Hey guys! It’s been a while. I think a worthy welcome back post is this short story I wrote for a recent short story competition hosted by NYC Midnight. Each contestant was entered into a heat and given a genre and subject matter for a short story no longer than 2,500 words (the word limit, for me at least, was the complicated part). My genre was fantasy and my subject was “trophy collection.” I like what finally turned out… let’s see what you guys think!
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“Pas de Deux”
The girl was in her frenetic state again. She babbled on even as a spoonful of porridge dribbled down her cheek. “Just before sunrise, Giselle and Albrecht dance one last time, and they know they’ll love each other always, even though they’ll never see each other again.”
The porridge made a cruddy circle around the girl’s mouth. Her nostrils flared. Her eyes were wide.
“Mary,” the attendant warned.
“And then,” she paused to think, “there’s a splendid pas de deux and I was Helen’s understudy, she had fallen ill, some of the girls said of syphilis, but I didn’t believe them – she was only seventeen, you know! – and I got to dance with Albrecht! Well, his name was Bill, but at any rate, George came to see me, George who’s in that picture just there, my dear brother Georgie and –”
The attendant never knew what would set off the girl’s fits, but he always knew when they were coming. Her mouth slackened into an ‘o’ and her fists began slamming into her thighs, her forehead, the bed, anything and everything willy-nilly. Her leg jolted the bedside table, and a daguerreotype fell to the floor. The doctor was called. Insulin was injected; the fists slackened into wilted little hands; the girl was placed back on her bed, like a doll, until she could wake up and behave herself in a manner that was better expected by the institution.
When she woke up, George’s picture was gone. She felt on her buttock where they’d given her the shots. She hated the shots. They made her stay in bed, and staying in bed would not bring George back. Staying in bed would only make her weaker. She stared at the whitewash peeling from the walls and imagined she was dreaming. She was not trapped in a hospital bed. She had not fattened up, and her brown hair was not lank, nor did it smell of porridge. They had told her the year was 1923 and that George was gone for good, but they didn’t know what she was, what powers she possessed.
It could not be 1923. Wasn’t it still 1914? Wasn’t she still in the small ballet company in Cheapside? It had to be 1914, with the sound of an expectant audience beyond the stage curtains and the smell of resin on her toe shoes. It had to be 1914, when Georgie looked so dashing in his green khaki uniform. He smiled at her from the audience, and his cap was tucked under his arm.
But no, she only had to chance one look out the grated windows of the institution to realize that this London must not be the London of 1914. Its clothes were different, the sounds were new and strange, and anxiety hung like smog throughout it. This must be 1923.
The girl tried to be cold, solemn. Quiet. If she wasn’t quiet, she wasn’t behaving, and if she wasn’t behaving, they would give her the shots and take away her things. Her talismans. That was a word George had found in a dictionary when she was twelve and he was fifteen. “Talisman,” she incanted under her breath as she sat in the hard-backed chair, “anything that acts as a charm, or by which extraordinary results are achieved.”
She watched the skyline and the boats lining the Thames. They told her the War was over. They told her everyone who would come home had already returned. “Talisman,” she repeated as she sat in the hard-backed chair, “anything that acts as a charm, or by which extraordinary results are achieved.”
Her words echoed off the walls. One missing picture could not create an echo in her hospital room, but somehow the echo existed, keening larger and longer with every talisman they took away. So she had to sit there, quiet and solemn and still. She would not have another fit. She would sit there, rubbing her shoulders hard enough to blister and looking out the window caked in soot.
Some people could dance hard enough and long enough to bring their loved ones back to them. There was a maiden once who had not seen her intended in over a year. At midnight during the full moon, she went to a glade, carrying some of his letters, and danced until sunrise. When she was almost dead with exhaustion, she saw the shadow of her beloved on the ground near her feet.
A girl in the corps had told her that, and she had asked George what he thought of it.
“It’s possible,” he said, “like Giselle in your ballet.” George was always serious when discussing faery folk and magicks, but he did so with a glimmer in his bottle-green eyes.
