The Water Would
Posted by May in Short stories
Brace yourself… possibly my darkest story yet. It’s the story of a modern, female Don Quixote. The main character lives in a world of dreams and Arthurian Romance but is cruelly snatched from her reveries. I suppose if I have to be literary about it, the work is a metaphor for the loss of innocence and the realities of life but in all honesty, I was just depressed. Enjoy, but be warned.
She had grown up in a house filled with books. The walls of almost every room were decorated with a hodgepodge of shelves, grinning with rows of multi-coloured teeth, some lying on their sides, being read from sometime long ago. In the living room and the study, there was a shelf, with a single line of books, encircling the top of the room, just below the ceiling; crowning these rooms with the laurel of literature or perhaps, that of the eccentric collector. But from every shelf the world shone, illumining the beholder, encompassing them with a light denied to so many and sought by too few. Drawing in the open mind, with the enigmas of their pages, hoping to open this mind some more. She would stand bathing in the cool glow of enlightenment, loving the way the book shelves looked, this myriad gleaming cracked spines and beautiful leather and gold bindings and yet she would turn and walk away. To her own bedroom, with its own shelf of books, most of them pristine, still yearning for that first caress, the first bent page or crack in the spine. She would fling herself into the dusty pink bean bag in the corner of the rotting bay window, near to the radiator; she liked the choking heat from the central heating and the creeping draft from the rattling window. This was her favourite place. In the other corner of the bay window, there was a pile of books, perhaps two feet high. These were the books for which she shunned all others; reading and re-reading and then reading some more. These were the books she loved. These were the books she would live. There she sat, hour after hour, winding her way through the labyrinthine quests of the stories. Sometimes she was locked in a castle, ravished by the wicked son of a good king, sometimes, she was won in tourney. Other days she would be of great help to the Knights of the Round Table and on many days, she would fall in love with a single glance. And as she read of these fantastical worlds of days bygone, days long gone, she grew into the fairest maiden anybody had ever had the glorious good fortune to lay their eyes upon. A river of blonde, gushed down her back and past her waist, shimmering opalescent in the sunlight that snuck through the old window panes. Her complexion was of lily white, with rose bud lips and gentle blushes of pink across her exquisite cheeks. She was beautiful and she was eighteen and soon she would embark on an adventure of her own, away from the questing knights and malicious ogres of the kingdoms of somewhere else. Lunette was to go to university.
Her parents drove her to the university. In the car, on the way there, she had read a book that she had read before, a hundred times, perhaps more. When she next looked up and dragged her eyes away from the printed words that had jousted and tumbled themselves into reality, engorging her completely, they were crossing a bridge. As they moved towards the city that seemed to emerge from nowhere and tower into the purple skies of the dusk, she gasped.
“The
“What was that, darling?” asked her mum from the front passenger seat, craning her neck to see her daughter.
“Does dad know what he’s doing mum? This bridge presents grave peril to whomever attempts to cross it; the blade of the sword and the two lions chained on the other side, not to mention the water beneath it. It’s so dangerous, only Sir Lancelot before us has managed to cross it.”
“The Knight of the Cart, by any chance, Lunette? You have such an imagination, my darling. You’ll be the star of your English class; you’ve been reading for such a long time,” replied her mum. She didn’t turn around to look at Lunette this time, she reapplied her lipstick and gazed at her face in a small mirrored compact. If she had withdrawn her eyes from her own reflection she would’ve seen her daughter, eyes down, gripping the hollow plastic handle on the car door so tightly that blood dripped from the end of her graceful fingers as her nails cracked and were levered from their beds. She hadn’t realised that the journey to this university would involve such risk and she feared, no, knew in her heart that one crossing of this bladed bridge was all she would be permitted, for surely her fortune would soon ebb. On the other side of the bridge, Lunette noticed the crimson tears weeping from the ends of her fingers. Just like Lancelot. His hands and feet were cut to the quick from his crossing. And just like her knight, she saw no sign of the chained lions. It must have been a mere enchantment. As the large, silver hire car wound its way towards Lunette’s university residence, she gazed from the window. In this city of busy roads, red and blue buses and four storied tenements, she felt she was galloping through the romance countryside peopled with generous inn keepers, glorious marquees and shimmering castles.
