wip

(Feeling good and energized after WorldCon, ready to finish up a piece that’s been floating around in my head for a while. Story elements include Hawaiian shirts, a retirement community called Friendly Village, an old love affair, a smart-alecky fortune teller, rabbits, and centaurs. Here’s the current beginning.)

Old fabric holds smells better than the kinds come about in the most recent decade. The new stuff is all chemicals, rubbing the roof of your mouth like steel wool if you sniff too hard, can bite like a spell’s sting. Older silks, cottons hold household odors: cedar or cinnamon, tumeric and garlic, perfumes you can no longer find like L’Origan or Quelques Fleurs, camphorated moth balls or talcum powder. Rarely, the whiff of a person, a smell lingering long after every scrap of their DNA has vanished.

Most often just the lilac assault left by a hasty dry-clean. But the other times make it worth it.

I pulled the green XL circle aside with my thumb and kept going widdershins, into the Ls. So far the Value Village’s rack had yielded only two possibilities: an XXL black with a subtle bamboo-patterned weave, cream-colored dragons curled and coiled like sunridden clouds and an XL crimson rayon whose flame-pattern suited it to throw-away magic, a protective cloak perfect for what I was after: a trip through hostile territory with no one to watch my back.

It was a pretty day outside, the last days before summer would slant to the other side of the clock and the days begin shrinking into the grey days of fall. A day for turning up the radio and blasting “Dani California” until the sound came up through your bones.

My shirt was umbrellas, parasols really, pinwheeled against cerulean sky and white cumulus clouds. Protection, and even though it was newer and untested, I trusted it to ward off anything, magic protective gloves, more supple than lead-lined canvas but surely at least that solid.

The spell struck up from a black background, red serpents, scales lined with scallops as blue as the sky outside. Slashing bites along the outside of my left hand, locking on, tails sticking straight out as they attached themselves.

I lurched sideways.

The floor crashed up into my face, thunked against my forehead in painful collision.

Then I was gone.

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Over the years, Tikka’s job as a Minor Propagandist for the planet Porcelain’s Bureau of Tourism had come to shape her way of thinking. She dealt primarily in quintets of attractions, lists of five which were distributed through the Bureau’s publications and information dollops: Five Major China Factories Where the Population of Porcelain Can Be Seen Being Created; Five Views of Porcelain’s Clay Fields; Five Restaurants Serving Native Cuisine at Its Most Natural.

Today she was composing Five Signs of Spring in Eletak, her native city. Here along the waterfront, she added chimmerees to her list as she watched the native creatives, cross between fish and flower, surface, each chimerene spreading its white petals as it surfaced, white clusters holding golden centers, tendrils of golden thread sending their scent into the air along with the most delicate whisper of sound, barely audible over the lapping of the sound’s water.

The urge to pose beat along every energy vein of her silica body, but she resisted it. She would remain alone this spring, as she had every spring since she had made her vow and inscribed it in the notebook where she kept her personal lists, under “Life Resolutions,” #4 under “Keep myself clean in thought and mind,” “Devote myself to promoting Porcelain’s tourism,” and “Fall in love.” The third item had been crossed off at the same time, in vehement black pen strokes.

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(From the beginning of the novel I’m currently about halfway through)

It was Fish Day at Archie McPhee’s.

In another kind of store, Fish Day might have signaled a sale on salmon or fresh herring.
Here in the novelty store, against a backdrop of bins filled with rubber eyeballs and plastic beetles, it meant the appearance of the enormous Wheel of Fish.

Nicholas woke slowly. It was chilly in the room, and when he shifted his body between the clinging flannel sheets, he could encounter zones of warmth and cool. Two down comforters were draped over them as well; Nicholas could not sleep without their weight on him, while Feniker, who seemed to burn with a furnace’s metabolism, would inevitably throw most of them off during the night, onto Nicholas.

He could hear Feniker’s soft breathing, a burry almost snore, a sound so uniquely Fen that it tugged a smile onto Nicholas’s lips, knowing what his lover’s face looked like when sleep-slackened, how it must look right now. He had drawn the drapes across the windows; the hotel’s front looked out onto the plaza, but Nicholas had opted for one of the less ostentatious back chambers which he secretly thought more pleasant, overlooking the back gardens, which were the more handsome vista, even when leaf-deprived and blackened by the cold, due to the green cedars that ringed it round.

