Trying

Ice pit

Ice bites into my fingers. It’s not going to hold. Already, I can feel sandy granules breaking off against my skin. This isn’t solid, like some sheet of water frozen in one go; this isn’t orderly molecules aligned in hexagonal prisms. No, this is an amalgam of ice pebbles, with a mortar as arbitrarily strong as my muscles: some strong, some weak, some tearing under the strain.

A twitch vibrates up my thigh; I can’t hold out much longer. What can my abducting muscles handle: 80 lbs? And they’re holding at least 150. My triceps scream, but they can hold the other 100 lbs for a few minutes more. Enough to ease myself out of this chimney.

God, damn it. I saw the rock. I knew it was there. I know better than this, to walk near one. I know they melt the snow under the crust, leaving pockets. And I fucking walked right into it. Foom. Buried to my thighs, ice walls on my right and nothing but pocket everywhere else. Just air, like someone decided to make me a bedroom in the great outdoors. My breath didn’t even frost down there; it must be 40 degrees. The ceiling dripped onto the sides of the rock, releasing silicate smells in the dampness. My salvation, however tempting, would not be the rock. “Rock solid” doesn’t apply to the snow around the damn thing. Ice walls it would have to be.

And now, most of the way up the ice walls, the side of each knee digging into any divot I can find, I grip the top of the crust of snow, away from the rock, and I know it’s not going to hold. It’s going to crack, or melt under my bare fingers, or it’s going to break when my thighs give out.
I pull my body up, an inch at a time. I don’t even hear the break.
I fall. Foom. Into the snow. Back into my bedroom of ice.
Would it be so bad, to take a nap here? I’m tired. My legs are shaking and now my arms are shaking and when was the last time I ate anything?
The snow collapses in my hand. I suck the water, so much less voluminous than the snow. No napping. Recharge and retry.

The walls are too clean. No footholds, but too close together to put my back to one and push against the other. That would be the ideal way, my biceps femoris and my quads can support my whole weight plus a hundred pounds, easy, indefinitely. Well, for minutes and minutes and minutes. Enough minutes to get the Hell out of here.

The walls are too clean. I know that’s my problem. My real problem. I’m only stuck in here because I can’t get a grip. I only have the one knife—no climbing picks. But compress ice and what happens? Water. One of the few substances on Earth for which that’s true. And a knife functions on what? Pressure. Force applied to a small area-the edge. Maybe I can cut some footholds, some handholds. After all, I’m in here until I get out, right? I have all the time in the world. Three weeks, to be exact, since I have insulation in the form of the air bubble in the snow, and I have fresh water. I’ll live until I starve, and with my reserves, that could be more than three weeks. Plenty of time to cut into the ice.

I push the blade, using my weight and not my muscles to apply the pressure. It’s working. The knife is sinking in: a half a centimeter. A centimeter. This might actually work. Ugh! But it’s hard!

Fuck it. I’m not going to try that hard. This place is comfortable. So what if I die here? It’s nice here. I’ll work with what I’ve got in here and I won’t use my tools or put in a lot of effort. Besides, the snow will melt some day and I’ll be able to just walk out of here. In three weeks, it will be May. I’m sure it won’t snow much in the meantime.

My stomach growls. Muscles shake. God, but I’m hungry. Oh, well. It doesn’t matter anyway. This story was just for fun.

…and THAT, my dear colleagues, is why it is so frustrating when people don’t really try your advice, or they say they aren’t serious after you’ve done a lot of work. Trying and failing is fine, as you can see in the story. But not trying hard is unsatisfying. We are all the protagonists of our life-stories. If we don’t try with every bit of what we have, or if we say it’s not serious, then we are doing a great disservice not only to ourselves, but to the audience—our loved ones, our friends, our acquaintances who watch our lives. And how many times will you read a story if you know the protagonist always gives up? How often will you engage?

To the Cusp

My parents could have worked in Marketing for any University in the world. All my life, they told me that if I just hung in there, I would go to college, where the professors would take me to the cusp of knowledge, to the very precipice, to the cliff, after which the wide gulf of discovery would open up before me.

The cusp.

That’s where I feel now. Not the cliff my parents talked about, but the crest of a hill. Right now all I can see is my dashboard and the sky, but in a minute or two, my car will level out and I’ll see the wide world of creating verbal art. I’ll see it from the airplane perspective: all geometric fields and wooly forests. Rivers of plot wind through character rills, and the perfect stone outcroppings dot the world like upthrust thumbs.

The sensation started with the gut-level understanding of something that had only lived in my head: stories are manufactured. Everything in them is planned and calculated for effect. They are DESIGNED.

Well, duh. That’s what my head said. Of course they are manufactured. They don’t grow under mushrooms (although a few ideas have grown OUT FROM mushrooms, I must admit).

But my heart did not hear this. My heart heard: I will sit at my keyboard and story shall stream from my fingertips!

