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OR NOT SO SURPRISINGLY
Quote of the day: 'Mutilation and exile had obviously not improved Justinian's temper, but he acted more prudently after his restoration than might have been expected'.
Eighth century Byzantium: SURPRISINGLY RELEVANT TO AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER.
None of the fics below the cut are, though, alas. All gen, all written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
31_days.
Title: Crinoline
Day/Theme: September 17: 'violence you can see and violence that hides’
Series: Original
Rating/Warnings: G; reference to alcoholism.
Graham Service walked to and fro across the old pine floorboards, dark and glossy with age, knotted and intricate under his feet. Coarse and grey and hung with webby clags of dust underneath: they had taken them up when they had installed the new heating.
Almost fourteen years ago, now. Claudia had been almost four and she had caught her hand on a nail when Theresa had brought her over to see the new house. He had baked little coconut macaroons in the beige seventies oven, with perky glacé cherries as the nipples, and Claudia had laughed with them, uncertainly, holding her bandaged hand under her other arm, mouth rimed with coconut flakes.
She was so beautiful, now, Claudia, living her life between the tangle of bikes at the front of the house and her room, floor tiled with plates of biscuits, girls with long hair leaning over textbooks, magazines, Theresa’s old books from the seventies, glossy sans-serif feminism now a little brittle at the spine.
Claudia had once spent a dinner cataloguing their failings over the risotto, so naive, how could parents take a child to an exhibition like that. What would happen if they talked about it at school, afterwards?
Yes, one could certainly look back on the books with fondness. Hell, you shook them and the joss fell out.
It was Alison who was the problem, upstairs Alison, Claudia called her.
He had once heard her explaining to a friend, leaning down over the banister. Alison is here to write a masterpiece about the drink, she said. How sorry she is about the alcohol. Ah, said the friend wisely. She is reclaiming her voice. I think she should just start a blog, said Claudia, she doesn’t even have a contract yet.
They had clattered off to the pub, fake ids and iphones in hand, still wearing the grubby plastic wristlets from the summer festivals, fluorescent talismans. We’re going to get drunk and talk about Plato, dad. Don’t wait up. Oh of course my dear make sure to behave disgracefully. Playing it cool for seventeen-year-olds, such indignity.
He had waited over wine, the streetlight turning the Japonica petals outside the window black as soot, until they spilled back down the road at half-past-eleven, swooping down past the tall red brick houses on their bikes, stork-legged in the streetlights.
Hi, dad, no after all that we talked about Nietzsche, it was awful. Hurrying up the stairs in a whip of black hair, fizzy with cheap lager and smoke, has she been smoking? He goes to watch her friend biking off through the window.
Yes, it is upstairs Alison who is the problem, with her seven-year-old Compaq with the keys outlined in greyish muck, her cloud of thick, crosshatched black hair, her nails painted in one layer of red varnish so that they always chip.
She even dresses as if she’s still as young as they used to be, big necklaces, wide boots, the long skirt with yellow stitching. Blowsy. When she arrived with her two black nylon holdalls and asked for sanctuary, Theresa said yes of course and so Graham did as well; such a leap of faith, she needs a place of her own. She has the spare bedroom, up the stairs to the left, where Theresa’s old harp lurks black and triangular in a corner and all the unwanted books live, a wall lined with liver-spotted encyclopaedias, dust-grained volumes of Leavis, Gibson and Gubar, Greenblatt.
They never even took up the carpet, and its ridges, he imagines, feel like horsehair. What they stuffed sofas with, puffy glossy armchairs, doublets. Or perhaps that last was sawdust, a belly full of hamster-bedding. They used it for crinolines, to stiffen the fabric. Crinis, linum. Hair-thread.
Alison is bent over her keyboard, her head haloed by the screen. It has a sepulchral glow, Claudia would have told them eight months ago, when she still wore black lipstick and kept her nails like little plugs of liquorice. You had to buy special varnish to put on top to make them matte, she had told him, unless you wanted to spend exorbitant amounts on stuff that was dull to start with. Exooorbitant, a new word.
Piles of books, double-spaced printouts surround Alison. Above her, lines of post-it notes are pinned in blobby rows on the corkboard. At the top of each line there is a card with a title in thick marker. Childhood, scholarship, uni, abt, schlshp, prs, ldn, first nvl groucho, boyfr. first year second year relapse third year. Fourth year. Recov. It was like the little line of pencil marks tracking Claudia’s height on the kitchen wall, turned sideways.
