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fulseldenFive original ficlets, all written for prompts at ![[info]](https://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
31_days
All either G or PG, though see individual warnings.
1
Theme: 'In any case, try many things'
Rating/Warnings: PG: mention of violence. Random era-mashing.
GREEN GLASS BEAD
The girl followed her lover up the hillside, walking behind him up the narrow goat-path, across root-tight earth made crumbly by summer. Around them close mats of heather stretched out across the sway of the land. Ravens flew above them, one at each end of the sky.
We’ll show you what we’ve got.
And people came along the hills, with strange things or dried fish or quick blood and silence. They traded for things along the way, sometimes, food or safe burial for one of their party, a bed for a birth. When her grandmother had been a girl, she had known old women who remembered when men from far away had been instructed by the gods and by great men, and had come for the bones of the land, the strong blue stone. They had come and gone, and now the markers for the quarry, tall lines drawn up against the blue sky, were worn white as beach-wood, their carvings smudged down by the rain. They still stood, though; dead men and deep places still needed the stone. She lay back, rested the bead in the hollow of her throat. Just under it her skin glowed green.
Now the girl and her lover looked out and down across the land, sharp in the sea air, the near reaches a little worn with heat, wavering up over the hills. At their feet the ground hollowed down into bog, pocks of brassy clear water, little slumping tussocks and spiky reeds. Over the far slope of the hill, tatters of yellow and ochre streamed against the sky, grave-markers rising in a flaggy forest from the humped back of a great grave, the wind carrying the tinny clang of clappers from the ghost-nets which hung before the entrance. Men came from far around to lay their bones here.
She moved to sit, rock warm and rough under her, scaly with small rings of yellow lichen, rich green ferns deep in a crevice at her back. The heather around them rang with bees.
Her lover sat beside her, his arms around his knees. He had gone with the men on their last encounter, a bloody one. This time he was here with her. They had found a trading party with too much to take and too few guards, had made, the old men joked, a bone fire.
They had returned with strings of dried meat and fine, fine axes, pig-iron and bone spindles, smooth squares of hide scratched with neat rows of writing from one side to the other with no kind of break, clever curved shapes and one big one at the start. A box of stiff honeycomb, a box packed with goose-grease. A parcel of cloth in new patterns.
A broken arm and a wide curving wound over her cousin’s ribs, flesh and fat and bone rising with yellow pus in the week afterwards, a short sharp fever at the death when red snaked across his skin from the wound.
A good raid, all in all, to be remembered. She had yelled herself hoarse with the other women over the grave, but her lover had stood and bit his lip until his teeth were rimmed with red.
"I want to show you something," he said now, half turning back to her, dusty fair hair and the duck of a wind-red cheekbone.
"Oh, my heart?" she said.
She would never be a wife. The women said she was made wrong for childbearing, her blood had never come. In fiercer times she would have been made a boy, or left for the gods.
"Come here," he said.
In the raid he had killed two men.
"Here," he said, and he kissed her. Their teeth bumped together and she felt something new and hard on her tongue. She felt his mouth pulling up into a smile, pulled back to see him looking like a boy who’d found a honeycomb. He mimed spitting.
It was a rough-smooth ball, a stone. But when she spat it into her palm it shone bright green.
"I took it from the second man," he said. "It was in with a lot of other beads, but they were only bone."
She grinned back and pulled him in again, bead in her fist at the nape of his neck. They were strung together, he thought, on the long run of the hills, high over the graves and the green valleys.
Later she held the bead in her fingers, warm and a little wet. She held it up to the sky, against the sun. It turned small and black against the blaze, her eyes holding a ring of fire even when she looked away. But she thought of the sun shining through the green not as it did through the busy membrane of a leaf, but clear and still and even, casting a strange light on things.
----
2
Theme: 'I'm the Emperor of Sorrows'
Rating/Warnings: G.
THE EMPEROR OF SORROWS
The emperor of sorrows comes slow across the night
With iron hands and a maidenly umbrella
Sharp as green-sickness.
He scents out boarding houses
B&Bs
Dyed rosebuds in thick heritage porcelain.
He gathers up green grass that turns black under streetlights
And the orange stain on old ice-lolly sticks.
He offers a precise understanding
Of legatees and VAT.
In the morning he is gone
Leaving a soft mint on the pillow.
----
3
Theme: 'A gentleman can have it all'
Rating/Warnings: G.
BURIED WATER
Thomas Prender drove his silver Audi A6 down the curve of the valley with the seat-heating turned up high against the early autumn chill. A flurry of browning beech leaves caught and lifted in the air ahead of him, the trees above and below him still mostly green, shot through with the low evening light. The church spire rose up from the village roofs, the light catching the weathercock as it had done when he was a boy coming home from school. Six o’clock. Mrs Weston, tweed skirt and gumboots, waited with her collie Tuppence by the side of the road as he drove past; he raised a hand. In the rear view mirror, she stepped down from the verge and moved off, vanishing above the paper pine tree that bobbed above the dashboard and filled the car with the smell of fairytale forests.
