Ugly by Jailbird

Authors Note: This story is heavily Luigi/Amber later down the road. It is also includes a lot Chuck Palahniuk's themes and ideas, so if you've read many of his books... you will either like it a lot, or be bored by the references because you've already read something similar.

Little Carmela Largo hunches over the coffee table in the living room. Copy paper is stacked and strewn around her, on the khaki colored carpet, cluttering the smooth mahogany table. Crayons pool in her lap, gathering in her dress where the skirt is bunched up over her knees. Her dark hair pools around her face, spilling over her drawing. Her young features are locked in an expression of intense concentration.

On the the television, Pooh Bear and Piglet and Rabbit and friends are having an adventure. To little Carma, Pooh Bear is as real as any person she has ever met. She fights to capture his visage on paper, to emulate his adventures, and to create her own. As much as she struggles, however, her version of Pooh does not do justice to the actual bear.

She grabs a pearly pink eraser and attacks the page with it. Brushing the eraser shreds onto the carpet absentmindedly, she presses her pencil to the paper and tries again. This drawing is even worse, she thinks. It needs to be perfect, like Pooh Bear is, but her copy of him is all wrong.

"Hey squirt," says a voice behind her. She spins around and knocks her knee violently against the table. Tears spring to her eyes but Carmela is too old to cry over bumped knees, so she bites her lip and ignores the throbbing pain.

Luigi vaults over the back of the couch and lands, plop, on the cushion behind Carmela. She knows at that moment that she will have to leave anyways, but decides to push her luck and stay awhile longer. Luigi stretches his arms over the back of the couch, his legs towards the coffee table, subsequently kicking Carmela in the back.

"Hey," she whines. Luigi doesn't apologize. Instead he trails his toes through the drifts of paper, flips them over, displacing and rumpling them. Carma quickly picks up her drawings, but he's already ruined some of them. He finds what he's looking for under a illustration of Eeyore in a tent. Carmela dives for the remote control but her big brother is too fast. He sweeps it up and shoves her roughly against the coffee table.

"Get the fuck out of here, Carma. I'm watching some grown-up shows now," he pokes her in the shoulder with his big toe and she pushes his leg away.

"I'm coloring in here," she objects, glowering up at him.

He barks a laugh and snatches the papers from her arms. "Why bother? A little kid like you can't draw anything worth looking at. What is this?" he sneers, pointing roughly to a little picture drawn in yellow and red crayon.

"It's Pooh with a pot of honey!" Carmela explains, her voice shrill as she tries to take the paper back. Luigi holds it just out of her reach.

"It looks like a fucking dog. A dog with a boner."

Carmela shrieks and Luigi tosses the papers on the ground. "It does not!" She hollers at him, although she doesn't know what a boner was. "It looks like Pooh! With a pot of honey!" Collecting the papers in her arms, she feels hot tears sting her eyes. She scampers off with only half of her pictures and none of her art supplies. She knows that a gentern will be around later to pick them up and return them to her, if Luigi doesn't ruin them for fun.

Carmela barely makes it to her bedroom before she bursts into sobs. Hot tears erupt from her eyes and she wipes them away with her wrists as quickly as they appear. She looks at her picture again from behind damp eyelashes. The red and yellow shimmers before her, and a fat teardrop plops onto the paper, right onto Pooh's nose.

It does sort of look like a dog, Carmela thinks, and crumples up the offensive drawing. After a moment, she grabs the next drawing off the pile and rips it in half. One by one, she destroys all of her terrible drawings, until there's nothing left but a pile of ruined paper.