Alison raises a hand, the other one still jabbing at the keys. Give me a minute, sweetie. Of course, she thinks it is Theresa, coming up with a mug of greasy cocoa, red pen in hand, to illuminate the proofs with editorial sigils. Paragraph paragraph missed space blank spot. Giggling together like thirties schoolgirls with a pash.
Alison rattles her way to the end of a line, sighs. Tilts her head, he doesn’t even breathe like Theresa does. Have you got to the juicy stuff, yet, he asks her.
Oh, and what would that be?
Well, me of course. Naturally. Behaving disgracefully.
Alison tips herself round in her chair, gives him the kohl-lined eye. Sweetie, she says, you have no idea. Really, for years you were my benchmark, Graham. My benchmark. She jumps up (has she been smoking?) and plucks down boyfr. Sticks it to the front of his grey wool jersey. My little grammar school boy, she says into his ear.
She leans back, oh Claudia told me today she thinks medicine, of all things. But last week she was sure about anthropology, so, really. Who can say. You should really talk to her, I think she’s making herself quite unhappy.
The post-it note flutters down. He takes it out of the air. Perhaps he should put it on her chest, or, no, on the computer. On the bookshelf. But instead he folds it into a tight little square in one hand, like a sweet-wrapper.
Maybe he’ll do that, he says, talk to Claudia, that is. University is the real deal, after all. He wonders how he could be more predictable. Buy a motorbike, perhaps. A big Harley with an engine like a rock-drill. He laughs, and Alison, though a little uncertainly, laughs too, the computer glowing behind her. He folds up his hand around the square of paper, picks up a used coffee-mug, promises a refill.
As he backs himself out of the door, it feels as if he will hardly fit himself through the frame, his past sticking out stiff as horsehair around him. But he makes it anyway, heads down to the kitchen. Waits for the kettle to bubble and boil and click, snapping the water out into steam, shading it out around him like the most gracious white organdie. Ready for the big man, the big moment.
---------
Title: A Grit, a Grindstone
Day/Theme: September 16: 'you are due to be transformed’
Series: Original
Rating/Warnings: G
Aresa could never have said, afterwards, what prompted him to refuse his turn in the Mill. Very few people from his background ever got within two levels of the upper ring, after all, let alone earned enough credit to qualify for the Mill itself.
When he had been a grey-kneed boy, scrabbling for offworld trinkets dropped by hurrying travellers, taunting the customs officers from behind a delegation of solemn Tann Acolytes, mouthing strange new words to himself as he leant with elaborate ease beside the falafel stands, he had never even imagined the upper ring. Everyone knew just what it was like, after all: it was the star of every telenovela, the setting for every advert and the hook in every feed.
But then they closed the ports and the world became smaller. Selling foreign baubles for their exotic plastics or their cute-pings became a thing of the past. The lower rings got smellier. Things collected: rubbish, street-venders, cults, people. A young man could go a long way, true, but now he could no longer go out, he could only go up.
So Aresa did. A paunchy merchant with a smiling, flitting wife, two sleek-haired daughters, he leant back against his desk in the upper ring, hands cupping a bowl of miso broth, dark particulate clouds curling up and sinking in the bowl, in the traffic outside the window. He felt the presence of the Mill-token on the table behind him. He imagined being young again as he had never imagined being rich.
And he remembered how, when he had been young and poor, he had longed to hold new words in his mouth, to leave, to never see the pictures of the upper ring, its fine houses, its beautiful wives, its dutiful daughters, again. He drank his broth. Later, he let the token fall down out of the window, through the circling, soaring crowds.
-----------------
Title: The Leech Charmers
Day/Theme: September 15: 'tremble like a flower’
Series: Original (though rather Lovecraftian)
Rating/Warnings: G, some Edwardian 'oh vicar' coyness.
“Come on, sweet boy.”
The vicar cupped his cheek politely in the morning room. They blushed and broke apart as the maid came in, set down the silver tray, the pink-sprigged teapot with the uncomfortable handle, the plate of ginger biscuits.
Thomas moved to pour the tea; pulled his hand back.
“We should wait for Grandmother.”
“Of course.” The vicar sat back, tugged at his dog collar.
