[other] shangri-la
Dec. 1st, 2007 01:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ib_archiveauthor: e
artist: jackie (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vivaldi)
email: macaulay.station [at] gmail.com
It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that it should be presented as "true."
- "On Fairy-Stories," J.R.R. Tolkien
Beauty is mapped in Europe's finest, her closets stuffed with Prada, Versace and Ferragamo. Beauty's favourite shoes are Manolo Blahniks, and her drawers overflow with strings of diamonds and pearls and rainbows of sapphires and rubies and possibly the rare emerald or three. Braided strips of Bottega Venetta's leather bags take precedence over the thousands of Hermes' scarves, and a collection of vintage Chanel dresses.
A girl sits in front of a mirror, shivering. She is wearing a samite shift so large that she could have folded it around her thin frame three times over. Her padded slippers make no noise on the granite floors. She has her supper in the dining room. It takes her an hour to finish a glass of water, and she touches nothing on her plate.
In the adjoining room, there is a fireplace. It burns porcelain logs and gives no heat. Kneeling in front of it, white fabric pools around her like spilled milk. Firelight overlays itself on her, wrapping her bones as if to catch every word.
"Hong Kong is quiet, a ghost city of lights and dead people. Rose trellises crawl up the sides of the IFC, edging into a sky murky with pollution. People doze on desks, floors and against half-open elevators, mouths open with saliva staining collars of dusty business suits. On the top floor, there is a girl. She sleeps in a canopy bed, hands folded over her Hello Kitty duvet. Her hair fills the room, sandwiched between floors and ceilings, obscuring the view of the harbour, and falling out open windows. Bleached blonde strands catch on thorns before slithering into the sea, where young girls walk on sand and cry in pain when bits of glass and metal dig into their feet. They exclaim, 'It feels like we're walking on knives!' When a girl dies, her maiden blood drifts and melts into white foam, and her nails, bladder, liver, spleen and the fleshy muscles of her heart, stomach and arms metamorphose into water and her bones transmute into glass. They despise children and their skipping stones and aluminium cans of pop and soda; they clap and sing siren songs when they hear how a serial killer kidnapped a young girl from her Kowloon neighbourhood while his Rotweiler hamstrung her grandma. They found her years later in California when she got too old, eyes gouged and intestines hanging from her dessicated abdomen and with so little meat on her bones it was as if she had been consumed slowly over the years."
The lie strains thin between them; they both know that the loup garou does not kill his victims. He feeds on their dreams and stories until they can eat nothing and drink only water. Even now, she can feel his breath on her skin, meaty with the weight of a thousand nights just like this one. He asks:
"Will you marry me?"
She looks at him for the first time that night: a muzzle worn with grey and magic, teeth filed so sharp and thin that the fire almost flickers through it so that she can see past them into the caverns of his large, dark mouth, up the esophogus into eyes of amber resin.
"I'm sorry," she says, and flees into Beauty's closet, where decay and mothballs tremble through maps of Givenchy and Yves St. Laurence. She shivers under mink and fox fur, trying not to think of her sister in Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital, comatose under sanitized sheets and heart monitors for what feels like a hundred years. The heroin needle that she'd used had been thrown into the sea and drifted through the Pacific into Victoria Harbour, settling onto shallow sand among pieces of bone glass beneath the white foam.
the end
artist: jackie (
vivaldi)email: macaulay.station [at] gmail.com
It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that it should be presented as "true."
- "On Fairy-Stories," J.R.R. Tolkien
Beauty is mapped in Europe's finest, her closets stuffed with Prada, Versace and Ferragamo. Beauty's favourite shoes are Manolo Blahniks, and her drawers overflow with strings of diamonds and pearls and rainbows of sapphires and rubies and possibly the rare emerald or three. Braided strips of Bottega Venetta's leather bags take precedence over the thousands of Hermes' scarves, and a collection of vintage Chanel dresses.
A girl sits in front of a mirror, shivering. She is wearing a samite shift so large that she could have folded it around her thin frame three times over. Her padded slippers make no noise on the granite floors. She has her supper in the dining room. It takes her an hour to finish a glass of water, and she touches nothing on her plate.
In the adjoining room, there is a fireplace. It burns porcelain logs and gives no heat. Kneeling in front of it, white fabric pools around her like spilled milk. Firelight overlays itself on her, wrapping her bones as if to catch every word.
"Hong Kong is quiet, a ghost city of lights and dead people. Rose trellises crawl up the sides of the IFC, edging into a sky murky with pollution. People doze on desks, floors and against half-open elevators, mouths open with saliva staining collars of dusty business suits. On the top floor, there is a girl. She sleeps in a canopy bed, hands folded over her Hello Kitty duvet. Her hair fills the room, sandwiched between floors and ceilings, obscuring the view of the harbour, and falling out open windows. Bleached blonde strands catch on thorns before slithering into the sea, where young girls walk on sand and cry in pain when bits of glass and metal dig into their feet. They exclaim, 'It feels like we're walking on knives!' When a girl dies, her maiden blood drifts and melts into white foam, and her nails, bladder, liver, spleen and the fleshy muscles of her heart, stomach and arms metamorphose into water and her bones transmute into glass. They despise children and their skipping stones and aluminium cans of pop and soda; they clap and sing siren songs when they hear how a serial killer kidnapped a young girl from her Kowloon neighbourhood while his Rotweiler hamstrung her grandma. They found her years later in California when she got too old, eyes gouged and intestines hanging from her dessicated abdomen and with so little meat on her bones it was as if she had been consumed slowly over the years."
The lie strains thin between them; they both know that the loup garou does not kill his victims. He feeds on their dreams and stories until they can eat nothing and drink only water. Even now, she can feel his breath on her skin, meaty with the weight of a thousand nights just like this one. He asks:
"Will you marry me?"
She looks at him for the first time that night: a muzzle worn with grey and magic, teeth filed so sharp and thin that the fire almost flickers through it so that she can see past them into the caverns of his large, dark mouth, up the esophogus into eyes of amber resin.
"I'm sorry," she says, and flees into Beauty's closet, where decay and mothballs tremble through maps of Givenchy and Yves St. Laurence. She shivers under mink and fox fur, trying not to think of her sister in Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital, comatose under sanitized sheets and heart monitors for what feels like a hundred years. The heroin needle that she'd used had been thrown into the sea and drifted through the Pacific into Victoria Harbour, settling onto shallow sand among pieces of bone glass beneath the white foam.
the end
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-06 03:02 pm (UTC)And the artwork is gorgeous, too. I particularly like the way the girl was colored.