I know, yawn, blow-by-blow accounts are so dull and so very much not droll (let us not confuse the two “d” words, please), but I’m going to natter on a bit about it anyway. It would possibly be wise to skip this post unless you are somewhat interested in the process.
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The following is a lightly-edited fragment of a what was intended to be a longer bit of fiction I wrote in January 2015. I found it while looking for old files on a portable HDD to see how hard it would be to recreate “Rust” from my post yesterday. No dice… yet, anyway. I may be looking for the wrong filename and it could be under another name entirely. The song I referred to as “Myrrh” (which is only one of many “Myrrh”-titled songs I’ve worked on) is actually fully intact and on my modern DAW, so I might have to share that (with vocals!) once I decide what those lyrics should be. But, on with the story… I’ll say a bit more about this piece after the fragment.
The smell of excrement, rot and chemicals rose from the waters as the barge Vivienne and Llewellyn were riding floated across the River Strife to the slaughter yards south of the river. The copper smell of fresh blood drifted over the other smells and Llewellyn had to choke back a the bile that threatened to add to the miasma of roiling in the dark twilight waters below.
“Good gods, how does anyone deal with this stench on a daily basis?” he asked no one in particular, and didn’t expect to get a response. He covered his face with a handkerchief.
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Ed watched his neighbor undress in the moonlight in the window in the apartment across the way. He dimmed his reading lamp so he could better appreciate the natural contrasts of the moon against the inky blackness of her room, put down his book on Celtic mythology filled with more fiction than the latest bestselling high fantasy novel. It was truly awful scholarship, if there was any scholarship involved in its writing at all. The lack of references and indices told most of that tale.
It was not the first time he had played peeping tom and he doubted it would be the last. Although he suspected his neighbor knew full well that he often watched her in the semidarkness, her eyes never once stole to the window framing her slow dance from clothing to skin. That his neighbor had never once drawn her curtains in the name of modesty, Francis Edward Carlisle (“Ed” to most folks) was damned if he was not going to allow himself to take in the show visible in varying degrees of light as the moon waxed and waned throughout the year. His neighber was “a looker” by his book and Ed was not exactly flush with offers from women willing to share their naked bodies with him at fifty-two. That had stopped happening someplace in the last decade or so and, to be honest, he had never had all that many offers in life but it still happened on the rare occasion before he had acquired his permanent beer belly and man tits.
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Her matte-black nail polish was chipped again, a detail she had grown used to. She knew she was rough on her nails, using them for everything from a makeshift screwdriver to a replacement for the worrystone her grandmother had given her and that she had lost. Instead of rubbing a smooth stone to assuage her nerves, she taken up nail-biting. Or, rather, she had taken it up again. The stone was her grandmother’s way of trying to break of the nail-eating habit. And it had worked, until she went and lost the stone one night out on the town. She kept hoping the stone would show up but considered the possibility unlikely. And she had yet to get around to replacing it.
She ran a ragged fingernail over her lips, drawing a pinprick of blood where the rough edge accidentally caught a ridge of flesh. When she thought about it, she found that she did not care. Maybe he would think that was sexy. If not, she had other ways of getting his attention.
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