I have been reading. I curl up with my Scribner Anthology of Short Fiction. The stories are very good; Brokeback Mountain has always been my favourite. I flip through the book, find stories at random, eat and drink them. I suspect there are happy stories in the Scribner Anthology, but the ones I read are all sad.
The Premise:
“I want a bitter grl and a cheeky boy and a night with fireworks just after a dance in a decade when everyone thinks the world is about to end. ” (more…)
Last night, I had a dream. In it, Che appeared; he accused me of being Middle-Class with delusions of oppression. I hung my head but secretly sulked.
“I could never hate you.”
“You could. I could make you.” Yet finally, finally, his lips curled into a smile. It was a slow, heated smile; butter melting on hot toast, a square of sunlight through a window on a fall afternoon. With it his own godhood showed through the shell of this rascal, this backwoods carnie. Something burning and beautiful, so uncompromising that it evaporated everything it touched. Even the glimmer he allowed through made the air around them buckle and shimmer. Then again, her shadowy tendrils were reaching out too, curling around him. He saw then that he could annihilate her, and let himself be consumed. She could strangle him, he could impale her. Her shadows could choke all his bitterness and exhaustion, his shards of brilliance could pierce and rip to shreds all of her doubt and sorrow and longing. He smiled then, and it was a beautiful and terrible thing. He leaned down, pressed his lips to her ear, and blew these thoughts into her mind.
It was a hot, sultry evening as the carriage made its way north to Bristol; the sort of night that gave birth to strange, vivid dreams and stranger imaginings when one looked up to the huge, luminous orange moon. As the carriage bumped and shook it’s way along the coach-road, the landscape became wilder and more beautiful – moors replacing cultivated fields, and trees that hugged to the road, throwing odd shivering shadows on the road, distorted by it’s bumps and wagon-tracks. One lonely coach ambled down this road, though it had miles and miles to go before Bristol came into sight. The coachmen expected that the first rays of dawn would light the road into the city, and he tucked his hands under his armpits to keep them warm. Inside the coach, a young woman read by the light of one swinging lanthorn, one hand clutching her rosary and the other shoved up under her skirts.
The attack came suddenly. The coachman hardly had time to cry out before his body fell into the muddy ditch, and there were cheers and hoots as the carriage’s door was wrenched open. A sandy-haired head popped in. There was an impression of a wide grin and white teeth, and then he spoke. “Ah! A woman.”
Isobel was pressed against the far wall, but she didn’t resist when the highwayman took her hand and pressed a smacking kiss to her trembling fingers. She opened her mouth but could not speak, and he took her silence as invitation. In a moment his muscled arm was wrapped tight around her waist, and his mouth pressed to hers. He did not kiss her tenderly, or sweetly: he kissed her as if he’d like to eat her up. It was not her first kiss, but it was the first that flickered with lust. She hadn’t remembered to close her eyes, and when he pulled away he saw her looking at him dumbly. He gave a grin that might have been meant to be dashing, but it seemed sheepish and fond. She spoke then, and started at how shrill her voice sounded.
“Really…really, you mustn’t!” and he pulled back, the bravado gone out of him. She looked at her silk slippers, and blushed. “I must get to Bristol by morning. I must! I..I’m to be married to a merchant.” and waited for him to blush and apologise. He didn’t. “It..it’s a very sensible match, you see.” she finished lamely, her eyes on his, imploring (though for what she’d no idea). Her hands clutched the French novel she’d been reading, hiding it under the edges of her skirts. He nodded then, but slipped like oil between her knees. She was about to protest – oh really, sir, how could you! – when she heard the splintering of wood and the scrape of his knife behind her calves, and realised that the only reason his chin (scarred, she wondered how) was resting on her knee was that he was opening the secret panel to get at her dowry. She sighed with relief, and mayhap a little disappointment. So, he wasn’t planning to ravish her after all.
She heard the jingle of heavy coin as the loot was tossed out to his men but didn’t look up – she was reading her novel again, by lanthorn-light. Then he was kissing her (quite suddenly) and with a whimper against his mouth her book fell from her hand to be crushed under his knees as he pressed close to her. His tongue slid along the seam of her lips and she sucked in a breath, and the shock of a tongue that wasn’t her own against her teeth almost made her bite it. His hands were sliding over her bodice now, and she imagined she could feel the heat of his palms even through the heavy brocade. His lips plucked at hers, his tongue stroked hers, he swallowed down her moans. Their teeth clicked. She felt he was somehow delving deeper and deeper into her, his tongue a wriggling fish that would follow the rushing stream of her lust to its source. She wondered where it led, but had a good idea: that part of her was feeling much less dry than was typical. He was stroking her now, one hand on her stockinged knee and the other palming one small breast through her bodice. She moaned into his mouth, tipped her head this way and that, trying to seal to him perfectly. Overcome by boldness, she thrust her tongue into his mouth. He is just like a character in a novel, she thought, and with that his conquest was complete.
