read online

dirt track that supplied a good track and the use of a former pro mechanic for $20 dollars a month.

  Which was easily slipped from his mother’s purse.

  As I’ve been told this happens a lot with kids with alcoholic parents. Sometimes it’s the only way they end up getting anything to eat.

  Sorry, went a little sad dark there for a minute.

  Just before his junior year of high school Roy was spotted and recruited to the motocross team known as and copyrighted as Crystal Teeth.

  All the rest was a history of and stories of drugs, success, love, fame, marriage, buying of lots of the things, child birth, pain, and death.

  Since the death of his wife Grail had been raising a teenage daughter on his own. The medical bills from his wife’s treatments drained away all the money they had smartly saved in preparation to make sure their daughter would have a good life ahead of her.

  He was on the edge of having to completely change their life style from newly being poor to newly being po when the offer from Osip Industries came in.

  Even though the pay presented was great for the work he would be doing, the fact that his daughter would get the chance to live a year in a very nice house with a lot of very old historic things surrounding her and get entrance into a prestigious private high school, those things made it a no brainer in excepting the offer when it came across the door of his former agent.

  Things had quickly spiraled downhill for them after his wife died and this was the first time he saw a chance to even remotely get the out of control train back onto a road, any road, or track with me saying train, because they had been off roading life pretty hard.

  Grail’s daughter, Sharon Ellen Havers, no nickname.

  Though he father use to call her Show Cake when she was a little.

  But those are the type of stupid names fathers sometimes give their daughters.

  Joanna has never been given a nickname by her father.

  A lot of people who know her call her many things not her name.

  As I hinted at, at one time Sharon’s family was living a pretty upper class lifestyle but they had lost almost all of it before she was even five. Most of it went the way of doctor bills when her mother was sick and the rest went the way of her father trying to use money to help her get through the grief of losing her mother.

  Moving into the Osip’s mansion was a case of Sharon coming into another atmosphere of privilege and status that made her families former level of rich look like the way of living for a family who hits up the soup kitchen once a day.

  She thought she was going to have to deal with snobs.

  Deal with arrogances and Upstairs Downstairs drama.

  She had no idea what she was getting into and neither did her father.

  Best intentions and all that.

  Sharon Havers and Joanna Osip didn’t get along from first introductions as Joanna responded when introduced to Sharon, “Just stay away from me. Servants and their pets aren’t allowed in my room. Make sure you remember that.”

  She was referring to Sharon as her father’s pet there.

  If I didn’t make that clear enough.

  Writers sometimes aren’t clear enough.

  Well, this one is anyways.

  Sharon’s father tried gathering as much information on the Osips as he could before he took the job and after reading up on them he knew this wasn’t going to be easy for either his daughter or him.

  But he didn’t know what else to do because he also had a recent visit to the doctors and know a few years was all he had to try and get them back on a good road. All those years of concussion after concussion have taken their toll on his brain and his body as a whole was getting worse. What use to heal when he was young is now haunting with aches and pains that even large doses of pain killers aren’t pushing away.

  As a parent he wanted what was best for his daughter at the moment but he also knew he couldn’t be so focused in making the moment everything it could be because the future has to be addressed now. The clock was ticking and there was coming a time when he wouldn’t be able to be there for Sharon. That frightened him to no end, frightened him more than any reservations about bringing his daughter into the world of the Osips no matter what he found out.

  Grail had tried to tell his daughter, “It’s a job. We’ll have to be on job at all times while there and the job will have us putting up with a lot of bullshit. Best just to avoid them whenever possible.”

  But that was like the stupid shit parents try to feed their kids by saying, “Don’t let bullies bother you, they are just unhappy people.”

  Sharon tried to follow her father’s advice as he tried to reinforce it even further after their first meeting with Joanna and her father that she should just stay away from Joanna until he can finish the job and then they can get an apartment near her new school and fully restart their lives together on better footing.

  But the problem with trying to avoid an Osip is they get to decide the course of forward and backward, away from and towards.

  Something Joanna learned really early in her life. That she could make someone else do the most menial of tasks just by her being who she was, just by what her last name said to others.

  Her father once told her, “Your last name will open doors for you. It will give out initial fear. But it’s what you can do that which will open every door after the first. And it’s what you can do that will put a fear in them that will last for a very long time.”

  That should be on a father’s day post card that should.

  Sharon and Joanna had a couple of run ins with each other early on but nothing more than shouting matches. That was until one day when Sharon was cleaning up the motocross bikes after Joanna’s final riding lesson.

  It was one of the many chores that her father gave her the privilege of also being able to ride the bikes.

  Joanna had went out of her way to try and make sure that Sharon wasn’t able to do anything but go to her room, eat, and shit, but her father thought the exchange of work for the privilege of riding was a fair trade off.

  That angered her. She thought sometimes her father’s sense of building stronger employees went against other things he had taught her. It didn’t but young minds and simple older minds sometimes have problems seeing all the lines that are within an issue.

  Sharon loved riding because it was something she felt connected her with her father. He of course was a worried father watching her ride but also felt a bit of proud in how good she was.

  Though of course he also made sure she understood being too much better than Joanna wasn’t a good show to make.

  These were pro rider quality racing bikes that even most pros didn’t have because there was no way an Osip was going to learn on or be taught by someone on just any dirt bike. The same reasoning in how she learned to drive a car in a Bugatti Veyron.

  What, you think she was going to drive some piece of shit Honda Civic or something?

  Joanna walked into the estates large garage that could store all the work vehicles, personal vehicles, and collectors’ items that her family owned, and still have plenty of room for moving vehicles around, working on them, and cleaning as Sharon was doing with the bikes dirty from the lesson earlier in the day.

  With an itch in the back of her mind Joanna waked into the garage that day knowing they no longer needed Sharon or her father. That her own father would not be angry with her for what she was about to do.

  She had grown to hate Sharon and her father because of the attention they got from the other servants, several of which had gotten autographs from him because of his past triumphs.

  Sharon was spraying the bikes off with a water hose and her back was positioned to the main garage doors. She actually liked cleaning the bikes. It was a quite calming exercise before she went to her bedroom to do her homework.

  Joanna had paid her father a visit a few minutes before this in his office. She told him exactly what she wanted to do. He gave her his permission and tol
d his security to be on guard if something went down afterwards.

  She had grabbed a riding crop from the small stables the family had on the back grounds of the estate before heading to the garage. It was her father’s riding crop. It was made of an adamantine rod; which was once part of a key that was said to unlock a gate to Hell. It was covered in Kangaroo skin leather because someone once told her father that no one, Presidents or celebrities could get away with carrying something made from Kangaroo out of Australia.

  He proved them wrong to set an example of who he was in their mind.

  The riding crop’s tip was made up of four small spiked balls that could be filled with a toxin made from the white sap from a Manchineel tree. Its purpose was to inflict a lot of pain on a horse to get the very last bit of work out of it.

  The first blow struck Sharon in the center of the back of her neck.

  Joanna’s aim when delivering a blow would improve later.

  Only the rod portion of the riding crop landed with the blow but it was enough to send Sharon falling forward and instantly her eyes lost most of their focus. She knocked over one of the bikes and stumbled over it before being able to turn around while leaning against a far corner of the garage and see it was Joanna who had struck her.

  Through fuzzy vision she asked, “Why?”

  Joanna didn’t say anything in response and from as much as Sharon could see she didn’t have any sort of expression on her face either as she moved forward holding the riding crop above her head ready to bring it down in attack