Miscellany

Works in Progress

A Writing Exercise

Diamonds on the soles of her shoes.

Richard drank the last of the wine, and flung the glass against the wall, raining shards of crystal onto the carpet. He flung it with all his force - such force that the tiny pieces of glass flew backwards into the room, landing on the floor near her feet, shining like so many diamonds. She looked coolly at Richard, sipping from her own glass, silently taunting him. There was a fire of rage burning within him, twisting upwards from deep inside and flaring through his eyes as he glared at her, wanting to incinerate her where she sat. With just one look.

Hate intoxicates. And how he hated her now. His head swam with loathing, with the giddiness of disgust and abhorrence. He wanted to destroy her – to rend her apart, to throw the pieces on the fire, and to scatter the ashes to the winds. That would make him feel good. That would release his anger. To be free of his rage, he had to cause her pain. Yet he was powerless to do so. She had taken all he had from him and she was enjoying his torment as he realised she would never ever let him get it back. Her cool, cruel taunting gaze, told him he had lost and she had won. His anger said he would never forgive her.

Hate intoxicates; anger destroys. He swept the plates and the food from the table and they clattered to the floor. He picked up a steak knife and stabbed it into the table-top in total frustration. The tip was driven into the hard wood a full half-inch, and the blade snapped from its handle. Unable to stop it, or pull it away, his hand slid down the edge of the razor-sharp blade and severed an artery. Richard stared at the blood spurting from his wrist. This was real, he thought. And it was bad – very bad. He looked at her, appealing.

She got up from the table, her feet crushing the glass lying around her and sticking into the bottom of her shoes. She gently touched his shoulder as she passed, and murmured, “Goodbye, Richard.”


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An Leannan Sidhe

Birmingham: a wet day. A young woman scuttled through the wind, rain and puddles, searching through her bag as she went. She pulled a bunch of keys out of the bag just as she reached the entrance to a small block of flats. Pulling the door open, she hurriedly went in.

As she pulled off her wet coat and kicked off her shoes, she looked upstairs, into the flat, and called out, "Hello. I'm back."

She listened. At first she could hear nothing, but then she picked up the sound of music coming from Vincent's study, the furthest room from the entrance to the flat. He can't hear me in there, she thought, and with a sigh, climbed the stairs, feeling the wetness of her trousers clinging to her legs. She went into the bedroom and changed into an old skirt. The music entered her head as she did so. Orfeo. She recognised the dreary early Baroque music which Vincent had been playing constantly for days now - since he came home with a CD recording of the opera after hearing it broadcast on the radio. She shut the music out of her head, and went into the kitchen, where she was greeted by a sinkful of unwashed crockery. Left for me to do, she thought. Typical. She turned on the taps and squirted in some washing-up liquid. She surprised herself with the force she had used and realised she was letting her anger build up. And she hadn't been in for five minutes yet.

She decided she didn't want to be angry again. So she filled the kettle and started to make some tea. I'd better make him a cup too, she thought, and pulled out two mugs from the cupboard. One was chipped slightly and she knew she shouldn't be using it, so she poured her own tea into that one and Vincent's into the other. Picking up the two drinks, she carried them to Vincent's study.

Vincent's study was the spare bedroom. It contained a cheap desk and two bookcases, plus a couple of chairs. There was also a hi-fi and a collection of CD's, mostly opera, but also a selection of folk and rock music too. There were books in the bookcases including dictionaries and grammar text books. There were also an old copy of Pear's Cyclopaedia, detective stories by authors like Miles Burton, GK Chesterton, and the more modern Ian Rankin. There were also several "classics", from Homer to Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde and several mythological compendiums. On the floor were piles of manuscripts of works - some complete, others incomplete; some published, some not. This was where Vincent worked, or, as it seemed to Mel, where he had now withdrawn to live as a recluse. She rarely went inside the room for fear of disturbing something, or for fear of falling over something left lying on the floor. She hardly ever even cleaned there. She had begun to hate the room.

For taking him away.

She entered. "Hello. "Didn't you hear me come in? I called out." She looked for somewhere to put Vincent's mug down.

Vincent moved a sheet of paper that was covering a coaster. "Hello, Mel," he said, watching the passage of the mug through the air as Mel put it down. "Thanks, I need that."

Mel turned the volume of the CD player down. Vincent frowned but said nothing. "It's nasty weather out there," she said chattily. She wanted some interaction, after a day checking out people's shopping at the supermarket she worked at, she neded someone to acknowledge her as a person. Funny, she thought, I deal with hundreds of people a day, and never know anything about them. She wanted to vent steam about the offhand way people treated her, and to express horror at the things they spent their money on. She wanted to express her feelings about the men who leered at her while she totalled their basketfuls of shopping, and the hoity women who looked down their noses at shop-workers, and refused even to acknowledge a smile. She looked over at the window as if to indicate where the weather was happening.

"Uh-huh." He was typing. He was also trying to hear the music that still played on the hi-fi, and he didn't try to hide it.

She took another breath, about to say something else, realised how hopeless it would be, and said, "I'll go and make tea then" instead.

