I already posted this on Livejournal, but here it is for Blogger folks. Latest draft, mind. For those that just happened upon the page, this is an excerpt from The Pearl (working title), a requested story for serialization on Erotic Dreams Zine. I have a serial piece already on the Zine (two parts published), so check it out. Membership is free. For those of you with memberships already, but who may not have gotten a notice, the site suffered a password catastrophe. All passwords were lost, so if you didn't get the notification email, contact the site owner for your temporary password and/or username. Usernames weren't lost.
The plot I had in mind for The Pearl changed during the transit from head to keyboard to screen. I do that a lot, start with a basic idea, and then just ride the wave wherever it takes me. Works for me. Only problem with this approach to writing is I have to do a thorough fact checking to make certain I didn't annihilate any logic in the previous sections. Little rocks I don't want to crash into before I reach the shore. :D
Content warning: hints of violence and death
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The aftermath of his family’s destruction, there were only smells and cold touch; the soft grasses he crushed, stumbling and crashing onto earth, the sweet scent of herb blood, but not the verdant green he could only see in the bright light of day. It was before the bright light of day, or just after. Time had gone, become the deep grey, the almost black of a night with, perhaps, a moon in the sky. His sister called it a splendid pearl, the moon. Pearls had ever been so small that he could barely see their smudge on his palm, and never the perfect luminosity of white that she described. No use looking skyward. The moon was smaller than a pearl to him, and he could not hold it. If there was nothing to touch, there was nothing to feel, nothing to care about.
“Kimiko!” Gone. Gone with the last cry from her throat. His things, she’d gone back to fetch, his things that he’d left behind, too panicked to think of them until she’d dragged him stumbling from his lonely cloister and out into the world. It had been green and brown then. There had been light. Colour. There had been the smell of her perfume in his nose, the flowers and the musk, the bright expanse of rose silk floating to his side. Rose silk that had been his sister. Gone. She’d left him crouched in deep grass that grew taller than his head, and he’d heard the scream, understood the end of his sister, listened to the horse riders thunder past him without discovery, and remained frozen in the world for hours after. Until the grey had come, and then the near black of a moon night, until time had seemed to end. Then he had set off in the direction of the cry, his sister’s last cry. He hadn’t moved from his position once before then, not even his head, so that he wouldn’t forget the direction to turn. He’d commenced the journey walking, but after the last tumble, he had begun crawling, and it seemed a crawl of aeons. Smells, feels, crushed grass scent, grit on his palm, rocks cutting into his knees, horse manure stink, metallic odour of her blood, sharp smell of his sweat, flower perfume, a spicy musk in the breeze. Silk. The aeons ended in a handful of silk. “Kimiko,” he breathed. In her hands, his flute, his prayer beads, the means through which he’d cursed her to a certain death. “I should have stood up and let them murder me as well, but I was a coward. I was a coward!” He choked on grief, set his head on her motionless bosom. None of the beautiful rose. Just the endless wash of bleak darkness. “Useless blind son! Useless! I can’t even die like a man!” To feel her face one last time before he died. Just to feel her face. The prayer beads weren’t strong enough to throttle him, but his sash would do well enough. He didn’t need a tree. He just needed his determination, and he would end what had begun useless and remained useless. “The only thing I ever did for you was to kill you, Kimiko,” he whispered, “when I sent you back for these unimportant things. I understand now. I should have died long ago. It’s over now. I won’t be selfish anymore. I’ll be strong enough to choke the life from my own body. But I…I just want to touch your face one last time. Forgive me that I don’t deserve even this, but I…must…” Fingers on wet. Fingers on wet. The sound that came from him was a whimper and a gasp at once, breath coming in as a great intake of horror. No face, no hair, no head. Her smile had been taken from him, her lips gone, her nose gone, her cheeks, her chin, her perfect smooth forehead. There, under his fingertips, only a truncated wetness of neck and bones and blood. He screamed, and the wail echoed back to him from the great beyond that in daylight was an expanse of brown washed with grey. Rocks above. Rocks below. His cloister tucked into a sheltered copse between upper and lower ridges. His graveyard in which he would die next to his sister, whose head he could not find, though he scrabbled and reached, and crept about searching for it. No use. They’d taken it, a trophy for the warlord that had ended his family without ending him. Because he’d been a coward and hidden in tall grass. “Oh, Kimiko! Oh, Ancestors, no!” He found her body again, clutched an ankle and shivered in the dark with his forehead on her leg, breathing in, breathing out, waiting for the shaking of his body to cease. After a time, with the world becoming a lighter grey around him, he straightened from his crouch. He worked the sash from off his waist, wrapped it around his neck, and began the tightening to end his life. Courage. Just a little more courage and nothing would matter any longer. If there were a place for the dead after life departed body, then he would know it soon, or have the comfort of oblivion. He wrapped one end of the sash around his foot, the other over a hand, and spread his body—head back, leg extended, neck squeezed. The dizziness began, and the darker shadow that had been lurking to the foreground for a time now moved. He was already too choked to make a cry of surprise, but he had the strength left to struggle with the hands that interfered with his intentions. -------------------- |
