wytchcroft

Rosemary Lane

Ah to be broken into joy.

“Oh Rose,” Jack sighed with his head lolling on the lathed smoothness of my shoulder, “you have quite killed me.”

The little death, and my poor frock all torn and my petticoats disarrayed; by pleasure.

The rumpled sheets their every crease proclaiming; “what ho, mischief in the Master’s house!” And I myself so gleefully destroyed, reduced to spastic judders and twitches – peering through eyes sticky with fallen lashes, whose insides were ruptured and brazenly exposed, cogs and levers, my pretty hinges, the secret inner workings all revealed.

“And where is the lad eh? Where is the sailor boy?” My father swung his head from side to side as if to find the culprit, the enactor of his ruination would be crouching behind a cabinet, skulking shame-faced behind the marionette of the Great Ozu.

But Jack had gone at first light with a jaunty step, a tip of his cap and three shiny coins laid on the bed. Jack had gone and it was for Jill to go tumbling after...

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Current Mood: busy
Current Location: between the wall and the window
Current Music: trees - polly on the shore

Rosemary Lane

And if I am a place call me Rosemary Lane, it is a good name.

As I am but a child, slip a penny into my hand and call me anything, I can be anyone. If I have feeling call me Love. As I have purpose call me service. As I can sing, call this my tale; it is the song of my life, the song of pipes, jenny-wheels and gears, pneumatics, the hiss of the bellows and the wheezing of tubes.

Some say I have a secret, a heartbeat, a life concealed inside, that there is a being hidden inside me, a person. But who does NOT have a being inside them?

I’m under house arrest, I’m under close inspection. All that is left of me and the now is a ruined reputation. I am struggling to order, to think, to place in sequence the parts of the tale, the pieces of me.

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Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Falmouth
Current Music: espers - rosemary lane

( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: sick in transit glorious
Current Music: marianne faithful - sister morphine

( Read more... )

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: among the hills
Current Music: kate bush - joanni. david bowie - all saints.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: by the mail box
Current Music: the knife - annie's box

PT 2: The Second Skein

Once through the fabric partition of the Great Fabrizi’s study and the small door concealed by it, the Great Magician and the Aetheric Assassin stood in a chamber of small proportions and little furniture. A small wicker chaise-lounge and a row of drawers such as an architect might have to store his papers and plans. What the Great Fabrizi kept, of course, were the blue prints and sketching for his theatrical magic tricks.

“Many men would sorely like to obtain the secrets kept here,” the Great Fabrizi acknowledged.

“Then I am privileged,” replied the Assassin politely. “You may rest assured, - I am no thief.”

“It had not crossed my mind that you were, though I’ll admit, thinking about it now; your talent could no doubt be used in such a way.” For a moment the Great Magician’s face expressed suspicion but this passed and in a trice the old zealous enthusiasm was back. “Well, no matter, for this is but an antechamber – a prelude to adventure, in our case, yea, a veritable aperitif, to the main course that awaits us.” By now he was gripping and twisting a gilt picture frame that hung from one of the deep crimson papered walls. “A course that is – of action!”

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Current Location: in the tunnel and on the stair
Current Music: the church - magician among the spirits

Pt 1: A Study in Shadow

It was a murky but otherwise unremarkable Wednesday evening, in the March of a year best labelled 'Vintage 1882', that the Great Fabrizi looked up from the desk in his richly draped and half darkened cocoon of a study, and peered through his spectacles into the eyes of inevitable doom. “Ah,” he said, nodding almost imperceptibly to the bringer of his demise, “it has come then at last, to this...” it was not a question. Nevertheless, having shimmered into existence as if solidifying out of the very shadows of the room, the Aetheric Assassin returned the nod politely and said, “even so.”

Slowly, for he wished to enjoy every sensation of skin, blood pulse, tendon and muscle while he was still able, and being no doubt privately astonished to discover he was neither driven from his wits, insensible nor even very much a-tremble, the famous Magician rose from his desk. He gestured again with his head, this time toward the crystal radio in its imposing mahogany and ivory cabinet and which was still, and without irony, playing a selection of light musical pieces courtesy of the Royal Alexandria Palace.

“I will admit, had I had any say in the matter, that I would have chosen perhaps a graver musical accompaniment to my execution. However, I am not one to complain and certainly your mode of transport,” once more the directive nod, “is uniquely impressive – astonishing really, and worthy of respect.”

“Thank you,” said the Aetheric Assassin politely.

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thanks to alex, alicia, and stosha for the insp!
hope this chapter affords some small amusement...

