:. www.geocities.com/leydensjar -> My Own Words -> What Thou Wilt

Preamble/Disclaimer/Author's Note: I need to redraft this story. 'Nuff said.

Technical Note: I converted this from a Word document, then cleaned up the HTML code as much as I could. If you are having trouble viewing this page, drop me a line at [email protected]

What Thou Wilt.

            I knew this night would reopen old wounds. It was late afternoon when Seb called to say Chris was in town.  It had been years since I had last seen Chris and many reasons why I stayed out of contact.  Nevertheless, Seb wanted to call Dan and have a small school reunion.  I hated nostalgia.
           The night began pleasant enough with wood-fired oven pizza and the ubiquitous small talk: Chris’ new car, Dan’s new son (with photos).  I listened, smiled, steered the conversation away when it came to close, playing on their interests.  Pizza was followed coffee and the beginning of reminisces.  Remember when David climbed that elm to rescue the ball and split his leg?  And what about Jody and whatsisname; are they still together?  We found ourselves back at Seb’s small apartment with more wine, a pack of cards, and Chris digesting noisily.
            “Your bid.”
            “Five spades.”
            “Sebastian?”
            “Five ... six.  Hearts.”
            “... ah, I’ll pass.”
            “Ditto.  Any higher, Chris?"
            “It’s yours, Seb.”
            Seb reached for the kitty, and began to reassemble his hand.  I rocked back on my chair draining my glass.  Chris waggled the bottle at me, and I let him pour me another.
            “That was a nice drop,” Dan was saying, eyeing the last of the Cabernet in my glass.
            “Exquisite,” agreed Seb.
            “Pass us that...” Dan was reaching for the bottle.  “Cabernet,” he read, and rolling his ‘r’s:  “Margaret River.” 
            “Margaret River, River, River...” Chris chanted to himself.  Then: “Do you guys remember that Rydler girl?”  I shot a look at Seb who glanced at me with a slight smile.  I grimaced, and rolled my eyes.
            “Yeah, that strange girl,” began Dan.  “Felicity-”
            “Fiona,” I said, putting down my glass.  “Now, Seb, are we going to get this show on the road?”
            Seb threw down a card, and I remembered.

~

            I remembered the awkward new girl sitting at the back of the class.  She seemed nervous and alone, letting her pen drift over the textbook page.  Not that anyone noticed her; that normal crowd who were normal only by their majority surrounded her on either side.  They sat and spouted their mindless banter on fashion and gossip and the latest soaps.  While I watched, she looked up and met my eyes for the barest moment before I shot my gaze back to my book, my ears burning.
           At the lunch break I found her again, in the library.  I avoided the assistant librarian stalking the shelves, feigning interest in a cluster of books on palaeontology.  But my eyes were focussed beyond the shelf, on the new girl.  Her back was to me, but I could see the edge of her cheekbone peeking around the edge of her marmalade hair.  Her figure was svelte, and had the rounded shoulders of someone uncomfortable with their height.
            She looked over her shoulder and I didn’t turn away.  She looked, and smiled.

~

            “Skinny girl,” Chris was saying, throwing down a card.  “Quiet, too.”
            “The ones to look out for...” mused Dan.  I didn’t look up from my hand; ignorance shouldn’t be mistaken for callousness.
            “Come on, John,” said Seb.  “Hearts are trumps.”
            “The glade,” she had told me, and I sought her there.