He nodded. She stood there a moment, looking at him. She saw his long dark hair and his broad shoulders. His eyes were light brown, or green, depending on the light, but they always held a soft warm gaze when he looked at her. Or at least they used to. But all he seemed to look at now was that wretched screen as he worked on his current opus magnus. He was a good few years older than she was, and his quiet maturity had been attractive to her at first. Despite the age difference, he was still good looking - not drop-dead gorgeous, but certainly attractive, especially when he smiled. When he smiled ... when was that these days, she asked herself.

His fingers tapped at the keyboard and she watched his hands moving rapidly back and forth over the keys like dancing spiders. And when did we last dance together, she wondered. She suddenly realised she was close to tears, and sharply pulled herself together.

Yet, for all her unhappiness, she knew Vincent cared for her deeply. She had read his poems and his short stories, which were almost exclusively about her in one way or another, and they told her in no uncertain terms how Vincent really felt. And in his novels, even if she wasn't the heroine of the tale, she would be in there somewhere, and even there, Vincent was paying tribute to her. She was his muse without question; but now it seemed that he had begun to love her fictitious personalities more than her real one. At least he spent more time with the fictitious Mel than the real one.

"I'll go and make tea then," she repeated.

"OK." He looked up at her this time, ready to listen. But Mel's look told him it was too late. She turned towards the door and went into the kitchen. Then into the bathroom where she locked the door and cried.


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If it had been wet in Birmingham, it was even worse in Dublin. Kieran was in his studio, working on a portrait of Rose. Rose was pictured sitting in a leather armchair, beside a table with a tall vase of flowers standing on it. The sunlight was coming in through open French windows behind her. She was wearing a deep green full-length dress and her long red hair fell over her shoulders and all the way down her back. She was looking at her reflection as she brushed her hair. She was a woman in complete control of herself and her surroundings. There was a confident and defiant challenge in her demanour which Kieran was trying hard to catch. This was an Irish Lady Lilith, now free and the full equal of her former master. This was no Rossetti imitation, but a Kieran Nugent original; and while it idealised Irish femininity, it also stood for Irish freedom and independence.

Kieran was not a political artist. But he was acutely aware of his antecedents and he wanted to develop a new, uniquely Irish, school of painting. For now, this was represented by historical themes rather than a particular style, but that was developing too: highly realistic, almost photographic in its detail, but hinting at ancient knowledge and mysteries.

Rose, his model, was also his lover. She was a beauty and he adored her: he would do anything in his power for her, and he was certainly drawn in by her charms, to watch her weaving her bright web, as the poem put it. He had fallen for her as soon as they had met, and he had asked her to move in with him within a month. She had agreed to stay with him from time to time, but she wanted to keep her own home, and would sometimes go back there for a while, leaving Kieran behind. These were the times she would go "back to the hills". Kieran reluctantly accepted this condition, and they had lived this way for about three years now. Kieran used her almost exclusively as his model. She was medium height and waspishly thin. Her complexion was pale, as is common with redheads, and her face was very slightly freckled. Her eyes were her best feature. Amazing would be a good description. They were deep violet in colour, and were large and wide, proclaiming innocence, virtue and purity.

Rose was energetic and enthusiastic about his work and loved posing for him. She had become the source of his inspiration, and the quality of his work had rapidly improved as he devoted all his skills and art trying to reproduce her beauty and charm on canvass. Kieran was quite aware that his work had only begun to improved since he had met Rose, and was perfectly willing to attribute all of his newly developed skills to a "certain something" that Rose possessed - a power to make him want to achieve perfection - a flawless artistic and technical excellence, and that was why he painted her more than anything else. More than anything else, Roae wanted Kieran's success, and she seemed to thrive as his work gained more recognition. She was particularly pleased when Kieran was invited to exhibit some of his works in a private gallery in Dublin, and accompanied him to the opening, where she attracted a certain amount of atttention to herself, as the subject of most of the paintings on display. The exhibition itself was extraordinarily successful and resulted in several lucrative sales and further exhibitions in Dublin, Belfast and other provincial towns.


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... to be continued



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My unsuccessful entries for the 99 words competition

Pirates

Call ourselves pirates? Ha!

There’s four of us – meself, Old Tom and Young Danny, and the dark musselman Bahir. None of us has been a-pirating for long, but times is hard, and “needs must where the Devil drives” as they says.

All we’ve managed to do is raid a few unarmed fishing boats – just to get something to eat. We're even worse fishermen than pirates.

But on the horizon is a abandoned Frenchie. A corvette left afire by a English man-o’-war, that plainly burnt itself out before any real harm was done.

Easy plunder. Right there for the taking.


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Twister

The three men were playing cards.

“Twist,” said Hank, taking a bite from the cruller in front of him. “Nice twister, Meg,” he called to the waitress.

Sam dealt a seven of hearts. “You must be busted, now,” he said.

Hank stared at the card, adding up the points in his hand. He looked past Sam, through the window. A tornado!

“Twister!” he yelled. Sam and Danny spun their chairs round to look at the ominous spiral of wind, while Hank switched a card in his hand for one in his sleeve.

“Nope. Twenty-one exactly,” said the old twister.

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