Then I picked up Swain. And I believed. Ahh! Cried the angels. I learned even more: climax must be a choice between what is right and what is easy, for both the protagonist and often the antagonist. Then the character should get what he or she deserves: the essence of (not the actual) his goal, or conversely the actual accomplishment, but robbed of meaning. Judgment. Justice.

Stories aren’t real life! Bad guys get punished. People get second chances! Good guys finish, if not first, at least with their dignity intact! Oh my God, how did I never see this?

After that, of course I devoured Stein. And Stein had even more to say: dialogue should be a confrontation. An oblique one. It shouldn’t sound “real”, because you’re only using the meat. But it should be distinguishable, from character to character.

Wow.

And then, the coup de grace: What we want to see is that picture in the pocket that the characters hide from everyone else. That one soul-jerking moment, that one vulnerable spot.

This echoes with what Randall has been teaching: be vulnerable. Suddenly, I read Stein saying the same thing: Start with your vulnerable moment. Start with that photo you wouldn’t show your best friend, that the paramedics would find upon searching your pockets, and you’d be mortified (dead!) if you knew they saw it: the dirty undies of your soul.

And here I am, encased in this knowledge, cresting this hill: I get it. I get it, and I’m ready to DO it. I will dive into the gulf of discovery, taken to the cusp of knowledge by these wonderful authors and editors.

And, after a good swim, I’ll be ready to dive back into these and other books for my next cusp.

NYC Midnight Short Story Contest_ Made it through the First Round!

I made it through the first round of the NYC Midnight Short Story Competition. I'm very excited. We were separated into heats, and the top five stories from each heat were selected to continue. I was heat 18, if you want to check it out here.

The story requirements were genre: historical fiction (not my forte), Character: ballerina, and plot device: secret club.

Burning Truth

SYNOPSIS: Marguerite de Valois, Queen of France, wrote her memoirs while imprisoned by her brother in his castle. Only after she delivers them to their keeper, where they remain hidden until her death, does she sit at her desk to pen the true story of her husband’s salvation from the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

To read the Actual letters, click here: http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Memoirs-of-Marguerite-de-Valois-V1.html 

***18-Burning Truth

Marguerite de Valois, Queen of France, fanned herself with her palimpsest of secrets. Though pursing her lips might ruin her powder, she made the face anyway. No one of consequence would see it. Unlike this salty memoir in her hands, most of which was even true.

The tang of blood burned her mouth as she chewed her lip. If she tarried any longer, her resolve might burn to ashes. She must execute this final transaction anon.

Queen Marguerite thrust the parchment toward a servant. Slender fingers, cool and sure, closed around her clammy ones.

“Here!” Marguerite commanded. “I charge you to take this and hide it where you will. Do not release these words of scandal and mischief until my death.”

She whirled away from her act, heavy skirts swishing. Rank fear billowed from under brocade and starched collars. The servant should have left by now, but Marguerite heard her breath.

“I may be a prisoner in this castle,” Marguerite complained, “but I am still wife to King Henry IV of France, am I not?”

A familiar squeak sounded behind her. She did not turn. This would not do. This was no regular servant. This woman...she owed this woman her life, the Monarchy. The Queen softened her voice.

“Do as I bid, Anne. I swear upon my crown, my gowns, and the sweet Virgin that I have not exposed your role that night.” Marguerite turned back toward the woman. She held out her hands as if to grasp the servant’s, but stopped. Her hands rubbed themselves against her bodice, soiled by the mere thought. She locked eyes on the poor girl.

“Now, child, our previous familiarity endears you to me, and as a consequence, I have written this letter recommending your service to anyone who would wish to have you. I may never escape my gilded cage, but you will, my nymph. You have saved my silly Huguenot husband more than once; I will admit to wondering if the ballet you danced for the Royal wedding were some portent. But, enough." Queen Marguerite pointed her finger. "If you dally any longer, I will have your head. These parchments must be hid, rested until my demise. If word reaches me or my successors that these secrets came out, or were lost…my revenge upon my brother is worth even your life.

“Away with you, that you might be safe from Catholics and Huguenots alike. That my words might be safe from the Queen my mother, who schemes whilst her plots fail around her. Dance away.”

Hearkening to her former ballet career, Anne arose and glided through the doorway, past the guards in wigs, tights, and pikes. Now, with Anne safely away, she would write the last scandal: the secret clan of ballerinas and the improbable rescue by common court dancers.

She perched upon her ornate chair. A quill, not yet cold, fit snugly into her hand. There was nothing else to do, she reasoned. For her own safety she'd been imprisoned by her brother, so no fit vengeance for her lot in life existed except to tell the truth. The trivial truth from a woman, a non-entity, a vacuous girl with dreams and laughter in her head and no cares except donning the most expensive frock. Well, she’d given them that. No one could fault her for the whimsical tone in her memoirs, for that is how they saw her: whimsical. Weak. Powerless.

