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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.
Another short story. This one is about childhood; not necessarily mine but some people may recognise themselves! It follows first day at playgroup, nursery and school and ends with the first time you realise childhood is not perfect, not a fairytale. It’s not about loss but about the awkward transition from innocence to experience.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, in a distant land, not so far from here there lived a girl. A girl who was not a princess but who never gave up hope that one day she may be. It was not the riches, the dubious celebrity, the contempt of Mrs. Jones, Mr. Smith, their kids, step kids, pet hamsters that she desired. It was not even the inevitably insipid looking Prince Charming that drove this dream. The thing she most wanted was to be like the beautiful, happy princesses from the animated films that had punctuated her childhood with their spinning dresses and sweeping hair and sweet songs and happily ever afters. Dancing in a field, friend of the birds, (strangely coloured, fat and charismatic birds, sometimes even clothed), singing like a nightingale (not clothed and possessing the normal levels of charisma for a bird) and utterly enchanting to look at, even though the happily ever after dress and hair hadn’t happened yet. Read the rest of this entry »
“Ignoramuses!” she exclaimed. And then added, “Or should that be ‘ignoramii’? She lay down the pen she had been using to mark the essays with. Green, never red. Red looked too threatening. Too much like school. She couldn’t help thinking that judging by the standard of the work she had just been subjected to, the red pen probably wasn’t employed enough at the schools of some of these fools. Spare the red pen, deal with the consequences. Maybe what they needed was a good dose of the red to show them the error of their ways. Or was it perhaps the errors of their beings. She preferred the latter. Sighing, she swivelled around in her scratchy, black office chair to face her computer desk. She noticed she had an email, an internal, urgent, marked red. There it was again. Why was it acceptable for someone to use red on her? She opened the email and read: Read the rest of this entry »
The fluorescent glare saturated even the most olive complexion to a dull moonlight grey. Faces became throbbing orbs of nothing. Blank and white and all the same. Tired eyes, sunken into the skull from the late nights; devoid of fun. Still late though, but only from the spinning boredom. The eyes were dead, glassy like a cold, dead fish, staring through the monotony, blinkered because nothing was great anymore. The eyes had died because somewhere, sometime, they had stopped looking, stopped searching for that great something. The life that had danced in the eyes, animating them with the longing of youth, all the desires and hopes and nightmares and fears were at rest. Long since gone to somewhere else far away. A great brick wall had been built on that old, old path between the eyes and the heart. All links severed, no way through. No way back. They were just organs now. Working in the way all the texts books say. That something else, higher than mere biology, had long since been compromised away. Left for middle age. Read the rest of this entry »