It was later, much later, that the moon looked down on him helping her onto his horse. There was a white cloth blindfolding her eyes, but she didn’t much mind. “And to think,” he told her, tilting her head back to once again plunder her lips, steal her eager kisses. “To think, I would have left the dearest prize behind.”
Imagine, if you can, a silence that is not the absence of sound…
Let me start again.
Imagine a silence that is not nothing, not what they call a ‘vacuum’, but a collective hush. Every being, animated or not, green and growing or fast and flitting or hiding in the muck of the ocean; imagine every creature and thing that lives holding its breath. A silence so profound, so…
I-I am no orator, my words are too weak. I am made for walking and waiting, and sitting through long nights, and bearing all with patience, and tending fires. I would leave matters of passion and art to my brothers and sisters, they are the ones men tell stories of. My tongue is clumsy; I never thought to explain myself. Yet… There was a young woman: she stopped me walking one night and asked me questions. She said she worked for…some paper, or…well, I cannot remember, I was too shocked that she saw me at all. I sat with her; we spoke. She was very beautiful: her belly was firm and round, her hips wide, breasts high, skin smooth and she moved as if she was about to burst, wrapped around so much life, so much need for the future. She blew her nose into a faded blue cloth. I remember that in detail.
She told me I looked so tired, so worn, so faded and grey. I told her yes, I am. She touched my hair, curled a tangled bit of it around one finger. It broke like dry straw. She offered me no shelter, no succour or aid – as others have – but sat and talked with me, and somehow I was more grateful to her than I have been to all of those that helped me over the years. I have a clumsy tongue, not many have the patience to hear my story. This lantern, this walking stick, this tiny feeble flickering thing that rules me. That a contraption of metal and glass could rule a goddess: it seems like a very good joke! She listened, unlikely as it was. She listened until the end, when I told her why I devote my existence to this absurd little lantern, why its embers are to me a god, as men have gods.
If it were to go out, I told her, everything stops. Imagine a silence that is not an absence, but a great hush as everything that lives waits at once to be undone. There is nothing after: the credits are over, the tape runs out, the curtain falls, the Red King wakes up, everything…ends. Of course I am a slave to this tiny glow, of course I am. I trudge, and suffer, and grow more thin and pale and faded and pitiful with every sundown. Of course I keep it safe, of course I do.
She asked me: do you ever want to just throw it down, stamp it, smash it apart? I could not answer; I fled.
Do I dream of shattering glass and dying coals underfoot? Of course I do.
Of course I do.
She was careful as she picked across the rubble to where he lay gasping, spurting his life. “If you thought me delicate then, I was. Not fragile, no, that was what you made me.” She touched him sweetly, leaving the scent of rose and resentment behind her.
Love wasn’t something we planned for, you must understand this. It swept in uninvited, a great wind that destroyed our taste for the past.
He’d fretted long: hand-wringing, brow-wiping. In the end it blurted out. She froze, spoon of applesauce halfway to her mouth. She’d never been so beautiful; he’d never felt so ill.
As the days went by, Zinnia found herself more and more taken with the idea of being a wife. She hadn’t yet come to the idea of motherhood yet, but skirted around the edges of the idea as it began to timidly tiptoe into her mind. She bent to her studies and correspondence with renewed zeal, entering into a whirlwind of research and for the first time taking an assistant. All the while her sisters marvelled and her brother laughed, and Zinnia knew for the first time that no matter how much they teased her, it would slip from her like water from an oiled palm, and leave her just as happy as before.
No-one really knows Mister Claypole’s first name. If you asked anyone who works under him in the theatre, any of his managers of patrons or whores, they might scratch their heads and speculate. George? Andrew? Donald? For some reason they will all give you the names of saints, and they will all forget to ask him if they are right. It’s been so long since Claypole has had anyone use his name that when he reads old love letters from his first and second wives (which he does instead of attending church), he always sees it with a tiny bit of surprise.
