alexdraven: (General writing)
( Jul. 15th, 2005 12:13 pm)
20 minutes and 10 words to work into something - an exercise from [livejournal.com profile] thesquaretable

ethereal, swishy, zealous, taboo, mountain, give, hate, incensed, helium, fumble - with a focus on sound.

*****

She’s always been this way, ever since you moved to Grey Mountain – hippy dippy, weird, fascinating, and running late. She’s not so off the wall that anyone will say they hate her, exactly, but there’s a certain taboo against visiting with her, talking to her, inviting her into your life, enforced by the zealous gossips that you think are endemic to all small towns. As far as you’re concerned that just added to her appeal.

Which is how come you’re sat here now, fumbling with a sketchpad so you’ll look like you belong here in her unfenced yard, where the trees are dressed with ethereal silk scarves and glass beads, and the wind chimes catch every breeze. Every time you come here you think that maybe you can see what she means, that nature does give peace and beauty, creating music out of soft chimes, swishy branches, the distant dance of water over rocks. The revelation never lasts more than a few hours back out in the real world though, but it’s a nice illusion when you can capture it.

Of course, this is her real world, and that’s something you’ve grown to love about her. Her world has peace and beauty and art and freedom and sensuality; ripe home grown berries and dancing in the rain. Yours has school and homework,and a Saturday job giving out helium balloons to grabby toddlers to go with their burgers and their fries. Yours is, and will forever be, dominated by incensed parents who still haven’t forgiven you for forcing them to move districts to escape the gossip and likely never will.

****

Not sure that I worked the sound element in there as much as I wanted - I had such a clear mental scene of the garden, with the chimes and all - although the power of gossip is also in sound, so mebe. Also not qute sure why those words had to be female, but thy sort of did.
My entry to Torquere's May DIY contest, which didn't win for the very good reason that it's not that great - kinda experimenting a little really, and I can't decide if I like it or not. In any case, posted for completionism and rare [for me] femslash.

Comments of any kind, crit included, as always, appreciated. It's a one shot so I'm not too invested in the characters if you should want to take a fine tooth set of claws to it ;)

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

Tuesdays and Saturdays were her time, once Kiesha and Michael were asleep in their beds, and twice a week Lisa tuned the radio in to the hissing between two stations and let her thoughts off the leash. Twice a week she pampered and pleasured herself, took care of herself the way no one else was going to.

Read more... )
alexdraven: Ace of Cups from the Vertigo Tarot (AceofCups)
( Sep. 12th, 2003 11:23 am)
She cried in the night. The treasonous criminal, convicted and condemned for plotting against their Queen and threatening her very life, cried soft hopeless tears when the lamp in her cell was extinguished. The sound of it tugged at Pel’s heartstrings.

The girl was hardly more than a child, perhaps fourteen summers old at the most, thin and gawky like a colt still. Pel told herself firmly as she walked the short distance between cell and chamber that no amount of wide green eyes and freckled cheekbones could testify innocence. It was right that the girl should weep after her betrayal.

As the slow hours of the night turned though, it became harder to hold the prisoner’s guilt up as a ward against the memories. Memories of her first summer’s love, of tumbling skin on skin in the swimming pools with a girl who looked so much like Pel’s traitor charge. Carlean, her name was, all long limbs and slight elegant curves, tangled blond hair and talented hands that had made Pel squirm and beg.

Carlean had never been one for tears. No, she was all laughter and life, moans and gasps and screaming that brought her sisters out in the thunder to see that their youngest sibling wasn’t murdered but instead was lying in the hayloft, face buried in Pel’s shoulder, body quaking with laughter for the blushes and the fuss.

No tears. Not when her mother took a strap to her for the fright, not when Pel kissed those red marks in teenage benediction, not when Pel and her family packed up and moved along the trader’s road in the cool dawn of the next morning.

And yet she cried, and Pel’s heart softened.

It was for her own rest, Pel told herself, that she fixed a short candle stub to glow and gutter by the bars of the cell door, she told herself. For her own comfort that she did the same the next night and the next, through the slow rotation of the seven-day span laid down by the laws between condemnation and death.

It was for her own rest, she told herself, on the final night when not even the butter soft light could keep the hitching panic from her prisoner’s breath; for her own comfort that she turned the heavy key in the lock, set the door ajar and entered. For her own comfort she took the thin body in her arms, and purely for her own selfish desires that she kissed those chapped lips, and smoothed her hands over the tangled hair and smudged skin.

In the thin dawn light, it was for her queen that Pel mixed and measured the poisoned juices, and for her unhappy conscience that she sweetened it with honey. But it was for her heart’s sorrow that she mixed a second dose.

Under the chill gaze of the queen and the three white robed judges, it was for her duty that she held the clear glass to the traitor’s mouth, and for her dignity that she let the breath leave that young body with not a word to comfort it’s passing.

But it was for her own memories and for love that Pel took her dose, unsweetened bitter gall, and lit the last quarter inch of candle in her rooms.

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

Originally posted 15th August 2003
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