A Muse to Live For
is coming to you on
♥♥♥ VALENTINE DAY ♥♥♥
This is especially cute because February 14th is also my birthday. It is a nice present indeed, to have my favorite story ever published on this particular day!
Here's a taste of the first chapter.
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Chapter One
“Deep into that
darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming
dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was
unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there
spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”... ”
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
London, November,
1884
Nathaniel
A mirror is an awful thing to have
about one’s home.
One can, with care, go about life
lightly, without knowing of one’s own existence, which is not a bad state of affairs,
considering. Invisible and insensible, one can live on. In a manner of
speaking. I, of course, have been a dead man for five years. But one can go on,
in a way. In a sort of muffled darkness. Careful not to make a sound, or raise
any dust.
Until one has to shave. The mirror
stares back at me haggardly, telling the whole tale all over again.
Dead. Dead to the world, and buried
in these two darkened rooms.
It is fairly poor taste to disturb
the dead, and I resent the intrusion as much as any dear departed would. If
only Henry would let me lie in peace.
This mania for the music hall has
become a perpetual nuisance. Hardly a month passes that I don’t have to go through
this torment. It’s Henry’s way of doing me a kindness, or so he says. Says it
will cheer me up. It doesn’t. It’s sickening. But I go anyway, because Henry’s
ruckus if I don’t go is worse. Not in the amount of noise and exertion perhaps,
but it’s more personal. At the music
hall, I just float away. It’s just noise.
It might be easier to go and spend
one and a half penny at the barber shop, but I dislike the man’s hands on me. He
chatters without pause; his suspiciously pliant and universal political views
annoy me; and besides, I’d have to walk the length of the road in my current
state of unkempt overgrown shagginess. Worst of all, I would have to pass Mrs. Crabwood’s
parlor downstairs. She thinks unshaved men should come and go through the
traders’ door, which I would not mind, as such, but her reproving look would be
unbearable.
I wish people were not so ready and
eager to look me in the eye. If eyes are windows in the soul, should we not grace
them with some privacy? There’s not one person on this earth whom I’d want to
know my soul, and me theirs.
No, better to face the soulless
mirror, and my own darkness. Marginally better, at least. I find scissors and
snip unevenly away, before taking up the razor. The scissors are blunt, like
everything in here, and each cut pulls at the skin, as if niggling at the puckered
proud flesh over a half-healed scab.
The scab being me.
It’s twenty minutes’ walk to
Henry’s, most of it along the river. In summer it would be a pleasant stroll,
under the spreading plane trees, with the boats plying on the sunny water. Now
my boots plash softly into sodden fallen leaves, and slick horse muck. Still,
the bare trees looming in the mist have a gaunt beauty, and for a moment, the
briefest moment, I wish I had a pencil and a sketching pad with me, to jot down
the twisting, muscular forms of their outstretched limbs.
Time was when I never went anywhere
without paper and pencils. But that man is long gone.
I am just in sight of number 16,
Rossetti’s house—he’s gone these last two years, poor tormented soul, with all
his women and his menagerie, may he rest in peace—when a gentleman in a dark
coat steps out of a cab not two yards from me and hands out an elegant lady,
who turns around to shake out the folds of her gown and unwittingly looks me
right in the eye. I shudder, hurrying on.
Really. I mean it. If it’s true
that eyes are windows in our soul, why do we look people in the eyes? How many
people have you ever known that you’d want to share your soul with? One? Two? Twenty?
Fifteen thousand? Or maybe none at all?
****
Gabriel
There is this to be said for my
profession.
I can sleep in.
That unspeakable time of day, the
early hours of the morning, when the whole world trudges along the streets with
dead eyes and heavy feet, on to another day of toil, is spared to me.
I see the tiredness of the world at
the other end of the day. But by then it’s dark, and there is not much to see,
and the tiredness has a different flavor. To me, that’s mostly the flavor of a
man’s spendings, which I mostly spit on the pavement. You get used to it. You
get used to almost anything, given time.
Darkness or no, I must be seen of course. I am the one
in the stolen foggy spotlight of the lamppost’s golden halo. But the darkness
outside stares back blankly, and mostly I like it that way. I have seen enough
of the world to last me a lifetime. My business needs the night, in any case.
I wish I could say my bed is warm
and comfortable, but mostly it’s lumpy, damp, and cold. But it’s mine and
quiet, here at the top of the silent house. If you’d ever spent
any time at all in the slums of Whitechapel, you’d know this is downright
luxurious.
