fulselden

So, a couple of weeks ago I wrote a post which was essentially a review of an excellent comic book but which ended with a flaily plea for there to be less about Orpheus already in mainstream fiction - that is to say, less framing of the creative experience as a whole as explicitly omg ORPHIC. Not that there's anything wrong with that (though, it's worth noting, Orpheus in some versions has some problems with ladies, post Eurydice). But it is explicitly a male narrative. Very explicitly! And whileas underworld descents have become a bit of a male speciality in, y'know, Western culture post Innana, it's Persephone who gets the permanent upstairs-downstairs gig in Greek mythology, not Orpheus. She may not have a lyre or the power of ART, but it's nice to think she may have learned something along the way.

Which is a very long winded way of saying that a couple of days ago

lettered wrote a fantastic Eurydice and Persephone piece: Love Like Other Things. And in the comments,

stultiloquentia linked to an excellent (and food-porn-ish) Labyrinth (!) fic which is also a take on Persephone: Dare to Bake a Peach. And then there was a prompt, courtesy of

laeria, at the very awesome Bechdel Test Comment Fic-a-thon (still going strong!) over on LJ for 'Eurydice, Persephone or Eurydice/Persephone - whiplash girlchild in the dark', which combined Eurydice and Persephone with my favourite pop song based on surprisingly boring Austrian porn!

So I wrote two ficlets, both rated R (Velvet Underground, dude).

I Could Sleep For A Thousand Years

Cora nipped the tip off a spoonful of jello, grimaced. It was overset, like clear red leather, like elastic webbing. Powdery strawberry. She slid it back down the rim of the dessert glass, tapped it back into place. Slid the glass back into the refrigerator, where thirty other glasses waited, each holding in their red insides a square of tinned sponge cake or a small green cherry, brown and suspended like the yolk of an egg. She closed the door, a primrose yellow clamshell over cold dark.

The girl was behind her and her nails were on the refrigerator door, red. Tapping.

“You promised,” she said. Her voice was breathy and sweet as new violets.

When they had first come down here, Cora had laughed at the crates full of nothing but little packets, summer days, berry delight, tropical sunshine. Pineapple. She had told her husband she hoped he would not loose his taste for the stuff.

But, he said, it prepared them for life in the shelter. Under the mountain, in the wet of each other’s breath, fogging the zinc. Pink grit for the immune system, above them dust and bright rotten winter. A half life, a sell by date, the smell of tinned tomatoes, the chalky sharp green glow. Dials, clicking.

An order, an instrument, all of them correct, in time.

The girl had come first. She had submitted to decontamination, her body rotating in the spray, white foam over pressed pink lips. They had watched her through the tinted glass. She had not cared to tell them much, about the surface. But she was very beautiful and her hair was dyed like white sugar. It has grown out, down here.

Cora had found a uniform to fit her. It was not difficult; he had planned for so many more people.

She found some coral lipstick and gave the girl a French manicure. Little white tips to her nails, tippity tap. She fed her orange jello and taught her to alternate the soup varieties, watched her skin soften.

My dear, she said, a daughter to me. She closed up the girl’s girdle every morning, hook and eye elastic and slap, snap, finished. Done. Her flesh was round and white, even when she first arrived. A dimple, a dint. If you find a dented tin, dear, give it to my husband.

The boy came next and was very polite. He held his hands over his face in the shower chamber, like a little child. He told them it was safe, up there. He said he had come for the girl. They both passed all the possible tests. Her husband looked at the girl’s monthlies. Like clockwork. It was for the future. And in any case, her husband had explained long ago about his useful ingredients. You had to keep eating them, you see. Or he didn’t know what.

The girl looked at her like an sly Pekinese, face flat and crumpled, eyes dense and black. She licked her lips. She looked at the boy.

Cora had a talk, in private, with her husband. He was always an easy man to alarm; the government used to send little grey men in suits round after him, talking in slow voices.

They left together. But the girl looked back.

She stepped out of the airlock, backwards, as it folded in, a great wheeze of metal and rubber. Hydraulics.

She laid her hands on the glass of the observation platform and smiled. She smiled at Cora, and she tapped her finger on the glass. She was wearing her uniform, boots and skirt and lapels like a majorette. The boy had been carrying her pack.

It was harder to persuade her husband, this time. The girl was drenched with disinfectant, her skin blotched and peeling over her shoulders, on the nubs of her spine. Down into her perfect little bottom, like a bathing suit model, the old magazines, eleven of them in the rack, every word held perfectly by heart. Every bright squared-off picture. Indecent women.

The girl reached around, rested the back of her hand on Cora’s belly.