The car drew up outside the building in which Lunette was to be living. It was a vast tower, with more than a hundred windows glinting in the late afternoon sunlight and gradually filling up with excited new students. They would throw their suitcases onto the new, single beds, say tearful goodbyes to parents and then weave their way up and down the corridors, attempting to find a friend to cling to, if only for the night. Lunette gasped, for what she saw was a tower, twice as tall as in reality with a solitary, tiny window, barely perceptible at the top. Tears began to drip silently down her pale cheeks, as her parents led the way up the narrow stair-case in the tower, dragging her life packed in a suitcase after them. Lunette followed as though she was walking to her death. So, she was to be imprisoned in this lonely place, away from those she loved and kept from rescue.
When they reached her room, Lunette turned to her mum and dad, the pride their eyes poured on her she misconstrued and it was transformed into the loathing of a mortal enemy. She felt that a hundred thousand tiny daggers emanated from these glares and pierced her young flesh and cut the ties she had with her parents and her former life. She felt abandoned and alone and as she imagined them journeying back across that bridge and away into a life, free of her, leaving her in this prison, she whispered her farewells and tenderly hugged each of her parents. Her father’s huge hands shook, stroked his daughter’s magnificent hair and said goodbye He felt as though a life had ended and this would be the final time he would hold his daughter as he had known her for eighteen years. The next time his eyes would rest on her, she would be changed; for the better, he made his silent wish. He knew university would alter her and while they were apart she would shed skin and her soul would die a little every day and everyday it would be replaced by something new, something that had never before been her but that would be the foundations of her as an adult. He rested his bristly chin on the top of her head and she felt a tear fall from his tired eyes and soak through her hair. She buried her head into his chest for a moment, remembering the smell and then loosened her grip and turned to her mother.
“Well, my darling” she said, “here we are. The room’s okay, isn’t it? Wardrobe’s lovely and big and I’m sure once you’ve got all your pictures up…” She couldn’t continue because her voice crumbled into a sob and she buried her head into her daughter’s shoulder. Lunette cradled her mother’s head and stroked her fading blonde hair as the mother mourned the closing of another romance story. It was the first day of school all over again, but much, much worse.
“It’s okay, mum” Lunette soothed her, “I have to do this. I know you’re not to blame.” Her mother didn’t quite understand these words but she was drowning in sorrow and her head was filled with a whirring melancholy.
“I love you, my darling”, wept the mother.
And the father joked “women; it’s all lies, tears and spinning. At least we’ve only got tears today. I hope!” Lunette laughed and loved that her father knew that tale. Her mother drew back from Lunette’s shoulder, leaving black smudges and tears on her daughter’s white cardigan. She looked at her husband and thanked him, in silence, for his humour. Her watery blue eyes laughed as she rummaged in her brown, leather handbag for a tissue.
“We’d better be going, my darling. Will you be okay?” asked the mother.
“I’ll be fine, mum. I can endure so long as you and dad are safe.”
“You’re a funny girl, my little Luny, a funny, clever girl. You take care and remember we love you, we love you so much,” said her father, taking her mother’s hand.
Lunette followed them to the doorway of her lonely cell and kissed them both, one more time and waved at them until they were no longer in sight. She rushed to her narrow window but for her, the tower was buried so far in the clouds of this cruel city, that she could not see them as they fled, back towards the bridge. She felt she should bring everything to an end, there and then; locked in this tower, away from the life she wished for, isolated in her reverie. She did not hear. She did not see. She did not know. The other students in the decrepit halls of residence had failed to puncture her existence as yet and she lay on the bed in her room and wept and tore at her hair and debated with herself. She longed to fly from the window, through that shroud of cloud and be dashed upon the cold ground.
In the car, on the way home, the mother said to the father, “she’ll be okay, won’t she? She will?”
He replied, “yes, my dear. She’s a sensible, clever girl and this will be good for her.”
“But she’ll change won’t she? That’s what university does, doesn’t it? She’ll be away from us and we’ll never know her as she is ever again, will we?”
He replied again, quieter this time and trying to quell a fear, “yes, my dear. Yes.” And he pulled over to the side of the road in the large silver hire car. Large because he’d had to move his daughter to the other end of the country. Empty now because she was gone. He felt rather ostentatious. He felt he wanted to explain. He couldn’t so he undid his seat belt and held his arms open to hug his wife and as he did this, he embraced their new life together, barren as he squinted into the future.
What felt like weeks passed in the tower in the clouds and Lunette soon found that her jailers, their identities carefully concealed, allowed her to leave the tower to begin a new life at this university. She attended classes and lectures and societies. Careful to remember that the people of this kingdom were under some kind of enchantment. She soon realised that it was she alone that could see the knights on horse back and the many beautiful daughters of the many innkeepers of this land. She made her way around, on foot, and sometimes she would hurry to the banks of the river and gaze at the bridge. The blade caught the light and the white shard cut harshly through the landscape of small villages on the other side of the river. She would imagine the lives of all the inhabitants of the miniature town. She felt small, insignificant and safer somehow. When she imagined the story that was being written and then looked out from the pages of her romance across the silvery river she felt the focus shift. That writer, whoever he was, stopped for a moment and looked with her. She became the author instead. She remembered the wooden village on the hearth in her father’s study; the red roofed houses and the bright green trees. It was during one of these visits to the river that she met a man. He was a stranger.