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Londonaire
Current Music: charlotte gainsbourg - time of the assassins

(another find)
warning; contains swearing. please remember - i am NOT my characters.
................

Concepts of ‘Englishness’ bothered Gerry, bothered him in the same way as blurred patches in his peripheral vision, the kind that didn’t go away but, however much he wiped his specs, just sort of smeared out on the edges, to the side or below. The same annoyance as a paper cut. Paper cuts always come with the jeering promise that, no matter what you do, sooner or later (in fact just sooner), you will be forced by the generally malign nature of things to use the wounded finger and repeatedly so. With a pair of specs it would be email, bills, files and forms from work, a laughing commuter thrusting out the funny pages of a daily paper – or else road-signs, bus stops, unexpected waving friends, yapping dogs, darting cats or footballs out of nowhere, billboard adverts, lurching cars at T-junctions, attractive women, all would remorselessly have to be looked at through the smear. Gerry disliked having to turn his head and he disliked having to deliberately look down or to the sides – and he hated flicking through pieces of paper, whether this was an innate thing, a natural quirk, or a borderline phobic reaction to 30-plus years of dirty glasses and sore fingers, Gerry wasn’t sure.

If the brain, as so often claimed, is but a large muscle, then, Gerry supposed, the mind was but a red edged finger in a dodgy pair of specs.

Or something. Anyway, yes, Concepts of –

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Current Mood: busy
Current Location: the archives
Current Music: aimee mann - live

Extracts from The Deep Stuff a sequel to The Solar Windmill re-edited and posted for a prompt from here
and see also here
………………………….

Memory:

Falling, it’s extreme. Some people make a sport of it.
Dress it up any way you like, spread yourself, use whatever you’ve got, some fancy jet, a ret-board, a parachute, wings, it’s still falling.

“No, it’s not, it’s flight. What, you think you fall... with wings - how butt crazy is that?” Halley, of course.

“Whatever.” and Eva sulking.

“Whatever yourself grll-fren', you can fall all you want. Me - I’ll be flying.”

"Woah! Halley, cheese much? You practiced that one in the bathroom huh?" and Eva laughing. "Well, ok, ok, you fly – then if I fall you'll catch me.”

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Current Mood: awake
Current Location: the space shuttle Cardenal
Current Music: nico - live

This is a response to the following prompt from house_of_enshu - the piece itself came out a little too academic and dry so i'm posting it here.

'I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.'
— Jorge Luis Borges

The idea of literary Prompts is not a new one. Ancient Greek and Roman writings reveal a wealth of plays, prose, philosophy and history created as a direct response to one another. In the Western literary tradition we see this first in addendums and footnotes to scientific and religious works which, in turn, lead to newly created texts – sometimes the cause of deep tears within the cultural fabric of the day.
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Current Mood: calm
Current Location: labyrinth and library and little lambs eat ivy

……………………

“Harry?”

“Harry?”

She remembers the old saying; dead men tall no tales. But people are fools and a dead man can tell a lie just as well as any other man. Karin looks at her hand. It has frozen in mid-air.
I was to going to strike him, even her own inner voice sounding dulled, numb now.

It must be reaction, such an irrational urge, as if she could slap him back into breathing, like a mid-wife.
She had played that role once; her older sister Rheya sharing the same cramped compartment and with one child already to show for the affections of her husband. He was a good man but she had barred him from the occasion, exiled him to the same small cupboard as their fractious mother. She was wailing loud enough for them all.
“Dear God, another child! What shall we do? How are we to cope, to raise another one - infants, children? My God!”

All the while her sister gasping like a steam-press but calm, issuing out her instructions; more towels, more water, fetch a painkiller, fixing her with wild, wild eyes. “And remember Kari’, slap him, a good smack mind you, on the arse, ok? He – gasp! – has to – gasp! – breathe!” A shriek then, the last subterranean motion and suddenly Karin is holding something red, slick as an oil fouled bird...
...and her free hand had frozen for some reason, she just couldn’t do it, could not make the hand connect with the slippery thing clutched so inexpertly in her arms.

No, she couldn’t do it then and she cannot do it now. All she can do is stand and watch that hand of hers, frozen in mid-motion, perfectly stilled, not even a tremor. Her nails, she can see, are remarkably clean – all things considered.

And then the long elastic moment reaches its end at last - and time snaps back into action.
She is a metal girl again, once more carrying out her task like a machine, like a robot.
Brushing the dust from an old chair she seats herself before the disused control desk, scanning the dials and switches then twisting and clicking them one by one, row by row, and at the last, the lights.
Such a complete darkness.

“Honestly,” she chides, “you are becoming a melancholic, we’re shut up like a couple of old cats!”