“That’s what I’m here for,” she said. “My boy lost his nerve and came to get me, but I know what needs to be got. It’s for the future,” she said.

She said the packets were never opened in the first place. What could he have done to them? Oh Cora, she said, like a mother to me, strap me up.

Her panties were wet against Cora’s thigh.

Cora made thirty glasses full of red jello and left them in the primrose yellow refrigerator. She borrowed back her red lipstick. The girdle, the webbing, elastic. A firearm, precaution. She held up the dry packets, the injection hole in each lower left corner. The government had thought very highly of her husband. She closed her lips over her teeth.

“You promised,” said the girl again, boots and skirt and buckles. She grinned across at Cora, shouldered her pack. “It isn’t so bad up there, darling. Everything is growing strange and new, things shine at night. The sun comes down like there’s milk in the air.”

She bowed her head, eyes rising. Her hair lifted a little, white at the tips.

“It’s different,” she told Cora. “But we’re not so bad.”

She took Cora’s hand, put it between her legs. Powdered strawberries, wet. Green cherries. Violets.

“We do a lot of things.”

Her hair was white as snow.

There was a sound, although Cora knew it could not be her husband. She smelled her fingers. Took a breath.

“Yes,” she said, “I promised.”

They walked together up the bright sucking corridors.

---

Warnings: racism, tangled power dynamics. Massive overuse of adjectival lushness. Very LITERARY sexing.

A Thousand Dreams That Would Awake Me

Eurydice puts her lips to the nozzle of the silver air mattress and blows, air whipping out past her teeth when she pauses to take a breath. It plumps out in front of her, fat curved ribs, tropical sunlight in thin smooth lines. Blue, from the sky, her face, a curve of tanned forehead, a fluff of blonde hair, crackled with chlorine and bleach. Beyond the mattress, she sees Mrs C’s red heels.

“Please, Eurydice,” she says. “I do think that sort of thing qualifies as a job for the boys.”

She is holding a foggy glass of gin and tonic, her usual poison. The wide straw brim of her sunhat dimples her face with shade, but through her sarong you can see the neat landing strip of black hair, even the creases of darker tan where the skin has folded again and again, that in a few years will be tight muddy wrinkles. The tips of her breasts are covered with wide nubbly aureoles the colour of sticking plaster, the size of a baby’s palm.

Eurydice looks up at two of herself, held on Mrs C’s sunglasses like a spider on water. A meniscus, they had done in it science, in laboratory 7B. Where sun came through the windows between nine and eleven on Wednesdays and Fridays and burnt at the back of your neck. She lets a last hiss of air leave the nozzle, tamps down the little plastic bung.

“All done,” she says, looking up, stretching her smile. She flips the mattress out into the pool, watches it bob and yaw in the sparkle, out into the centre. There are two other palm-frond umbrellas on the other side, white plastic tables, recliners . A glass full of thick-looking pink stuff, its sharp black shadow see-through at the stem. The white slab of the complex behind it, windows spilling rusty dribbles down the concrete.

Mr C said that he had built it and they would come, although the marina had silted up long before Eurydice had arrived, when she was back in Croydon and her name was Mary Jane. Mr C maintains a skeleton staff, and his pay is almost lavish for the work.

When Mary Jane's grammar-school-boy had come for her six months gone, face freckled, mouth full of South London, he had been the first man she had seen for almost a year who did not wear a cream lounge suit or a white uniform with cuffs worn to a shine. Brass buttons. Mr C’s tastes are particular, he likes his rum white but not his boys, he says, he taps his cigarette box, lines them up level. Mr C believes jeans are uncouth, he holds their passports in the safe behind the liquor cabinet.

He takes out Mrs C’s, now and again. Her trips across the border are quite regular, and for them she wears Guerlain and pearls, flat-heeled black pumps.

He had come wearing tight jeans and new leather, creaking in the heat. He had a new passport with an old photo, Mary Jane in a sweater, hair heavy with henna. Hell to get out. A month or so before Goa, the little Greek islands. The white plastic beach chairs, the sparkle the spackle, the start and the slop of the long gritty mornings. She had lost some people a lot of money, along the way, she had caught the eye of Mrs C in the resort round the peninsula. There wasn’t more to it, not really.

Concrete and chapsticks and Croydon, he offered her, a new passport, an old photo, Chanel-not-quite-number-five from the shop round the corner, Mr Patel and a rack full of bottles, a stack full of wigs like the pelts of lost women.

She had knelt before Mrs C and made a suggestion, a pay-off. A tight block of white stuff, crunchy under plastic, as the driven pure, but dirty, inconvenient.