Outside the light came down green through the lime tree. The paving underneath was so thick with stickiness that it looked, through the French windows, as if it had rained, though with something more viscous than water.
Thomas folded his hands in his lap, cocked his head to listen for movement upstairs. There was nothing to be heard.
He smiled encouragingly across at the vicar, a sandy-haired young man who hadn’t yet grown into his hooked nose, his high cheekbones. Thomas himself had had plenty of time to grow into his own face, though he looked, his grandmother was fond of saying, not a day over eighteen.
Naturally, the vicar had to perform his ceremonial duties whatever he felt about the matter in private, but Thomas always tried to cultivate a friendly relationship with new incumbents, and this one was especially promising.
So he brushed some imaginary dirt off the pale cotton twill of his trousers and leant forward. He could see his own face now, his messy black hair and fresh cheeks in the greenish depths of the mirror, behind the vicar’s pinking right ear.
“How are the new arrivals doing?” Thomas asked. “Is that young scholar still poking around?”
The vicar settled back a little. This was a professional matter; he was on familiar ground.
“Well,” he said, “he’s been talking to some of the less reliable locals. And Mrs Penston caught him snooping around the church on Thursday afternoon. But he spends most of his time in the tea rooms, scribbling away.”
He shook his head mournfully.
“He looks worse and worse every day, I must admit. I don’t think the food can be agreeing with him.”
Thomas sighed, clasped his hands round a knee, twiddled his thumbs.
“So, perhaps a fortnight?”
“I would imagine so,” said the vicar, nodding. “Though, if I might ask, why go to such an effort?”
“Oh,” said Thomas. He flapped a slender hand. “He’s another one of those super-distant cousins, apparently. Not that he knows it yet, of course. But Grandmother’s always been so keen on keeping the family together.”
As if on cue, a soft dragging came from above them. The vicar swallowed, reached up to smooth his hair. Thomas grinned at him, leaned over to ruffle it. The vicar jerked back, pleasantly scandalised.
“Please, my dear boy!”
“Call me that often enough and you might get enough centuries under your belt for it to mean something,” said Thomas.
His grandmother came in from the hall, moved over the carpet, settled on the rose-patterned chippendale.
Thomas winked at the vicar, took up the teapot. He filled all their cups to the brim, the red vivid in the light spring air.
Eighth century Byzantium: SURPRISINGLY RELEVANT TO AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER.
None of the fics below the cut are, though, alas. All gen, all written for
31_days.Title: Crinoline
Day/Theme: September 17: 'violence you can see and violence that hides’
Series: Original
Rating/Warnings: G; reference to alcoholism.
Graham Service walked to and fro across the old pine floorboards, dark and glossy with age, knotted and intricate under his feet. Coarse and grey and hung with webby clags of dust underneath: they had taken them up when they had installed the new heating.
Almost fourteen years ago, now. Claudia had been almost four and she had caught her hand on a nail when Theresa had brought her over to see the new house. He had baked little coconut macaroons in the beige seventies oven, with perky glacé cherries as the nipples, and Claudia had laughed with them, uncertainly, holding her bandaged hand under her other arm, mouth rimed with coconut flakes.
She was so beautiful, now, Claudia, living her life between the tangle of bikes at the front of the house and her room, floor tiled with plates of biscuits, girls with long hair leaning over textbooks, magazines, Theresa’s old books from the seventies, glossy sans-serif feminism now a little brittle at the spine.
Claudia had once spent a dinner cataloguing their failings over the risotto, so naive, how could parents take a child to an exhibition like that. What would happen if they talked about it at school, afterwards?
Yes, one could certainly look back on the books with fondness. Hell, you shook them and the joss fell out.
It was Alison who was the problem, upstairs Alison, Claudia called her.
He had once heard her explaining to a friend, leaning down over the banister. Alison is here to write a masterpiece about the drink, she said. How sorry she is about the alcohol. Ah, said the friend wisely. She is reclaiming her voice. I think she should just start a blog, said Claudia, she doesn’t even have a contract yet.
They had clattered off to the pub, fake ids and iphones in hand, still wearing the grubby plastic wristlets from the summer festivals, fluorescent talismans. We’re going to get drunk and talk about Plato, dad. Don’t wait up. Oh of course my dear make sure to behave disgracefully. Playing it cool for seventeen-year-olds, such indignity.