~

            The morning rain had not yet cleared, and I found myself trudging through the damp grasses, soaking the cuffs of my jeans.  The thought of turning back and heading to the comfort of home competed with the desire to see her.  I arrived at the edge of the glade, and all thoughts of home drained away.
            She was dancing, a light blue dress flowing about her, her pale arms and legs moving with unseen grace to her inner music.  I crouched by a tree and allowed myself become entranced. The sun broke through the clouds, and the rain in the glade became a hail of shooting stars.  She must have known I was there, but of the shy school-girl I saw none.
            She moved towards me, yet her motion never faltered, even as she took my hand.  I was lead out from my shelter, and she danced before me, ignoring my self-consciousness.  My leather boots were sopping and gelt heavy on my feet; her own were naked, and skipped over the grass.
            “I want to show you something!” She pulled at my hand and I ran after her out of the glade.  Not far was a shallow pond, its surface was a mass of turbulent and tiny contours and it sang with every raindrop.  She pull her dress over her head and I turned away, suddenly embarrassed by her unabashed nakedness.  She splashed into the weedy pond and waved at me.  “Come on!”
            I hesitated and stared at her.  She was crouching low in the water, its surface just touching her chin.  She raised an eyebrow in bemusement.
            “Do what thou wilt,” she spoke as if quoting,  “shall be the whole of the Law...”
            My jeans stuck to me as I tried to pull them off, and my skin turned instantly to goosebumps with the brush of the wind.  I jumped into the pond quickly to cover my nakedness and gasped at the cold.  She laughed and clapped her hand above her head.
            “Here, look at this.”
            The water between us began to flash with rainbow colours.  Tiny fish swarmed in tight concentric circles, their silvery scales catching the light, refracting and splitting it.  They are disturbed for a moment when she moves through them, reaching for my hand.  Her sky blue eyes met mine, and deep within me I felt something trip, a challenge being thrown down.  Never before had I the gall to do this, and I pushed aside my dissenting thoughts as I touched her face, and then kissed her lips.
            It was as she kissed back that I noticed her hair was perfectly dry.

~

            The following week is now a blur like some random tapestry of memories.  When I try to remember I begin tugging on threads and then retreat as the entire work threatens to fall and smother me.  Just some images, some scenes, I can remember with something resembling fondness, though the bitterness is forever beneath the surface ready to snare.  During the day we were strangers, barely passing or looking at each other.  My world was one of books and numbers, endless academic hurdles I was made to jump.  During those times I think she was alone, shunned by the Normals.
            At night we would meet at our glade, and we would be different people.  She would always beat me there, and I would arrive to find her, usually dancing, at times sitting with what seemed like idle doodles on the ground around her.  She had named me Beren, and she became Luthien, the tragic lovers of Middle Earth.
           Once I found her lying in the middle of the glade, a candle on the ground above her head.  She was pale, even in that dim light, yet I stood aside and watched.  For the first time I could see the pendant that she wore around her neck, which was usually hidden beneath her shirt.  It was a star of five points attached to a thin silver chain.  A few times I felt a chill cross my back despite the steamy and humid night.  I resisted the urge to go to her, shake her, wake her.
            My pale Luthien finally stirred, blinked her eyes and looked at me.
            “I was watching you,” she said, simply.  “I was there, and I could see everything.”  Her finger pointed to the low bough above my head.  Her other hand was clasped tight.  She rolled to blow out the candle, and I saw she had been lying on a delicate symbol drawn upon the ground.  I crouched to examine it.
            “What do you believe?” I may have said to her.  She touched my face and gently kissed my cheek.  What she said, I can’t remember verbatim.  I wish I could, just to try and understand her.  It was something about pleasure, personal and sensual pleasure that is the sole good. 
            “You understand it, don’t you?”  Her hand was seeking for mine, and I saw her other hand moving for her pocket, dropping in small squares of paper.  My rational mind was screaming at me as I told her, yes.

~

            Chris gathered up the cards an began to clumsily reshuffled the deck.
            “She fell into the drug scene,” I vaguely heard Dan saying.  He clicked his tongue as he accepted his cards.  “God, I remember hearing a story.  She gave David a blow job during Phys Ed when the rest of us were running around that bloody oval....”
            “Bullshit!” Chris dropped some cards.
            “Who told you that?” asked Seb.  “Not ... David?”  He gave a laugh. 
            Dan floundered for a moment.  “In fact,” my heart sank as he look at me, a cold light dawning on him.  “What was your involvement with her?  I remember Lindsay telling me...hang on.  Lindsay’s party.  What was the deal there?”
            “A lot of shit went down that night,” muttered Seb.  He waved his cards.  “Five spades.”
            Dan mused over his hand and Chris turned to me.  “You were hanging around her, weren’t you?  Was she screwing as many people as they said?”