But here, in her hand, she held more power than her mother ever did. Catherine de Medici’s family thought power resided with the Church, but the Protestants proved it resided in ink when they printed those Bibles and unleashed the Huguenots upon the world. Words had beaten down the once mighty Catholic Church; her words would beat down this farce of a monarchy.

She dipped her nib into the ink, tapping her quill.

“Letter V Redux

“The True Events of the Massacre of the Huguenots on St. Bartholomew's Day.

“King Charles, as I have written before, a prince of great prudence, always paying a particular deference to his mother, did indeed adopt a sudden resolve to follow her counsel, and put himself under the protection of the Catholics. Sadly, it was not in his power to save the wretched Teligny, honorable La Noue, or M. de La Rochefoucauld.

“However, after Charles resolved upon the “Massacre of St. Bartholomew” with M. de Guise, the Princes, and the Catholic officers, and before I became aware of the goings-on inside the palace, my original history took a fictitious, though believable, bent.

“I did, as I reported so genuinely before, go to the Queen my mother’s bed chamber in my panic, whereupon it was not my sister who shared my mother’s chambers, but a lowly servant, whose tears gushed down her linens, and who begged me to stay and defy the Queen’s request for me to retire. The Queen was, as I wrote in my previous account, in discourse with another party whom I could not see. The servant sobbed so loudly I could not hear, except to hear the servant warn me that leaving the Queen’s bedchamber would mean my life, and I must not go.

“But the Queen commanded obedience, and, upon the Queen my mother’s wroth, the servant Anne, rushed me from the room, escorting me to my own chambers, and prevailed upon me to listen to her tales of intrigue. I would never have listened, despite our occasional dalliance in the past, except that, in all the palace, she seemed the only one to be informed as to the general panic and activity.

“As you may know, years before this night, on the subsequent festival days of my marriage to Prince Henri of Navarre, dancers performed in a series of festivities arranged by the Queen my mother, always so fond of the arts. Girls dressed in feathers and lace, disguised as nymphs, performed a dance, to wit a ballet, much to the delight of the Court. The aforementioned serving girl was one of these dancers. Without my knowledge, nor the knowledge of anyone in the Court, including the shrewd and observant Queen my mother, these dancers then insinuated themselves into the Courts and the nobles, with that oldest of recreations.

“Having taken up as lovers with the Princes of the Court and even the Huguenots in the country, who claimed to eschew such things, their secret group was in the perfect position to know the impending Massacre and to save the Royal family. You will recall, prior to the religious wars that plague our country, the manipulation and misalignments perpetrated by Queen Catherine served only to infuriate both sides. Far from quelling the fire of religious fervor, her acts merely fanned the flames of fanaticism. Thus, the plot.

“This the servant told me, crying into my ear, and bid me to stay in these my own bedchambers as she barred the door.

“The remainder occurred as written, with my husband the King and I retired for the night, although we did not sleep for fear, surrounded by his gentlemen and my new servant, Anne, whom no one recognized as the dancer. When, in the morning, King Henri IV and his gentlemen repaired for the tennis courts to speak to King Charles, and after the hour during which I finally reposed, the pounding on the door and the shouts, “Navarre! Navarre!” did wake me from my slumber and transfix my nurse, who threw open the door.

“Despite my previous chronicle depicting M. de Teian saving me from archers, the afternoon’s activities unfolded quite differently. M. de Teian did indeed recover from his injuries, which were sustained outside as he ushered the King to my room. But as it is unkingly for the King of France to hide inside his wife’s bedchamber, I have penned the fictitious account, sans dancers, sans secret groups, and sans hiding King. That the monarchy was saved not by the Grace of God, Protestant or Catholic, but by lowly courtesans brings me mirth and melancholy in equal measure.”

Marguerite sprinkled sand upon the parchment. Her lungs deflated as she leaned back. Her corset creaked. This history, the true version, amused her now that years separated her from the affair’s tensions. She stood and held the parchment up to the light streaming in her window. Her words droll now that the smell of blood and steel no longer assaulted her nose, now that the bile of fear no longer soured her breath.

Yet what would such amusement serve? What would the commoners do if they realized their exalted King had shivered and cried in the night, and accidentally stabbed a man, already injured, who’d come to protect him?

It would not serve. If Kings were not chosen by God to rule—Queen Marguerite shuddered to think. She drifted toward the fire.

If Kings were not chosen by God, but were flawed people, no more special than common dancers and serving girls, then she could foresee a true massacre. A real French revolution. Her hand fluttered to her chest. No, that could never be. Not now, not in 200 years. But it was one thing to narrate the Court’s licentiousness. It was quite another to defame the King, to mortify him. The Court was no place for truth.

She bent toward the grate, dropping her secrets into fire. Blackened, the parchment crackled and curled in the flames.