Her fingers are fumbling for the lever. Ah, here it is. “Probably a lovely day outside, come on, let’s see shall we?”
There! The windows of the apartment fly open their shutters and the blind whirs away back into its slot, the bright sunlight pours in.

“See? Now, that’s enough of your silliness Harry, it’s time for breakfast!”

She smiles indulgently as she turns to him where he sits looking pale and bemused at his own sudden end.

…………………………………….

Current Mood: blank
Current Location: in the tunnel and out again
Current Music: randy newman - varous tracks

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: the beacon

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: out of Anglesey 1933
Current Music: intermittent

valentina malyavina (ala hari in solaris)

Current Location: tunnels through time to
Current Music: the canyons of your mind - bonzo dog

Honestly though, it’s flattering; no/one ever wants to hear my side of the story and there’s always another side isn’t there? Somewhere, if you look hard enough. That’s the trouble with the world nowadays, nobody takes the trouble to really look at things, I mean, properly look. “There’s always a chance”, he used to say,”if you just bloody well look for it.” ‘Course funny that what with his eyes being so bad.
“Oh I don’t need ‘em,” he’d be going on, “you’ve got a pair lovely enough for the both of us!”
The old charmer, he’d be giving out the flannel, “Irish eyes are smiling” or whatever you like.
Like I said, a real charmer – when he wanted to be - but then that’s the family for you, all of them charming, when they want to be, and blind. And liars.

The Lennons are all liars.

Really, do I? Well, I got a right haven’t I? And I mean, who am I now? No/one – nowhere bloody woman, ha ha. You know though… I was remembering, it’s been stuck in my noggin’ like a bloody radio ‘Things We Said Today’ that’s one, right? Funny that.

What? Paul’s, Paul’s is it? Paul Mc- You don’t get it do you? Back then, there weren’t no bloody McCartney, there weren’t no – they was all Beatles, get me, Beatles the lot of them, right? Beatle John, Beatle George – I ought to know, I mean I only went and married one didn’t I? Beatle Fred.

Whattya mean he wasn’t a – you cheeky git, how dare you?! Saying a thing like that after all I – Look, it’s my story right? I’m giving you my side, In My bloody Life, Mister, alright? Know how it was do you? I’ll tell you, it was the same as right here, right now and you with your judgemental face on, ‘Who does she think she is, look at her – marrying a fella like him – just to marry a Beatle – marry the money more like!’ all of that, all the time.

And as for the family, Christ I – wait, sorry, no that IS his fault actually because I never used to swear.

Oh right, yeah, John, right - oh that – the… look, I’ll tell you; ‘like Dracula’ I read that somewhere, anyway, yeah he comes in, sweeps in, all angry and long haired and those black clothes, vampire, the whole bit, Son of bloody Dracula. Ha, ha, ha! But like a fairytale too, really I mean, the sort of, oh – the prince to the tower, Childe Roland, that one. He was big on Browning was John. What, you didn’t know that? You didn’t know about that Dracula film either, did you, and I was nearly in that! AND Freddie – till John threw another moody. Anyway, like a fairytale, like a prince, and that’s a secret between you and me and the four walls, it’s always been a sort of fantasy for me, always was. John bloody well knew it too.

Typical bastard Lennon, ha, ha, ha!

……………….

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: hour after hour in an ivory tower
Current Music: the rutles - good times roll

We are filming, they are making a film of a film of me, my life… it’s a film already, as the light flickers, the days are chopped together frames of celluloid – it makes my ears ring, the clatter of the projector as the calendar spools past.

We are here in the café, entering together, myself and two men; a husband and a lover or perhaps two suitors… I shall nod to each of them in turn, across the glaring white of the table, like an auctioneer whilst they bid for me; my price as yet no higher than anyone else’s, anyone whose face has beauty impressed upon it.

Well, let them bid; I am an attractive woman in a café full of men, I can catch a hundred eyes here, I am under light but away from the tables the shadows are as thick as oil and there are so many beckoning recesses, like hungry mouths, so many men with hands already fumbling in anticipation. They have no notion, how nervous they seem, how monstrously unthreatening, as they fidget in their seats like boys, as their hands clumsily roll cigarettes, toy with glasses, wipe imaginary dust from tuxedos or military uniforms. They do not know. They are strangers here.

And I am not. The pretty chanteuse who dances around the tables, who sings so gaily and whose playful attentions are utterly lost upon the crowd, she knows me. Inside and out, she knows. She sees me as her own kind; we have grown together since school, since the days of watching the hard-bodied workmen strutting in and out of the steel plant, since forever, locked in place together here.