~

            Lindsay’s party happened.  In my mind it was a singular event, though he had many parties.  It was just eight days after I had met my Luthien, a week of exploring a side of my nature I never knew before.
            I had arrived alone, something we had agreed before.  I began drinking beer and watching the Normals from my corner as the conversation ebbed and flowed over such banal topics.  Jobs sucks, parents suck, teachers suck, God I hate this town.  I ignored Dan at my elbow, talking assignments, and I drank far too much.
            My head was feeling heavy, but I made out words from the intent and hushed conversation behind me.  I heard a familiar name, the word ‘kiss’, and I felt an explosion of cold sparks in the pit of my stomach.  Leaving Dan to his shop conversations, I pushed outside, and sought the dark corner of the garden.  There was my Luthien, seated on the ground, her head leaning to the sky with her eyes shut, and the girl next to her who sat close, gently nuzzling Luthien’s neck, gently licking her ear-lobe.  As drunk as I was, I took in the scene, and felt a gamut of truths reviled at once.
            I cared for her a hell of a lot more than I admitted.  I had mistaken what had defined us.  I was a means to an end, a mere source of pleasure, and she didn’t care.  For all the exalted ideals of the pursuit of pleasure, it was ultimately a weakness of flesh, a forgetting of what it is that made me human.  Where was the compassion for others, for the other, because it always took at least two?
            Her eyes met mine, grey and hollow and devoid of surprise.  I turned, stumbling for the house, then found myself running for the street, pounding along the bitumen, bitterly screaming at the air until I tripped and stumbled to my knees.  Four hours of beer wanted out, and between bitter sobs I vomited loudly into someone’s rose garden.

~

            She came to visit the next day.  We stood under my veranda, intimacy forgotten, and gulf between us now felt immeasurable.
            “What now?”  I finally asked after the long and awkward silence.
            “What now?”  Her forehead wrinkled.  “Why should anything change?  You had fun...”
            “Jesus!  That’s not the point...”
            “It’s always the point,” she stated.  Her hand touched my folded arms.  “Please.  Beren-”
            “Don’t call me that!”  I wrenched away, bitting my bottom lip.  “This is crazy!  You have no idea of what I’m ... feeling at all.  For fuck’s sake, grow up and take a look around you ... at me ... all this bullshit...” I faltered.  I turn my head away, not able to meet her gaze.
            “Please believe it-”
            “Believe what?  You’re a fucking junky!”  I instantly regretted the words.
            “All right,” she said at length, her voice cool and brittle.  “I felt so alone when I arrived in this town.  I thought you were different to those others in that class, see the life that’s for living, so much to ... discover.”  Her hand was on her pendant.  “I thought I’d found someone to shall this world and to live this life.”  She flung at me a small paper tab that fluttered pathetically between us.  “I want to live!”
            I didn’t watch her go.

~

            “Six, seven, eight,” Chris counted.  “Eight tricks won, and we bid six.  That puts us...ah, five hundred and twenty.”
            “Well done, guys,” Seb gathered up the cards.  “Good game.”
            “Another?” suggested Chris.  I had had enough, and said so. 
            “We’d better be off,” said Dan, standing up.  “Seb, where’s your phone?  I’ll get a taxi.”  They disappeared though a door in search of Seb’s phone.  When they left, Chris rounded on me.
            “What happened to her?  One minute she was at school, the next - poof.”  He airily waved his hand.
            “She had to leave,” I said simply, and left it at that.