Another Tabat story is brewing, this time explaining one of the city’s architectural features: the ninety-nine statues of figures from the history of Tabat, commissioned by a Duke to be placed along Salt Road. A mystery arises – what is it about the 99th statue that sets it apart from its fellows? Here’s a snippet from the beginning:

It was one of those rainy days that make up most of Tabat’s spring, a day when the clouds hung so low that the city’s upper terraces were shrouded in fog. When Nicolas started up the foot of Salt Road, it was clear, but as he ascended, the white mist around him thickened and he found himself breathing in cold moisture that made his lungs feel as sodden as the thick wool coat he had imprudently chosen that morning, thinking it would snow and he’d want the warmth.

He shivered and glanced sideways and slightly down at his companion. Feniker marched along with his hands in his pockets, smugly dry in his oilskin cloak and waxed leather boots, both brand new. An elaborate cockade was pinned to the black fabric’s breast.

The Fisher Queen fished her parents out of the sea one evening. The waves were flat as paint, stretching out toward the horizon. Dead fish curled drying on the sand, scenting the air. It was the dog days of summer, windless. Far out past the sand bar, the sea shaded green, then brown.

She felt one of them lip the bait and the tender fumbling as they pushed it back and forth, mouthing it in inquiry. Then they both struck on the double hook, a rush as sudden as a punch, and the tip of the pole dipped in acquiescence to the water.

She pulled them in using long slow pulls, bringing the rod’s tip back towards her shoulder, reeling in swiftly as it lowered again towards the horizon.

She remembered scraps of childhood as she reeled. Hanging upside from the jungle gym, feeling her head throb with onrushing blood while a cat stalked by in the unmown grass, tail high and stiff. Sneaking off to be with a boyfriend for the weekend, her mother finding out, shouting at her. College graduation, their heads among the crowd. Calling her in her first apartment to make sure she was okay, didn’t need anything. Her father’s funeral, her mother’s only a few weeks later, like a swan than has lost its mate, and so lies down to die.

Now they were fish, as long and muscular as sharks, but toothless, living on plankton and the spawn of crustaceans. Now they thought slower, deeper thoughts than when they were human, and if they included thoughts of the Fisher Queen, they betrayed no sign of it.

She waded hip deep into the tepid water, holding a North Carolina summer’s heat still here in the final days of the season. The fish came to her, floated alongside her legs. She bent to each one in turn to coax away the hook piercing their lips. But free, the fish remained there, their scaly sides rasping along her legs. They were all muscle ““ she could feel it when they flexed a tail in over to stay in place.

She rested her fingers on their brows and let them move in tiny, hypnotic circles. The fish floated in the water. She could see their great golden eyes underneath the surface, staring up at her.

He’s become Dr. Fantomas, for Dr. Fantastik seemed too superhero-ish for a Tabat story. Final story came to 6650 words, and I’m pleased with it. Recent reading that may have influenced it include Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, John Hawkes’ The Blood Oranges, and Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Dangerous Days (free on the Kindle!).

The title of the story has become “The Ghost-Eater” as well.

Tabita interrupted. She was a classic old crone of Tabat, her skin darkened from exposure to the salt wind, her hair cut short in the manner of sailors, which older women affected due to its easiness, if they had retained enough hair to make the style dignified.

Doctor Fantastik fixed her with a portentous eye. No particular amount of ghost energy clung to her, other than the growth that covered them all, the ectoplasmic snail ooze that ghosts could not help but exude and which grew throughout this building, shaggy and slimy as rotting moss.

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“Twin daughters,” Doctor Fantastik said. “That’s very sad. A friend of yours?”
“I bring him spices from the Southern Isles when I come up from there. Saves him on the merchanting mark-up.”
“And the duty, no doubt,” Doctor Fantastik said.
The sailor shrugged. “I’ll give you the address, and you tell ’em Cyril sent ya. They’ll see to my fee. They’re right desperate.”
“How so?”
“At least one of the girls been turned poltergeist,” Cyril said.

Work goes forward on the novel. 1500 words so far, a little chunk that fits into the book early on, just after (sort of during) the riot at the gallery. Once the Redmond lunch-time traffic has died down, I’ll go reward myself with an Italian soda.

Here’s a teaser, still very rough:

She was a tall woman with gleaming gold hair, obscured beneath a dark cloak. She tried to shrug the woolen fabric more securely around her shoulders, but it caught on obstructions beneath, and half swung away to reveal feathers the same color as her hair.

“Lookie, lookie, look,” said a voice from behind her. She swung, almost dizzy with panic to see several figures step out towards her from the deeper darkness between two refuse heaps.

She stood between the dull red bricks of two enormous warehouses. Chalked scrawls, melting in the misty rain in luminous trails, marked the lower walls ““ political slogans rendered illegible by moisture. A strip of moonlight marked the middle, a narrow path barely large enough to contain Glyndia. Midnight edged the sides of her cloak.