The city.

There is only one way out and one way in, this is a city underground, a city under the waves. There is only the tunnel.

Beyond the café, to the world at large, I am anonymous enough - I am as yet unknown, personal details secret, my name so far unrecorded will not be blazed to the public, not here and now where true success must be invisible.

The tunnel.

And I am in the resistance. We are here to destroy it. And only after, only perhaps with hindsight will my achievement, my existence, be recognised, another unknown crowd catching my eye as it winks at them from the footage, from our film, today. It is the film that will make me.

HE laughs, waggling the newspaper nonchalantly as he reads, “I’m afraid, Karin,” he trills, “the notices are really quite bad.” I lower my eyes.

But of course the condemnation of the film, the public, the critics, none of that reflects badly on me, not to him, in fact it has nothing to do with me whatsoever. He smiles warmly and I sit there with no feelings because he owns them. “Don’t worry darling,” his most reassuring tone, “it’s just as I said. From now on you must be only in the films I make. These hacks you’ve been performing for, they don’t deserve you.”

He looks up from the paper to gaze through the gap in the window condensation, out- out- to a horizon awaiting his triumphant footprint. “These fools, they don’t even see you,” he says.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: in a whirl
Current Music: GS i love (compilation)

What do I remember? Twilight on the frozen lake – a frost formed sculpture park and my lover with his warm hands - no – no it was my hands, that's right, even then his were slight and chilled, and I was watching his breath gasp out in tetchy wheezes.
“But, damn it, this place is meant to be alive, liquid, living motion. Not this frozen –"

And the lights then, dazzling, a constellation brought to earth and he of all of us suddenly entranced, suddenly charmed, whisking me around in waltz time. “Oh maybe,” laughing, “I don’t know, perhaps a world of ice instead, eh?”

“Well, or a thaw soon,” I answer and from the heat inside me, “things will – warm up!”
Yes, I was giddy and we were playing out for the last time our version of Bergman, our Summer with Monica.
He visited once, Bergman did, oh yes, staying with the family in the ramshackle and miraculous country house. We had to disguise it as a studio, and it became that joke, you know, of the sleeper that comes to believe the cover story; an old bourgeois farm house deluding itself into being. Oh but it had to be so, it was essential – we could not be cut from it, no – it was the core, if you want to understand, the family home. And he with his dreams.

But Bergman – I think we were frightened, such a big man but, like my lover, like so many men in fact, weak, always coughing, such drama – and deadly jealous of our house and vowing to have something like it of his own. I am told he lives alone now on an island. Well so it is.

If you notice, the house – it is in every film.

Of course, I am not – but I have seen all of them, watched them in the dark, in the cinema alongside everyone else. Yes, like everyone, in rapture. I am sure he knew.

So, then, back to the lake and watching the icy fog drifting like vaporous ghosts, like memories struggling to find a shape, to find a form. He was poking a stick into the ice to make holes for the fish; a miracle that they could live but somehow they managed it, their colours wavering and way down in the cold water.

“Like dreams, the cold dreams of an astronaut.”

I remember him saying that – and of course in the film there it is, the crew sleep and the fish flicker through the screen and between the stars.

People often have asked me about this; The Fish, the whole concept. “Why 'Oceanic'? What – is it an analogy, a metaphor, what, allegory?”

I nod and feel sympathy.

Again they ask also; “And really, all this “the cold dreams of an astronaut”, did he – did you, really speak like THAT?” and they laugh.
I am offended. “Of course we did! We were intense! We were artists! We were pretentious, perhaps, or yes, OK - but we were… young.”

But what do I remember?

………………….

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: the lake, the house, a past
Current Music: amiina - kerr

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Current Mood: awake
Current Location: flapping about
Current Music: conradt veidt - where the lighthouse shines across the bay 1933

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: the lighthouse in time
Current Music: incredible string band - my father was a lighthouse keeper

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: the lighthouse
Current Music: fairport convention - a sailor's life

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wytchcroft

September 2017

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ah - ya winsomnia lose some!

Entries tagged with fic

Rosemary Lane - concluded

Rosemary Lane pt 1.

card 3 (conclusion)

card 2

card

spirit among the magicians - pt 2

spirit among the magicians

The English Impatient

bits of Eva

response - Borges

goodbye harry no 3 goodbye

postcard to alicia 4

what was left at the lighthouse

mirror/mirror

bit of a Beatle wife bit that fell off a bit

fic bit more

lake bit (test) now reproofed!

(postcard to alicia 3) Where the lighthouse shines across the bay,

postcards to alicia #2

postcard to alicia

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September 2017

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