He had waited over wine, the streetlight turning the Japonica petals outside the window black as soot, until they spilled back down the road at half-past-eleven, swooping down past the tall red brick houses on their bikes, stork-legged in the streetlights.
Hi, dad, no after all that we talked about Nietzsche, it was awful. Hurrying up the stairs in a whip of black hair, fizzy with cheap lager and smoke, has she been smoking? He goes to watch her friend biking off through the window.
Yes, it is upstairs Alison who is the problem, with her seven-year-old Compaq with the keys outlined in greyish muck, her cloud of thick, crosshatched black hair, her nails painted in one layer of red varnish so that they always chip.
She even dresses as if she’s still as young as they used to be, big necklaces, wide boots, the long skirt with yellow stitching. Blowsy. When she arrived with her two black nylon holdalls and asked for sanctuary, Theresa said yes of course and so Graham did as well; such a leap of faith, she needs a place of her own. She has the spare bedroom, up the stairs to the left, where Theresa’s old harp lurks black and triangular in a corner and all the unwanted books live, a wall lined with liver-spotted encyclopaedias, dust-grained volumes of Leavis, Gibson and Gubar, Greenblatt.
They never even took up the carpet, and its ridges, he imagines, feel like horsehair. What they stuffed sofas with, puffy glossy armchairs, doublets. Or perhaps that last was sawdust, a belly full of hamster-bedding. They used it for crinolines, to stiffen the fabric. Crinis, linum. Hair-thread.
Alison is bent over her keyboard, her head haloed by the screen. It has a sepulchral glow, Claudia would have told them eight months ago, when she still wore black lipstick and kept her nails like little plugs of liquorice. You had to buy special varnish to put on top to make them matte, she had told him, unless you wanted to spend exorbitant amounts on stuff that was dull to start with. Exooorbitant, a new word.
Piles of books, double-spaced printouts surround Alison. Above her, lines of post-it notes are pinned in blobby rows on the corkboard. At the top of each line there is a card with a title in thick marker. Childhood, scholarship, uni, abt, schlshp, prs, ldn, first nvl groucho, boyfr. first year second year relapse third year. Fourth year. Recov. It was like the little line of pencil marks tracking Claudia’s height on the kitchen wall, turned sideways.
Alison raises a hand, the other one still jabbing at the keys. Give me a minute, sweetie. Of course, she thinks it is Theresa, coming up with a mug of greasy cocoa, red pen in hand, to illuminate the proofs with editorial sigils. Paragraph paragraph missed space blank spot. Giggling together like thirties schoolgirls with a pash.
Alison rattles her way to the end of a line, sighs. Tilts her head, he doesn’t even breathe like Theresa does. Have you got to the juicy stuff, yet, he asks her.
Oh, and what would that be?
Well, me of course. Naturally. Behaving disgracefully.
Alison tips herself round in her chair, gives him the kohl-lined eye. Sweetie, she says, you have no idea. Really, for years you were my benchmark, Graham. My benchmark. She jumps up (has she been smoking?) and plucks down boyfr. Sticks it to the front of his grey wool jersey. My little grammar school boy, she says into his ear.
She leans back, oh Claudia told me today she thinks medicine, of all things. But last week she was sure about anthropology, so, really. Who can say. You should really talk to her, I think she’s making herself quite unhappy.
The post-it note flutters down. He takes it out of the air. Perhaps he should put it on her chest, or, no, on the computer. On the bookshelf. But instead he folds it into a tight little square in one hand, like a sweet-wrapper.
Maybe he’ll do that, he says, talk to Claudia, that is. University is the real deal, after all. He wonders how he could be more predictable. Buy a motorbike, perhaps. A big Harley with an engine like a rock-drill. He laughs, and Alison, though a little uncertainly, laughs too, the computer glowing behind her. He folds up his hand around the square of paper, picks up a used coffee-mug, promises a refill.
As he backs himself out of the door, it feels as if he will hardly fit himself through the frame, his past sticking out stiff as horsehair around him. But he makes it anyway, heads down to the kitchen. Waits for the kettle to bubble and boil and click, snapping the water out into steam, shading it out around him like the most gracious white organdie. Ready for the big man, the big moment.
---------
Title: A Grit, a Grindstone
Day/Theme: September 16: 'you are due to be transformed’
Series: Original
Rating/Warnings: G
Aresa could never have said, afterwards, what prompted him to refuse his turn in the Mill. Very few people from his background ever got within two levels of the upper ring, after all, let alone earned enough credit to qualify for the Mill itself.