“Oh, but in Giselle they never see each other again!” Mary cried.
George kissed her forehead. “I’m sure it was a different spell.” And that was that.
She squinted into the window-grimed sunset. Would the spell work if she didn’t have her talismans? They had taken her locket first, the one George gave her for her birthday.
“This locket,” he had said as she held up the chain, “contains the hairs of a great faery queen, very difficult to get. These hairs, when worn in the silver of the locket, give extraordinary powers to even the most ordinary of wearers.”
Mary looked up at her brother. “Can it really do magic? Could someone use it to create living creatures?”
George grinned. “He could even use it to raise the dead.”
“Even to raise the dead!” Mary’s eyes widened. “Don’t be morbid, George.”
They’d taken her locket first, because they thought she’d strangle herself with it. First the locket, and now the daguerreotype.
A pair of toe shoes rested on the bedside table. The last of her talismans. She must not have a fit. She must remain calm. If she lost her last talisman, she would never be able to bring her brother back from France. She’d read the reports, before she came to the institution: Poison gas and barbed wire. Fields full of sinkholes. That was what hell was like, and Georgie couldn’t live in such a place. It wasn’t fair.
She rubbed her arms more frantically now. She must not have a fit.
But the daguerreotype! George in his green khaki uniform, pressed and groomed with rosewater and glycerin. Seventeen in a yellowed picture and nine years past.
She had been fourteen then. George would go to France, but he’d be back in six months for her birthday so she needn’t say goodbye. Instead, she practiced good posture for her arabesque.
“Be a good girl, and get the principal role this time,” he winked as a farewell. He’d be back after his tour ended; he’d be back safe and sound. Roll through the ankle, passé, extend, passé and down.
He didn’t come back in six months, or after a year. Then in 1916, according to a sergeant’s report, George was gored onto a barbed wire fence as his regiment climbed over him. They were fleeing enemy fire. This was no gentleman’s war and France was no place for Georgie. He couldn’t be there – he would be home from around the corner at any minute as long as she could keep the hysterics in and attend rehearsals like a good girl. He couldn’t be in France, in her dreams, snagging his smart uniform on the barbed wire as his eyes rolled back, no! He couldn’t be there hurting her and hurting himself even though he could never die – He, the Finder of faery manes and talismans – so he’d be immortally eternally blessing himself into the ground of the soggy trenches (oh yes, she’d read the reports in the papers) and squelching into the unforgiving barbed wire until she went ahead and did –
No. She mustn’t have a fit, or George couldn’t come home. She must stay deathly quiet and find a way to get her talismans back.
She had seen the door where they took her triggers when she misbehaved. Triggers, they called her talismans. The trophy collection, she called the door she shuffled past, down the corridor when an attendant led her to monthly examinations.
The trophy collection was a wooden door with a peeling coat of blue paint. It stood out, but bleakly, in that dimly lit corridor. It would not open by magic; she knew because she had tried on numerous occasions to enthrall the trophy door, but it would not spring.
It was only with the talismans she could dance George back to her. She must get them out.
She was alone in her whitewashed room, grinding her toes against the floor.
She’d break the door down – she thought as she went up en relevé – just like one of Arthur’s knights. Like Lancelot du Lac. Yes, that’s what she’d do.
But how, when the shots had weakened her? When she danced at night, she could not dance for long. The weakness kept her ankles from rolling through and her balance from being anywhere near steady. This body wouldn’t let her break open a door, much less rescue the talismans that would let her dance the way she used to: all night and into the morning.
Blood pounded in her ears. She crawled back to bed. If she fainted or if the attendants heard her ungainly, thumping leaps, they would think she was having a fit. Fits were only good for losing her magic. They would only make her weak.
But.
The attendants jingled over her when they gave her the shots. They jingle-jangled like a key, the key that locked up all she had left of George – the things she was keeping to show him when he returned from the Marne and Verdun, from those horrible places with the beautiful names. The naughty key that she could grab, if she controlled herself before everything went dark, the key that would become her way back to her brother.
