[inspired by the "walk" exercise, this is a sketch for a story I've been developing]
It is not absolutely necessary to go by night but we do. It must be close to midnight and we are on the deck of “The Red Guard,” the ferry that will take us across the Finnish Sound. It is early spring and the nights have lost none of their bite but a subtle something mingles with the salt and the spray, the foretaste of melting snow. Sasha and I are on the rear deck and we stand watching St. Petersburg condense into a glowing necklace tossed carelessly over these marshy plains. In the foreground I can still make out the torches at Peter and Paul fortress and I check Sasha’s face, does he realize this final irony? Did Peter route ships this way deliberately, so that the last glimpse of our country should be its oldest prison? But no, Sasha’s face is turned upon the thin strip of lights, but his eyes face an elsewhere, perhaps those other lights, at the Stray Dog, that baked the powder on his face and cast long strips of shadow on the pale swell just above his eyes. You hated this masquerade of half-naked sweating girls in black lace garters and mascara streaks from real or performed tears, these ghostly, painted, sepia faces mouthing tongue in check eulogies and tear-jerking ribaldries. You aspired to high seriousness and found your mawkish, face-painted boy instead. This is why I cannot accompany you.
I cannot help this banal tone, I eulogize, I memorize his profile, I study the geography of his tendons taut under the white knuckles clenched over the rails. His hands. Lovers’ hands hurt me most, theirs is the last trace to leave me, how they hold and hold down, stroke, tease and satisfy. Also how they first traversed the distance of the table to graze mine (that first night, December 1918) and how hands will be the last of us to touch. Courtship. Sex. Farewell. An affair of the hands.
We dock in X just as the Eastern sky begins to glow, illuminated as yet from off-stage. I help the men unload your luggage. A carriage is waiting to take you to the train station. What is there left to say. You always did say it best, like in the song you sang that night, a gypsy song, the cruel romances you were so fond of, called “Long Roads.” Driving on a troika decked with sleighbells, but long ago our destination’s passed. Walk with me, you ordered more than asked that first night after the show. I did and we strolled along the Neva with the other June insomniacs in the hot pre-thunderstorm nights of revolution. That walk ends on this far shore here tonight. Your hand is cold on my chin, slides down my neck, then withdraws.
3 comments:
This felt totally gothic to me. I really liked the focus on the hands, and the drama of departure is presented beautifully. I read it a couple of times and it became clearer each read-through.
Asya--I am hooked. From the first line, I want to know so much about the story: where are they going, why do they need to go now, why do they choose night when they don't have to?
This is a great beginning to a short story--you have all the elements going into it--vivid characters, a real sense of place, a forward momentum.
You don't need to answer this question--this is just the beginning--but I'm curious about who "you" is. There's me, the reader, but I have the sense that the "you" is specific. Great job!
I loved the image of St. Petersburg condensing like a necklace, and the way you show the distance b/w these characters in the different things they see in the city disappearing on the horizon. I think the "affair of the hands" idea and the way you articulate it are great. Could be a nice motif that would play throughout the story.
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