Swanmaiden's Blues Part 4

Note: this was an attempt at writing a modern fantasy short story I made several attempts at in 2010 and 2011. It took forever, I revised every sentence three or four times. I gave up in resignation. It's overwritten and cheaply melodramatic.

But looking back at it now, it's not all-together terrible, so I'm going to post it as is as a spur to myself in the run-up to National Novel Writing Month. Any constructive criticism gratefully accepted.

Thanks for reading. :-)

**************************** 

The Swan plays vulture as she creeps around the ground floor, hands wrapped around a knife and a flashlight. Coyly, the sweep of the torch picks out familiar objects, trappings of power from another time: a richly ornamented samovar; a Muscovites and Mongols chess set.He'd not outgrown his boyar's trappings entirely, it seemed.

He had taught her to play with those pieces, placing the board near the bars. A little kill-or-be-killed simulacrum of civilisation. In expansive moods, he even promised her freedom, if she won. 

The Swan took a shuddering breath and steps away from the cabinet. She compels herself to walk through the house to where the feelings of longing and dread were strongest. and found herself before the cellar stairs.

Here, the Swan hesitates. 

Long ago ascending another staircase, limping her way upwards from the menagerie. A lonely white mnemosyne with a red blossom at her hip. Rags pressed to her side for the scarlet thread otherwise left behind. 

Why go back? Because that time we left half of ourselves behind.

She descends in a sudden dash like a woman going back into a burning building.

Haphazardly, the flashlight illumes sections in sequence – the alchemist's laboratory, the books of long ages past, a liberality of antiquian junk.

And in one corner, a tattered, part-plucked web of feathers and cloth.

The Swan opens her mouth soundlessly. She outstretches her arm several times but then returns it to her side.

Years, so many years, of focus and restraint unspooling in seconds.

Swanmaiden's Blues Pt 3

Note: this was an attempt at writing a modern fantasy short story I made several attempts at in 2010 and 2011. It took forever, I revised every sentence three or four times. I gave up in resignation. It's overwritten and cheaply melodramatic. I think part 3 is where I start to get confused with my tenses.

But looking back at it now, it's not all-together terrible, so I'm going to post it as is as a spur to myself in the run-up to National Novel Writing Month. Any constructive criticism gratefully accepted.

Thanks for reading. :-)

*******************

The Swan's remembered it in reluctant dreaming in so many ways, she doesn't know how she was captured any more. But she remembers him.

An occultist still shedding his nobleman's skin. A hostage-taker; menagerie-keeper;

A chicken-necked ancient lost in an expensive suit on the obituary page.

Around three, after completing her shift the Swan heads out west to where the gated communities by the river bloom like algae. She doesn't ask herself what she's doing.

The Swan smokes her way steadily through the remaining cigarettes until she reaches the townhouse belonging to the man the obituaries had called a private investor; philologist; philanthropist. The house, a three-story cream Georgian affair, behind six-foot railings, locks and cameras, reveals nothing.

The website said that he'd died unexpectedly but peacefully, but only one out of the two was remotely believable. To think the old bastard had been in London for the last six years and she hadn't even known.

Had he known about her?

“Right then,” the Swan mutters under her breath. She watches the sweep of the cameras and – just at the right moment – runs from the shadows, jumps onto the roof of the Merc  on the road outside. Muddy brown footprints on black metallic finish. The Swan jumps again, high and forward. An hollow-boned impossible arc.

Heh. Gasping from too many cigarettes and with a bloody graze on her leg from a metal thorn, but over the fence. Since the Swan's wings were taken from her, she can bend the rules only a little, but life on the run has taught her to be creative with what she's got.

Close up, the house radiates a steel-to-skin malignity. The angry courage which drove her here like a saint, has vanished. It takes three times through before the Swan's voice is steady enough to quietly sing the alarm and the wires in the walls to sleep. Her hands tremble as she pries open a back window.

Swanmaiden's Blues Pt 2

Note: this was an attempt at writing a modern fantasy short story I made several attempts at in 2010 and 2011. It took forever, I revised every sentence three or four times. I gave up in resignation. It's overwritten and cheaply melodramatic.

But looking back at it now, it's not all-together terrible, so I'm going to post it as is as a spur to myself in the run-up to National Novel Writing Month. Any constructive criticism gratefully accepted.

Thanks for reading. :-)

*************************

Lying on the grass, her head propped on her hands, the Swan watches the herons fish. She follows the fluent signs of sun and trees on the the water, listens to the glitches and hiccups of song-birds in the branches above.

The Swan learns forward to observe her shadow in the river. It flickers and shudders with the flow. Contemplating the disquiet of the water, she does not notice the other shadows appearing over the stream.

A man's voice, repeating the Swan's alias several times, calling her back to another century. A tentative hand on her shoulder. The Swan pulls away in readiness. She could drive her elbow back as hard as she can, kick in him in the knees as he hits the floor, then...

Yet the Swan takes the human option. She turns and talks.

Since the Swan has a job, ipso facto, she has a manager. This is Sig – a red-headed six foot three of Scots-Scando genes, ripped jeans and several too many Krispy Kremes. The tiny alley, with its high walls and pinhole camera view of the night, gives him no choice but to loom, but his face is kindly and his hands are open.