Mrs. Gride doesn’t like noise. She
says it makes her temples ache, which is all stuff of course, but still, we all
creep about as quiet as mice. No, much quieter than mice. They do not listen to Mrs. Gride’s injunctions about walking along
the drugget, talking in a low voice and making no sounds. I can hear them
chewing and scrabbling behind panels and wainscots at night, when the house
sleeps, and I come home to my lonely room. Usually they are the only ones to
welcome me back. I’m always the last one to return. I feel a bond of likeness
with them. We all live at the edge, behind screens. It doesn’t stop me from
throwing shoes at them when they cross the room too boldly, or go close to my
wardrobe. I have little enough as it is. The mice will have to nest elsewhere.
I am not a charity institution after all.
In the morning the bed has a narrow
strip of warmth in the middle, a stripe exactly as wide as my body, and I must
not move, lest I stray on the flabby, cold linen outside, but still, eventually
I find the nerve to reach out and fetch my cigarettes, and light the first of the
day. I smoke it in bed, my one and only indulgence. I have become adept at smoking
in bed without shedding ashes on the sheets or setting myself on fire.
I watch the thin, ghostly, white smoke
curling and floating towards the pale grey skylight, swirling into a puff of
breath. It’s likely to be the most beautiful thing I’ll see all day.
I have a small pile of work to do
for the girls downstairs, so I finally heave myself out of bed. I don’t ask
money for these small jobs. By tacit agreement, I help out, and the girls close
an eye on my strangeness. It works very well for all involved.
Later, much later, in the light of
a single candle, I shave at my little mirror (an evening ritual, for those like
me). As usual I give fervent thanks that nature hardly gave me any beard to
shave. Then I shed my trousers and my waistcoat and my shirt and wear my other
things.
The stockings, which need mending
again, but will do for one more night, in the dark. A small chemise. Then I put
on my boots, with small heels and about a thousand fucking tiny buttons that
are hell to work with stiff, cold fingers. They are old, second-hand or third,
like everything I own, but well-greased and waxed and buffed to a sheen. It’s
cold out there, and wet.
And then my tight, tight corset. It
needs some fancy bending to lace it up by myself, but I am limber. I pull the
laces as tight as I can around my waist, feeling the shape of me change, like
some creatures are said to change in the light of a full moon. The core of the
corset is whalebone and steel, stiff like armor. It knows my true shape better
than my body does. It hardly needs padding at the chest, hard as it is, but it
suits me to pad it anyway, for the weight of it, with two silk cravats I keep
for the purpose, so old, worn so soft by use, so waxy with the damp of my skin,
that they almost melt to my chest. My skin is all tingling now, and it’s not
the cold. Silk and steel hug me so close, so much tighter than my day clothes.
I am almost naked, and yet every bit of me is more defined and clear, like I
have come into sharper, truer focus in the searching eye of a telescope.
I paint my lashes and my eyelids,
black and black, to make my eyes shine. I paint my lips red. That marks me as
the whore I am, and I don’t mind.
I am what I am.
My wig hangs from the corner of the
wardrobe. Freshly brushed, the blonde hair shines in the candlelight and waves
like a ghost in the faint breeze as I open the wardrobe door. Maybe the ghost
of the woman whose hair it is, who knows. She might well be dead. I don’t know
what would be creepier, to wear the hair of a dead woman or the hair of a live
one. Still, I’m stuck with the wig for now. I am not pleased with the color,
which does not mix with my dark hair. But I got it almost cheap in Middlesex
Street. It was the sort of bargain where nobody asks too many questions.
I wear my violet skirt over a small
horsehair bustle and a blouse and tight bodice. I don’t button this all the way
up, but I put on a shawl, for the cold. The wig, which in summer would hitch
and sweat, is almost a comfort now. I look at my mirror one last time as I tie
my hair in a loose chignon at the nape of my neck, and stab it through with a
horn comb. No pins. I learned the hard way not to trust a man around a hairpin.
The mirror is too small to see much. My pale face, the dark circles of my eyes,
the red lips, the ghostly locks. All the rest I can only imagine.
But that is my life. Imagining
myself, conjuring myself into existence … especially the parts that don’t fit
in the narrow, narrow picture.
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"Daydream"
Pencil sketch on paper, model D. Kovalev
©Katherine Wyvern 2018