She had lost some people a lot of money; she thought she could stand to lose a little more of something else.

She had packed her bags and let him let a boy pack his.

He had been picked up at the little airport, a smell of cooking over the warm marble flooring, men in green uniform at each shoulder, cracked leather holsters.

She had gone to the ladies and looked though her things. She could never decide if she had been happy or sad to find only clothes, makeup, a book for the plane.

She had taken a taxi back, along the shoreline, the new empty road with new cracks in its seawall, pelicans out on the little green islands, across the grey sea.

Now she is a Coppertone girl and her hair smells of coconut, of Mrs C and Opium from the bottle like a hip-flask, its tassel dredged between Eurydice’s legs, thick wet strands on her clit, Mrs C smiling down at her with dry coral lips in the air conditioning, just hold that smile.

Nudging the tassel aside with the toe of her boot, the leather cutting into the back of her thigh and the globe lamp above them spackled with flies at the bottom, the sharp rim of the sole, the quick buck of the boot-toe.

Eurydice and the patent leather, the bed, the perfume, the bottle. The thin squirt of Opium across Mrs C’s breasts, a wet greasy line like the crack of a spice chest.

The sparkle, the spackle, the slop.

Every evening she must serve them dinner, prawn cocktail and pineapple rings, honey-roast drumsticks. Down in the basement, the concrete rippled with sandy mud, there is a walk-in freezer. When you go in, smell falls off you like snow off a branch, small and tinny against the cold and yellow tang of frozen meat.

“Mrs C,” she says, brushing her knees off by the pool, standing up in her white bikini, her skin slick as magazine paper, “did you come here from London?”

It is not the kind of question she has asked before. You wouldn’t want to hear anything you couldn’t take away with you.

Mrs C sips her gin like cough syrup and smiles. She lies back on the recliner, her hat levered off up her head by the back of the chair. She tugs it off, lets it drop.

“I grew up in Hong Kong,” she says, letting the words toll against each other.

The shadow from the umbrella, tangled and hairy with palm fronds, lies out over her body. She fiddles with the knot of her sarong, one-handed. Silver nails, black hair, her glasses hold the sun in each left corner. Her mouth is broad and the lipstick is pale against her tan. Rose garden, a mint green tube to the right of her mirror.

“We went every Friday night to the Nautical Club,” she says, “and had roast beef with absolutely all the trimmings. But they sold noodles in the street, from stalls. There used to be little shrines in the stairwells, too, by people’s doors. Oranges and incense, very spiritual.”

She arches her back against the chair and is silent. Eurydice kneels.

“I grew up in Istanbul,” she says, slowly. She thinks of the liquor cabinet, rows of cut glass bottles against the safe, its ticking combination lock. “In the morning all the towers showed up out of the river mist and you could hear the call to prayer. There were fishing boats on the Bosphorus. It’s where I got spoiled for good coffee,” she says.

She laughs, lets Mrs C’s hand come to the back of her neck, right up under her hair.

Once they had come out in the morning to find a long slack green snake, thick as an arm, lying on the bottom of the pool. It should have been able to swim. None of the servants would touch it, so Mr C had dived down to get it, his broad back streaked with wet rows of hair, his dick loose and dripping, a leggy snarl of drowned spider peeling off his thigh. It was the only time she had ever seen him wet. He had hefted the snake in his arms, shiny and loose, a sharp crease in the middle. Untouched. Mr and Mrs C had bent over it, their heads together, sniffing. But Mrs C had shaken her head and the snake had gone on the garbage heap down by the outbuildings.

Now Eurydice bends, her cheek against Mrs C’s thigh, her tongue stretched right out, just the tip touching, the rest going dry and tight in the open air.

The mattress is still in the blue pool, on the meniscus. Reflecting bright sky, minarets, sticks of burning incense.

Across the pool, walking out slow across the concrete, a servant comes to pick up the glass, straighten the recliners. He wipes the tables with a blue cloth, his face steady. He smiles a little, stuffs the rag into a white pocket.

He does not turn his head to watch the women.

---

And I also realise I wrote a ficlet a while back that was an explicit take on the Orpheus myth, though at the time I marked it as orginal fic because apparently my brain files 'Greek myth' as 'public property'.

Written for the

31_days prompt ‘Human jackals for every human disaster'
Rating/Warnings: PG. 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, thank heaven for small mercies.

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.

Evangeline looks back at what follows her and knows that she has not regained anything at all.

---

But anyway, the take-home point here is that fandom is sometimes very shiny! Also, that Bechdel ficathon is great, go check it out.