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Victoria Silverwolf
Daedalian Member
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 Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 8:22 pm Post subject: 1 |
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Click on the cover to read my story "Harvest." (Which was altered to some extent by the editor, not always in ways I agreed with; but that's what editors are for.)
http://www.speculationnation.co.uk/
There are some other science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories to enjoy, too.
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Reality is a crutch for people who can't face up to science fiction |
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wordcross
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 10:55 pm Post subject: 2 |
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congrats!
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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? |
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Scurra
Daedalian Member
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 8:10 pm Post subject: 3 |
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Cool. Some great imagery and a lovely atmosphere. Congrats.
Out of interest, was the editing more for length or for style?
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still Quiz Olympiad champion. Must get a life.
New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon
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marcusI
Daedalian Member
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 1:30 am Post subject: 4 |
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Congratulations Victoria!
Good story. How many have you published? |
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Zag
Unintentionally offensive old coot
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 2:36 am Post subject: 5 |
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| Much congrats! A good read with an eerie appeal to the senses. |
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Victoria Silverwolf
Daedalian Member
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| Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 1:39 pm Post subject: 6 |
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Thank you for the kind words. 
This story was edited for style, I believe. As you can probably tell, I tend to overwrite. The editor's version is more direct than my own. A matter of taste, I suppose.
I have had speculative fiction published in about a dozen very small press publications. (Fanzines.) Thanks for asking.
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Reality is a crutch for people who can't face up to science fiction |
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Courk
Daedalian Member
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| Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 3:07 pm Post subject: 7 |
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| Congrats! Also, I can't get Vogue out of my head now. |
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MatthewV
Daedalian Member :_
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| Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 10:45 pm Post subject: 8 |
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| You could still post the original work here if you desired. |
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Victoria Silverwolf
Daedalian Member
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| Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 3:11 am Post subject: 9 |
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Thank you for the suggestion. (And apologies for the long delay in my response; I have been away from the computer for three weeks.)
Here is the orginal version.
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A woman walks slowly and steadily into the October Club, glancing neither left nor right. She refuses the traditional offer of refreshment and sits in the only unoccupied chair. It would be easy to mistake her for one come to listen, rather than the speaker she is destined to be. Her dress is a floor-brushing, shapeless thing of heavy cloth, in a color nearer to black than green. Her hair, worn long and loose as if she were still a young girl, appears to have been lightened by the years, like mud drying into dust. Her lack of cosmetics and careless manner of dress hint to the fact that mirrors have never been kind to her. Yet despite her sharp chin and crooked nose, her thick fingers with nails gnawed to the skin, her eyes are genuinely beautiful, with warm amber irises. The tale begins.
As far back as I have been able to trace them, my people have always been farmers. That doesn't mean that we have always made our living that way. Teachers of high school English and funeral directors, automobile mechanics and beauticians; one way or another we earned enough money to coax dirt into yielding its treasures to us. Where I grew up the soil is thick and soft, black as old blood, warm and moist and full of life. Poke a hole in it with your little finger and you stand a good chance of seeing an earthworm hard at work. We were like those worms, I suppose; serving the Earth in the only way that seemed natural to us.
My mother -- piano teacher by trade, actress by passion, farmer by soul -- passed away on an summer morning, after what the newspapers used to call an "extended illness." Nowadays they go ahead and call it cancer. That's a sort of progress, I suppose. My father -- farmer in mind, body, and spirit -- supported me with the strength of a boulder or an old tree. But even oak and granite will break, and it was not so many years later when he joined her in the modest cemetary next to the Fairsprings Lutheran Church. I've seen lovely sunsets from that cemetary, more than I can number.
People still used the word "spinster" back then. It wasn't an insult. I knew I was a spinster. That was different than being an old maid. An old maid was a bitter woman, hating her unloved body and everyone who shared a warm bed. But a spinster was one of nature's solitary creatures, no more to be pitied than a hawk.
I sold most of the farm to those who could make better use of it, but kept the living heart of it for my own. It surrounded the small wooden house in which I had lived for three decades like a moat, a nearly circular field that shifted like the seasons, but more slowly. One year this part would lie fallow, and that one would be full of the deep green beauty of soybeans, while another would be standing proud with grain; the next year they would change places, like children playing dress-up games. It was small enough that I was able to take care of it on my own, as long as I didn't try to make a profit, and large enough that I was able to feel alone inside it. I earned the little money I needed by walking to the Fairsprings Public Library, reaping facts out of thick, dusty books, and sowing them into articles that a Chicago publisher would collect into thinner, cleaner, simpler books for middle schools. It was a quiet and pleasantly isolating way to make a living.
One night in early autumn the moon was nearly full, low on the horizon, and as deep a shade of orange as I have ever seen. I wrapped one of my mother's shawls around me and walked into the night. Since childhood I had been one who wandered freely into Oz and Wonderland and Sherwood Forest, and I found all these places in my field. I closed my eyes and inhaled the sweet scent of wheat eager to be harvested. When I opened them I was no longer alone.