Thomas shifted gears, swung the car one-handed round across the low stone bridge over the mill race, past the first of the houses, their yellow sandstone rough and grainy in the evening light as home-made fudge. He had come this way with Miriam in a Porsche 944s in Guards Red, her blonde hair whipping round her face in the breeze from the window, her hand over his on the gearstick. That first time, he hadn’t even known her last name. They had driven back this way, twenty-five years gone, in a hired Bentley, white wedding ribbons rippling on the bonnet, the churchyard behind them silted with pastel confetti. They had spun out and back to the village, long green country lanes with grey London offices at the end of them, late nights and early mornings spent droning down the motorway, the city-worker’s pilgrimage, again and again, until they had spun down into the valley for good, rooting themselves like a spider’s nest in the corner of a window, a tight white cocoon of eggs that stays there right through till spring.
Miriam had insisted they keep his family house, the old mill, built over the wide dark rushing stream that came down the valley in a clear brown tilt through reddish stone, taut runnels of water under tall beech trees and hanging holly bushes. At this time of year, it carried leaves like old coins, gold and misshapen in the roiling water. They washed up against the old mill wheel, down under the house, in great clotted lumps, a mass of slimy wet leaf-mulch and water-worn crisp packets, old condoms like the skins of giant larvae. It had always been his job to go down, stand on the walkway, prod at the blockages with an old curtain pole. He had got quite good at it; practice, he sometimes thought, for the world of finance, the poke, the stab, the rush. Miriam, leaning down, laughing, had told him he looked like St George with a spear.
When he was young he had left a row of mice and birds down there, hanging in the water like washing from a string. Looking at his life since, the rows of office windows and the stamp of the divorce papers, it felt like a promise and a culmination.
-----
4
Theme: ‘even my beloved people will fall like petals’
RED FLOWER GIRL
Rating/Warnings: PG. Some swearing.
It was seven days after midsummer when Sondra slammed into the morning room and hurled a pot of violet pounce powder into the air above the breakfast table. Soft purple powder silted down across the bacon and kippers, sank gently into pools of egg yolk. There was general consternation.
The general especially looked pained, dabbing a soldier of toast sadly into her purpled egg.
“Sondra,” she said, lifting up her toast and looking at it dubiously, “was this really necessary?”
“Yeah.” Sondra flung herself down in an empty chair and began tearing her way through a croissant. “The Flower Girls have got the go-ahead.”
Around the table, people were silent. Lady Ayesa stopped dabbing at her front with a napkin; the two burly lieutenant-colonels looked at each other, both holding a forkful of kipper in the air. The general put down her toast.
When it became clear that nobody was going to say anything, doctor Tsen cleared her throat.
“It may not be as bad as all that, Sondra,” she said. She drew her little finger through the powder on her plate. She looked across at Sondra, six feet and an eyepatch of fey old soldier, bright red nails click clacking their way through the dusty croissant in little jabs, her jaws working as she popped shred after shred of pastry into her mouth without swallowing.
“Breathe, Sondra,” said the doctor. “Everyone here would rather it was you, if it had to be anyone.”
The general nodded and pushed away her plate.
“You were the best of us, Sondra,” she said. “We know it, and the new brass know it too. Those Flower Girls don’t know how lucky they’ve got it.”
Lady Ayesa said nothing. Everyone knew that her daughter had volunteered to be reconstituted as a Flower Girl, a petal of the Western Forces, if she fell. She had died in the assault on Jericho, five months back; even now she would be being taken out of storage. They did not have so many people that they could afford to clear out the body banks very often, though five months was pushing it, of course. Half a year. Her daughter had been very like Ayesa herself, thin and a little horsey, with jet black hair and a gap between her front teeth. Nothing like Sondra, tall and pale and scarred and blowsy, with big red knuckles and wide flat red nails she’d had implanted in a little shop full of varnished bamboo and plastic plants when she was fifteen and not yet of special interest to the military.
She tapped those nails on the table now. They were still good, even if the skin had puffed up around the implants sometime in the last half century or so.
She swallowed.
“Fuck this for a dance in the moonlight, girls,” she said. “I’m not gonna sit around and watch them pour people into my tits n’ arse, let alone the rest of me. The doctor here knows how they got hold of my material and the rest of you can ask her if you want my bona fides. But I’m going after them and I don’t care how far I’ll get. They should let our dead rest or bring them back right.”
She took a stick of gummy lipstick out of her belt pocket, drew it across her mouth and screwed her lips together.
“Hell, I couldn’t handle me when I was twenty-five,” she said. “Ain’t no little ghost-girls gonna take the heat.”
She clicked the lipstick closed one-handed and slid it back.
“Come if you want to go down singing,” she said.
She got up and left, closing the door gently behind her.
The Lady Ayesa rose and brushed off her skirts, nodded to the others. She followed Sondra out of the door.
The rest of them looked at the table, everything matte and a little purple like a dusty stage-prop under improbable theatre lights. They were old women by the standards of the war, and they had all seen heroics before. None of them got up.