Oh, but she mustn’t be solemn or silent any longer. She must have a fit.
The girl was pacing the floor, clutching her toe shoes and murmuring under her breath. She saw the attendant and began striking her thigh.
“Oh yes, my brother George gave me my slippers just the other day, and he said not to worry while he was gone on that six-month tour, not to miss him too much, that’s what he’d told me and I swore I wouldn’t, I’d practice everyday and now the full moon has to happen the full moon I have to get to George, have to get him back from France—”
The girl was working herself into a frenzy.
“He said not to fret when the nasty girls put glass in the toes of my shoes. ‘They don’t know how powerful you are,’ he said and he gave my locket a kiss,” here she rounded on the attendant, “the very locket you stole from me, and my brother George needs it, he needs it on the full moon during the witching hour—”
The attendant had called for a doctor and a syringe.
“They don’t know how powerful I am, George. George. George. George.” She rocked back and forth, her matted hair falling into her eyes and her fists idly beating against her brains when the doctor came. The jingly-jangly doctor. Just as the lights were dimming and the music was quieting on the world, she grasped the key and flung it beneath her bed.
Midnight, chimed the bells of Mary-le-bow, and proceeded with their carillon.
The blue door felt cold and thrilling as the lock sprang open. The girl tapped her thumb against the key. An orchestra was tuning somewhere in her head.
She looked around the trophy room. A broom, a pail. A window set high in the north wall. Moonbeams leaked in so that tonight was clearly 1914 because the window wasn’t caked with soot like in 1923.
Her effects were in a small glass case on a storage shelf, along with the stolen possessions of true lunatics: a tatty bit string, four playing cards – bent and dirtied. The key would not open the case. She threw herself against its etched panes, full force, shattering frosted glass pineapples and holly leaves. Blood ran down her hands.
She chained the faery locket around her neck. Its magicks thrummed against her breast. She smeared her blood on Georgie’s picture and set to knotting her toe shoes.
Her blood tap-tapped on the musty floor as she spread her arms to port-de-bras. She began to dance: this changement for George. This glissade to call him back. A penché, ungraceful and teetering, and her blood drip-dropping the rhythm from her outstretched arms onto the floor.
One, chimed the bells of Mary-le-bow, and already the girl was weakening. She dug her toe into the floor and danced until the bells chimed three, the devil’s hour, and sweat mingled with her blood.
She stumbled against a wall. The moonbeams jittered. She thought of suffocating mud and trench rats. Poison gas. George leered at her from his picture. She must keep dancing, in a shapeless gown and old toe shoes, so that George could stop eternally squelching himself into the mud and the barbed wire fences.
The devils drummed against the windowpanes. Look! She believes she’ll catch the wall again, but she’s falling toward the glass!
The cold floor. Jagged shards of glass cutting in. Eviscerating.
Ha, ha! But the change was coming.
A power welled up inside her. She blinked. She opened her eyes to the warmth of stage lights, the cheer of an audience as she completed turn after turn in fast succession.
The cold floor. “Oh, Jesus” and a call for the doctor. Feet running down the corridor and crunching on the discarded key.
But no. She danced still, leaping towards the maternal warmth of the wings. George was waiting in the audience for her next costume change.
A body was lying in the cold. Was it hers, taking such shallow, unsatisfying breaths?
George in his green khaki uniform. Laughing at George’s suppertime imitations of the Prime Minister.
Her legs were jerking. Cold. Cold. Cold. She couldn’t breathe. Her heart was slowing. Her magic was waxing. The doctor was taking someone’s limp and bloody hand.
After the show, she would wrap herself in an ulster and run to George. They would embrace as fiercely as if he’d been away for nine long years, but really, he’d never left her.
A thousand years away, a girl lay on the floor of a broom cupboard, and doctors tried with tourniquets to staunch her bleeding. But Mary was onstage, dancing. She had extraordinary magicks; she could bring back the hours so that the dawn coming through the window on that last morning was not the gray of 1923 but a peaceful unbroken stillness in the warm dew of 1914, and his eyes in the velvet audience, looking on.
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