He was very young and beautiful, and entirely innocent of clothing. Instead of the alarm I should have felt at meeting an unknown naked man on my land, I felt instead as if I were the intruder. My flannel shirt and blue jeans were ridiculous burdens, chains that I was using to keep myself a prisoner.
He approached me. His skin was nearly the same burning color as the moon, his hair long and silky and darker than midnight. He was small and slender, almost like a child, but there seemed to be unspoken wisdom in his eyes. Strange yellow eyes, the eyes of a jungle cat. He came to me, and freed me of my chains.
I was no virgin. I had known men who wanted a woman, and who were willing to settle for what they could get. If they were kind to me, I offered them what comfort I could. They would move on to some other woman, and I would be left with pleasant memories. But this one was different. This one needed me.
It seems ridiculous, doesn't it? That this wild, beautiful boy should need anything from a plain spinster twice his age? Yet even as we shared the taste of our skins, even as he lay beneath me shining with sweat, even as he entered me and we clutched each other as if we were drowning, I knew that he had come to me because he had no choice.
Afterwards, as we lay together in silence, I think I fell asleep for a moment. I closed my eyes and listened to the wind scatter dead leaves. I felt the flesh of my lover soften into a mist. For some reason this did not seem strange to me. When I opened my eyes, I held only the night in my arms. I knew that he had not been a dream. I could still smell the spicy tang of his body, still taste the salty savor of his secret places, still feel his seed warm and wet inside me. I gathered together my scattered clothing, wrapped them in my mother's shawl, and made my way to my solitary bed.
Three weeks later I knew I was pregnant. Like many another human being faced with a crisis, I did nothing about it. A few months later, on a moonless night when winter was beginning its conquest of the year, I sat in my father's rocking chair half-reading a book of fairy tales by firelight.
Suddenly there was a terrible pain in my womb. I dropped my book and staggered to the bathroom, bent over with waves of cramping agony. By the time I reached the side of the bathtub I was on my knees. Somehow I managed to tear off my nightgown and crawl into the tub. By now I could feel that my cervix had dilated (while the part of my mind that was something other than a blur of red pain protested But it's much too early!)
Mercifully, the birth pangs lasted only a few more minutes. I suppose this is because the thing I had brought into the world was much smaller than a normal infant. I could hardly see it in the small amount of light that flickered inside the bathroom. Covered with the blood and slime of its birth, it seemed like nothing more than a cut of meat from a slaughterhouse. I reached out to hold it, then pulled back my hands quickly. It had no limbs, and far too many eyes. I prayed that it was dead.
I stepped out of the bathtub with a strange sense of calm. I wrapped the thing in my torn nightgown and walked out into the darkness. Frost whispered under my feet as I carried it far from my house. I knelt and dug with my bare hands, thankful that the ground was not yet frozen. When I could no longer feel the tips of my fingers, I threw the thing into its grave and pushed the cold soil on top of it.
I made my way back inside and threw the bloody nightgown into the fire. It burned quickly, as if it were eager to die. After I had bathed myself with water as hot as I could stand, I dried myself in front of the fire, stirring it to make sure that every scrap of the nightgown had been reduced to ashes. Only after I had returned my book of fairy tales to the bookshelf did I allow myself to collapse to the floor and weep.
Time does not heal perfectly, but scars are easier to bear than open wounds. By the time summer returned I was once again able to walk in my field with some of the pleasure I had once known. There was, of course, a place where I never set foot. It made little difference, as now all of my field was overgrown with weeds.
One hot evening I strolled through the tall grasses, listening to the music of insects and watching the meteor trails of fireflies. It was then that I saw him again. He was still naked and intent on his goal, but this time his gaze was not meant for me. He carried a small sack of pale cloth in his right hand and a tiny sickle in his left. The blade looked like black glass, attached to a rough wooden handle.
I followed him, even though I knew where he was going. We reached the place where I had buried our child. Above its grave there grew a plant like nothing I had ever seen. It was slender, taller than our heads, and covered with long green leaves like a stalk of maize. But where the ears should have been there were large, purplish pods, something like those found on a cocoa plant.
I reached out to touch his shoulder, but he gave no sign that he was aware that I still existed. Instead, with great care, he began to reap his crop. One by one, with the silent, paper-thin blade of his sickle, he cut the pods off the plant and placed them in his sack. When he was finished, he walked away. I never saw him again.
It was not until the next day, when I had summoned up enough courage to revisit the place, that I discovered a single pod at the base of the plant. Had it been inspected and discarded, or was it simply an oversight? I still do not know. I peeled back the thick tissues of the pod covering and discovered within the perfectly formed skeleton of an infant.
That same day I sprayed all of my field with herbicide. Nothing has grown there since. |
_________________
Reality is a crutch for people who can't face up to science fiction |
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mps1453
Daedalian Member
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| Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 4:48 pm Post subject: 10 |
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Congrats
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Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math. |
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