When he had been a grey-kneed boy, scrabbling for offworld trinkets dropped by hurrying travellers, taunting the customs officers from behind a delegation of solemn Tann Acolytes, mouthing strange new words to himself as he leant with elaborate ease beside the falafel stands, he had never even imagined the upper ring. Everyone knew just what it was like, after all: it was the star of every telenovela, the setting for every advert and the hook in every feed.
But then they closed the ports and the world became smaller. Selling foreign baubles for their exotic plastics or their cute-pings became a thing of the past. The lower rings got smellier. Things collected: rubbish, street-venders, cults, people. A young man could go a long way, true, but now he could no longer go out, he could only go up.
So Aresa did. A paunchy merchant with a smiling, flitting wife, two sleek-haired daughters, he leant back against his desk in the upper ring, hands cupping a bowl of miso broth, dark particulate clouds curling up and sinking in the bowl, in the traffic outside the window. He felt the presence of the Mill-token on the table behind him. He imagined being young again as he had never imagined being rich.
And he remembered how, when he had been young and poor, he had longed to hold new words in his mouth, to leave, to never see the pictures of the upper ring, its fine houses, its beautiful wives, its dutiful daughters, again. He drank his broth. Later, he let the token fall down out of the window, through the circling, soaring crowds.
-----------------
Title: The Leech Charmers
Day/Theme: September 15: 'tremble like a flower’
Series: Original (though rather Lovecraftian)
Rating/Warnings: G, some Edwardian 'oh vicar' coyness.
“Come on, sweet boy.”
The vicar cupped his cheek politely in the morning room. They blushed and broke apart as the maid came in, set down the silver tray, the pink-sprigged teapot with the uncomfortable handle, the plate of ginger biscuits.
Thomas moved to pour the tea; pulled his hand back.
“We should wait for Grandmother.”
“Of course.” The vicar sat back, tugged at his dog collar.
Outside the light came down green through the lime tree. The paving underneath was so thick with stickiness that it looked, through the French windows, as if it had rained, though with something more viscous than water.
Thomas folded his hands in his lap, cocked his head to listen for movement upstairs. There was nothing to be heard.
He smiled encouragingly across at the vicar, a sandy-haired young man who hadn’t yet grown into his hooked nose, his high cheekbones. Thomas himself had had plenty of time to grow into his own face, though he looked, his grandmother was fond of saying, not a day over eighteen.
Naturally, the vicar had to perform his ceremonial duties whatever he felt about the matter in private, but Thomas always tried to cultivate a friendly relationship with new incumbents, and this one was especially promising.
So he brushed some imaginary dirt off the pale cotton twill of his trousers and leant forward. He could see his own face now, his messy black hair and fresh cheeks in the greenish depths of the mirror, behind the vicar’s pinking right ear.
“How are the new arrivals doing?” Thomas asked. “Is that young scholar still poking around?”
The vicar settled back a little. This was a professional matter; he was on familiar ground.
“Well,” he said, “he’s been talking to some of the less reliable locals. And Mrs Penston caught him snooping around the church on Thursday afternoon. But he spends most of his time in the tea rooms, scribbling away.”
He shook his head mournfully.
“He looks worse and worse every day, I must admit. I don’t think the food can be agreeing with him.”
Thomas sighed, clasped his hands round a knee, twiddled his thumbs.
“So, perhaps a fortnight?”
“I would imagine so,” said the vicar, nodding. “Though, if I might ask, why go to such an effort?”
“Oh,” said Thomas. He flapped a slender hand. “He’s another one of those super-distant cousins, apparently. Not that he knows it yet, of course. But Grandmother’s always been so keen on keeping the family together.”
As if on cue, a soft dragging came from above them. The vicar swallowed, reached up to smooth his hair. Thomas grinned at him, leaned over to ruffle it. The vicar jerked back, pleasantly scandalised.
“Please, my dear boy!”
“Call me that often enough and you might get enough centuries under your belt for it to mean something,” said Thomas.
His grandmother came in from the hall, moved over the carpet, settled on the rose-patterned chippendale.
Thomas winked at the vicar, took up the teapot. He filled all their cups to the brim, the red vivid in the light spring air.