The general picked up her cold, eggy toast, sniffed at it. She made a face.
“Ugh,” she said. “Parma violets.”
----
5
Theme: ‘Human jackals for every human disaster'
Rating/Warnings: PG. Some historical racism: this is set in a version of nineteenth-century London.
THE ANUBIS BOX
Young men on half profits chase through the streets, dragging barrows loaded with pulpy oranges and creased apples behind them. Costermongers shout out the names of their goods, let loose a flur and babble out of the corner of their mouths. Leven owt yenep, leven owt yenep. Entirely incomprehensible. On doog, On doog. No good.
Evangeline lifts up her skirts and steps down from the carriage, out across a sour-smelling puddle. The chill outside air smacks some of the tiredness out of her. It is less stale than the inside of the carriage, as well.
She steps through the crowds, head held high, veil bobbing before her. Inside the tight skin of her gloves, she can feel her hands sweating. When she takes them off, she is sure the inside of her knuckles will be grained purple-black. Cheap dye. She presses on, past a knot of Orientals bending over something that squeaks and clicks in a box. Wisps of red smoke rise up; they cough, wave their hands. One hawks up a splat of phlegm onto the pavement.
The market eddies to let her through, Edward keeping steady behind her, the cabinet cradled in his arms. But people turn and stare, naturally. Cool ta the dillo nemo. She walks on, cuts under a corner of the arcade and across the square. Crumbs of coal crunch under her boots, small children darting in between the iron-bound wheels of market trolleys to snatch the biggest pieces. She marches down a side street and down an alley streaked with yellow dog shit, damp and criss-crossed with washing, greying in the morning air.
There is no need to check the address. A tall house with severe mouldings over the windows, thick blobby glass squares in the pavement letting light down to the kitchen. A black-painted door with a spotty brass knocker.
The maid turns white, bobs.
“Please, Miss Evie, come in!”
Evangeline steps inside, gestures for Edward to follow. He ducks in after her, as usual as if he thinks he is much taller than is the case and is rather sorry about it. It is one of the things he has kept; she tries not to notice it. Today, though. Today she tries not to see it as a promise.
“It is quite all right,” she tells the maid. Hannah. “I remember the way.”
She pushes past towards the stairs at the end of the hallway. Pale grey light washes down from a silted up oculus at the first landing; a pigeon moves obscurely outside the glass. Evangeline waves away the maid as she moves to take her coat, looks up the stairs. Opens the door to the basement at their foot.
She leads the way down into the dark.
Above, the maid stands in the hall, pleats her apron. She drags across the splintery bamboo umbrella stand and uses it to prop the door open. She can at least do that much. Then she goes and locks herself in the kitchen.
Little rills of dust move across the empty hallway, driven by the breeze from the cellar.
It seems a long way down. There is a gaslight at the bottom of the stairs, the pipe leading to it rimed with thick wet dust. Evangeline narrows her eyes to the light, opens the door beyond it without ceremony. The air down here is warm and damp. It smells of the grainy yellow curry the doctor enjoyed, thick with cornflour, swimming with chunks of potato and apple. Just like they have it in Bombay, he was fond of saying, licking at his lips.
“My dear!” says the doctor. He perks his head up at them from behind a table spread with little bones, pieces of tiny, ink-heavy type, italic, gothic, arranged in intricate patterns. Two blobby red candles stand in the centre.
Evangeline thinks that if he tries to hug her, she will vomit.
“I have the box,” she tells him. She waves Edward forward, takes the cabinet from his arms and rests it on an empty corner of the table, flips the lid back.
The doctor stands up and peers inside. Dips a finger down, hooks up a slick of the contents, lumpy and red and wet. Takes a lick. Nods.
“Very well,” he says. “I will honour our agreement, my dear. My wayward apprentice, hmm, Evie.”
Evie says nothing. She is silent throughout the procedure, Edward’s body pale and empty on the table, the secret marks on his palms, the soles of his feet, slowly fading out, or perhaps in.
His eyes opening again. Full. Full of something, at least.
After that she cannot speak; she does not look at the doctor. She helps Edward dress, his hands loose and trembly. He does not say a word, not yet. She leaves the doctor alone with his box, with her price. God knows she paid enough, in several ways, for it. It is a loss she has carefully quantified, if only to herself. She leads Edward up the stairs, his hand large and warm in hers.
Evangeline will regret, in the future, that she looked back as Edward came after her in through the doorway.
He moves just as he has done for the past six months. As always, his left hand comes out to meet the door frame, he ducks a little, bends his face down. One wants to imagine an expression of shame, but his face is blank.
On doog. No good. Good dog.
It is unreasonable, naturally. No-one forgets time spent as a dead thing, even if of course they don’t remember it, precisely. The doctor promised he wouldn’t. And it was an echo of the old Edward in the first place, his stoop over their threshold in St John’s Wood, his small smile, holding out a seeping bag of oysters. Eating them with lemon and slices of bread around the fire, the brass holding tiny points of red light at its corners amongst its broader gleam. His laugh, over the sound of the flames.