“Am I back on already?” she asks with a slight tremolo in her voice.

“That depends.” Worn out by shouting over the music inside, the reply is softly spoken. “Do you need more time?”

He looks at her as if trying to understand. Sig's been doing a lot of that recently, the Swan realises. She tries to decide if sympathy is the first or the last thing she needs right now.

Control. Always control.

“It's been a bad day.” she forces out at last.

“Do you want to call it a night? Make it up another time?”

“No!” The Swan responds with such force that it takes her by surprise. She takes a deep breath, and repeats for emphasis. “No. It's nothing that work can't take my mind off”

He looks sceptical, but after a long measured look says nothing but “Okay. Back in five, then?”

The Swan nods in mute agreement and he returns inside, ducking his head to fit under the doorframe as he vanishes. She watches him as he goes, aware that something – something new - is wrong.

Wherever the Swan's been, down the years, there's always someone with enough of a sense for the Other to spot that there's something not quite right about her. Even in London, where Uncanny Valley pretty much has its own tube station, stand still long enough and they will single you out.

This time it was Sig. When they first met, the Swan had written him off as someone with no more up top than an encyclopediac knowledge of thrash metal and Zone One chinese takeaways. But she found herself, against her usual policy, telling him as much as she had thought he could cope with, when he finally asked after a year and more than a couple of rounds of after-hours tequila.

“Sounds like a case of PTSD,” he'd told the Swan as they'd staggered through Soho to catch the first trains home. “A lot of boys coming back from the sandpit with crazy memories. Handle with care. Don't push their buttons. Give them time to get over it.”

“Time!” cackled the Swan through harsh peals of laughter echoing across the dawn-smeared streets of Soho. “Time ...to … get ...over it” she gasped, refusing to be drawn on exactly what was so bitterly funny.

Swanmaiden's Blues Pt 1

Note: this was an attempt at writing a modern fantasy short story I made several attempts at in 2010 and 2011. It took forever, I revised every sentence three or four times. I gave up in resignation. It's overwritten and cheaply melodramatic.

But looking back at it now, it's not all-together terrible, so I'm going to post it as is as a spur to myself in the run-up to National Novel Writing Month. Any constructive criticism gratefully accepted.

Thanks for reading. :-)

The Swan works in the Lounge, a small distressed black-box bar on Berwick Street where they play their music so glass-rattlingly loud she has to lip-read the customers' orders. That's fine with her. The Swan isn't one for small talk, and the volume and defiance of early twenty-first century rock 'n roll innoculates her against her own private pain.

Others would disappear from view, but she believes in hiding in plain sight. So the Swan fits in, like she's done before; she adds a few piercings and more black to her wardrobe; dyes her hair a deep orange-red; listens to the right music; learns the difference between true and false metal. She wears an Angel Dust or Great Annihilator T-shirt when she wants to make a private joke.

She takes a grim pride in her excellence as a bartender - she's done this job in a hundred different places – a marketable skill for the frequently mobile. Most evenings, the Swan can catch the rythym of the work, a simple 4/4 beat which takes you from punter to punter … and repeat until cigarette break and closing time. Or Judgement Day, for all she cares sometimes.

At the bar, that fools gold crucible, surrounded by warm bodies and cold noise, the Swan can reach for a place where she can forget herself.

But then there's a night like tonight, when she can't reach it. Much too much on her mind to reduce interaction to transaction. All the Swan can do is focus on getting through to the end of her shift in one piece.

Snatching a break around eleven, she escapes from the Lounge out back. The night air saps barheat, offering barearm goosebumps in exchange. Propped against the wall, the Swan sparks a cigarette and closes her eyes, though she knows what waits in the scarlet and lightning-flash memory world behind them.

Review: Anna Karenina (film)

Like the sainted Karenin himself, this is an easy film to respect but a tough one to like.

Director Joe Wright and Script writer Tom Stoppard have taken the magic realist approach to AK - most of the film takes place within an endlessly plastic, unfolding theatre. So for example, as the scenery rises and falls, Oblonsky's office of pirouetting bureaucrats gives way to a St Petersburg street scene, to a restaurant and to a formal dinner in quick succession. 

Levin's ascent above the stage into the rafters where the poor live to see his ailing revolutionary of a brother is a great touch. Best of all, the horse race scene where Anna 'falls' publically' takes place in spectacular fashion on stage while the cast watch from the audience.

It not only looks amazing, but it never lets you forget the double artificiality of both fiction and aristocratic Russian life. Levin's rural scenes - the most didactic in the book - are unsuprisingly shot much more naturalistically. An escape from artifice? 

What the film really needed to complement this was inspired casting - a central love triangle equal to the story - and encouragement to emote enough to be heard amid the tricksiness of the story. But Keira Knightly, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jude Law, while not disgracing themselves, just don't grab the film by the emotional scruff of the neck and make it live amid all this cleverness.

AK can only enhance Joe Wright's reputation as a director, but it's not a film to remember beyond that.