“Hello there,” he said from her side. He had leant on the wall at the river next to her. She hadn’t noticed and jumped at the sound of his voice.
“Hello? Do I know you, good sir?” she answered.
“Well, no, but I noticed you the other day and well, you have got the most beautiful hair and eyes and mouth and well, you’re just beautiful erm… fair maiden.” She noticed that he reddened slightly as he was talking to her.
“I thank you for your kindness. By what name may I call you?”
He found her bloody strange, kooky but he thought best to play along, they like that. “Why, I cannot tell you that, my beauty. You may call me…” he glanced around for inspiration and his eye alighted on the road bridge, “The Knight of the Bridge and I come from afar, the
“No doubt you are on a long and difficult quest to win the heart of a lady,” replied Lunette, smiling at him with the sadness in her eyes.
“No, my lady. My quest has only just begun. I am in pursuit of your heart for surely, you are the fairest lady in all the world. I am here to tell you… well… d’ya wanna go for a drink?” the pretence wore as thin as his sincerity.
Lunette was shocked by this sudden transformation in his language but remembered the enchantment that spread itself on this land. “Fair knight, I would gladly accompany you for this ‘drink’ and maybe we could take some food as well. The keepers of my tower prison allow me to be free during the day but as darkness falls and fair Luna descends, I must be back and enclosed between those sorrowful walls.”
He smiled. And offered her his arm. And as she took it his smile changed imperceptibly into a cruel sneer. She was fucking weird but the fittest girl at uni. He just wanted a go on her. They made their way towards the university campus. For Lunette, mother moonlight would come too late.
In the pub, Lunette was presented with a glass of a radiant green liquid. It seemed to her that a thousand glow worms had been captured and placed in this glass. The Knight of the Bridge supped from a large glass of amber liquid and as he drank more, it seemed that the enchantment of the land gripped him harder around the neck and altered his manner and speech. He seemed to slur and burble.
“What, pray, is this elixir, my knight?” Lunette asked of the first drink he brought her.
“Just drink it,” he mumbled. “It’ll do you good, love.” And then he remembered the game, “it’s a mixture of the finest magic of the Magician Rohypnol and the enchanted water from the well of sacrificial dreams.”
“Well, thank you Sir Knight of the Bridge. I will do as you say, for I know you mean me no harm,” replied the naïve girl.
“You’ll do more than I say later,” he thought. He smiled at the girl sitting next to him in the dimly lit pub. She had her long blonde hair over one shoulder and as she drank the drugged Absinthe down, the finger tips of her left hand gently grazed her neck, just above her white breasts. He stared while she did this and imagined later. Those breasts, bare, naked; his mouth on them and his hands and his cock. All over her and inside her. That long yellow hair spread on his bed and her head lolling to the side. Her eyes half closed and her mouth half open. She would be his. All his. That tight, virgin pussy. He loved the first year girls. But she was special. Well, in a way; he might do her twice.
Every limb felt like it had been twisted and pulled, every sinew snapped and every inch of skin felt somehow different, dirtier, touched. Her back was wet and her long hair had turned filthy blonde and twisted into great clumps with the violating sweat. She felt grey, inside and out. She was lying beneath a stained blue cover, it smelt of unwashed bodies and something she couldn’t distinguish. She ran her shaking hand over her body, underneath this blanket of sin. She felt the same; the dip where her collar bones were visible beneath the tainted skin of her neck, the swell of her breasts and the small curve of her stomach. As she forced her hand down and beyond the stomach, she felt a wetness at the top of her thighs and between her thighs. Her fingers slipped in this new sensation. She brought her fingers out from beneath the covers. Some blood and a strange smell. The world started to spin a little slower and it began to jerk and she felt every surge of the world in her head. They became more violent and as she tried to raise her head from the pillow, the surging world gushed from her mouth and nose.
In her room, in the tower, she tried to reason away what had happened to her. She could not. The world of knights and castles and her prison in the clouds drifted into a dream, away from this dream of life and all the world flew screaming into a nightmare. She knew. She knew what had happened. She knew what to do.
She crawled along the razor edge of the
This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Short stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.