~

            The day after the argument I had skipped school and merely mopped about the house feeling nauseous.  Usually I was able to ignore or use the tension and do homework, but I found myself flinging textbooks from my desk and scrawling incomprehensible notes in the margins of my worksheets.  I gave up and buried myself into Dad’s armchair and pulled my knees up under my chin.  Every now and then I winced as another memory from the week broiled to the surface complete with emotions in glorious technicolour.  Dejected and wretched.  An insane resolve began to grip my mind, and searching my pocket, I found the small paper tab from the day before and held it to the light to regard it.  Then in one motion I popped it in my mouth and tried not to think about rat poison.
            Do what thou wilt.
            I flung myself out of the chair and out of the house.  The day was heavily overcast, but I wasn’t in the mood to notice.  My mind worked over the last week, searching each little moment, trying to find an angle to identify and understand what was happening.  Beneath my feet the ground changed from bitumen to gravel to grass.  By subconscious device or luck of some sort, I had walked back to the edge of our glade.  Further on I found the pond, a dry bowl in the ground.  I lay beside it and threw stones into the centre, imagining splashes.
            For a time I was content to mutter to myself, huddled and alone.  An hour may have passed before I began to notice a low buzz that began at the base of my skull.  I scratched at my head and watched the trees bend apart forming a path back to the glade.  Stumbling along it and there is my Luthien at the centre of the glade, erect and motionless, a hollow gaze centred on me as a pipe began to play, and with it Luthien began to dance, her arms lifting, her legs carrying her no where, and the clouds parted with golden and rainbow light streaming around her.  The grass jerked and reached for her and then the trees began to sway and dance with her in the motionless breeze.  Luthien in the sun was dancing.
            The buzz was becoming louder, and a great cloud of brown leaves were blowing through the glade, and still my Luthien danced through the leaves that weren’t leaves as I saw they were moving and dancing with Luthien though there was no wind, the wings of butterflies, brown with orange spots and flecks, flapped noiselessly around me, dancing out of the reach of my flaying arms and I too am dancing until I fall exhausted and one flutters near, the dancing leaves, butterflies, and alighted on my hand, my outstretched palm.  It had the body of a tiny naked girl, and she twirled on my hand as her sisters danced in the air around Luthien who was becoming harder to see, lost amongst a flurry of brown wings, tiny pink flesh, until all I saw was the cloud that danced and fluttered up up up, and the one in my hand danced slower then sank and sat and lay with wings covering its head and body and life.
            I closed my eyes to cry.

~

            Chris was pulling on his coat, swaying slightly.
            “Look, I have to ask,” he leaned on the doorframe.  “Were you screwing her too?”
            My fist clenched, and Seb pushed past me taking Chris by his arm.
            “Come on, taxi’s waiting.”
            I slumped back into my seat.  My head was reeling when Seb came back.  He poured me another drink.
            “Be alright?”
            I smiled slightly, and drank deeply.  “I miss her,” I said with a shrug.  “’Tis all.”
            He picked up the deck and began to flick and shuffle the cards together.  “You got hooked.  It happens.”
            For a while we sat in silence, the clicking of card the only noise.
            “Did you bring it?” he asked me, eventually.  For a time I met his gaze, then reached into my vest pocket and withdrew a small bundle wrapped in tissue paper.  Seb leaned forward as I delicately placed the bundle on the card table and gently unwrapped it.
            Within the petals of tissue was a blob of hardened hobby-shop amber, transparent like polished glass.  It encased an impossible object, like a Barnum exhibit.  Small moth-like wings were a faded brown with what may have been at one time flecks of orange.  They were impossibly attached to a tiny feminine figure, curled and naked.  Seb reached out and gently stroked the glass with his forefinger, as if caressing that ethereal body, the memory of days past, a phenomenon.
            “Exquisite,” he sighed.

(Word count: 3,000)

Copyright 2002 Sean Elliott
All Rights Reserved