—
Madlan Goring will someday be a staunch, respectable woman. She will have steely grey hair and speak sternly to her servants, and she will be adored and only a little resented by her children. And scandal will not touch her, and gossip will roll from her, because she will have pride. Pride is your backbone, her father told her. And as she pulls her laces loose, as she watches her petticoat crumple to the floor and hears the gasp from the bed behind her, her back straitens. She keeps pride in her backbone, and compromises everything else.
—
When they were little, Lowri and her brother Daffydd found a cave. A little pregnant ewe led them to it, and it was just big enough to crawl inside, and it was nice and cool that blistering summer. And now they’re in London with it’s bewildering strangeness, still looking for a place to hide. All they have to crawl inside is one another.
—
There are men in Gianni’s camp that had never heard the word ‘Giacomo’ before they knew him. He uses it daily, to excuse himself or to protest his sincerity, or any of the thousand things that beg for his pontification. And to be a fool is a great and heavy thing, but it’s better than being a sinner.
—
There was a plague that went through London, and Emm still remembers the twisted faces, the crowded graves, the plague masks in some dark corner of her mind. Very little matters to her nowadays, she finds it hard to convert her indifference into reform. Lime and sand and the dead cover her in her nightmares, and the panting bodies of two brothers in her dreams.
—
Knives and forks have been the fashion for how long now? But old and tried works best; Jim Holly still eats with his fingers and his knife. His teeth are sharp, his eyes are sharper, and his mind has a jagged, brutal edge. His knife is the only thing he carries, and the only thing he makes up stories about.
Lindsey is a stage magician, at least he was. Now, he’s starting to suspect he may be a conduit for infernal secrets, but hasn’t let himself think about that enough to be properly alarmed. Before, he was a proper sort, if somewhat scattered. And sometimes he is that again, if he leaves his jacket (and what’s in his jacket pocket) on the train. Of course, his jacket pocket always finds its way back to him, sooner or later.
—
You’ll see Valentine skulking in shadows, or perhaps as a dark shape moving between drops of rain at night. He doesn’t show himself much, trusting whispered secrets in sleeping ears to achieve his purposes. But soon, soon. Soon you’ll see Valentine walking down the Evil Quarter Mile, without a care in the world again. Wise men would caution not to meet his eye.
—
Redjack Ryan is missing a tooth. A canine. The left one. Or was it the right? Doesn’t matter, what matters are the stories of how and why and what happened after. The stories are important, are fascinating, give the lie to anything that might be hidden by that grin.
—
Watches must be wound just right. Not enough, and they won’t keep time. Too much, and their tightness weakens the springs. Or at least that’s what J.Q. Fiddich thinks, when he winds his ornate watch every night. It has many functions (stars, calender, compass…), but never does seem to set exactly to the time on the high church tower. He thinks this might be a metaphor for life, and keeps his watch well polished just in case.
When the first wave came, we were ready. We had anti-radiation agent, and we holed up in the basement. We weren’t worried at all. The government would come through soon with scan-raids and life would get back to normal, like it always did. Only this time, the trucks didn’t come.
We ate the animals first, after the stores were emptied. A few people were crushed in panic or killed in the night. Them next. We joked about it. ”You can get anything down,” we said “with enough salt.”
We started a lottery last week. In the corner my three year old is crouching over a spilled cabinet, eating salt.
“You smell like…” his nose was pressed into the crease where her hip met thigh, and she bit her lip – hard – to stifle a giggle. It tickled.
“I smell like yer mama’s perfume.” Her voice was harsh with stolen cigarettes, but he looked up with awe and thought it beautiful. ”You didn’t!” But he took a long whiff and there it was, that cloying scent of orchids and baby powder. He looked over at the dresser where the bottle sat – not as dusty as it usually was. The sheer insanity of the day made him want to….
“I did. And y’know what else?” Her hand edged down, lifting up her shirt for him to see. And he didn’t know who would have done it, there was no way she looked eighteen.
“You didn’t” he breathed, though the proof winked at him from her tummy-button, garish and gold and glittering. She smiled at him, licking off a little of her bright pick lipstick.
“I did. Can we do it now?”
Lowri ran in the hills and killed sheep and ate them for her breakfast. According to Dafydd, his sister had bested pirates on the shore, bandits on the road, and robbers at the hearth. She’d run to the Gower and back, she’d swum in the ocean and scorned the tides, she’d caught a mermaid by the tail and lived to tell.
Many of the villagers laughed at the boy’s stories, but young Dafydd knew that even if they weren’t exactly factual, they were still a perfect reflection of the reality he alone knew: that Lowri was beautiful and fierce, and would someday have the world in her pocket.