Monday, July 24, 2006

In the the nooks of my mind lives the dancer. She it is tumbling through my thoughts, swirling arcs of grace, like ribbons in the wind, dream catalyst by night, and under the sky of day, alive. I admire her in motion, blurring like a falcon in flight, or the subliminal slink before a vehement pounce. I see her wrapped in silk woven of clouds - and marvel.

I talk to her, but she never answers, not with words. I talk to others and see her winding into my vision with coordinated movements, slow, then with determined rapidity. In a sudden heartbeat she freezes, again to move as a feather in the still, summer air. I feel her swirl around me, close enough to touch, but impossible to reach. She is always there. I wonder if she sees me.

Once I viewed a sunset over the emerald waves - golden light, colors, as if a rainbow had spilled on the horizon, and her figure dancing on the water. I watched and wished I could name the way she moved - no word held so much poetry. I saw her dance with an invisible cyclone, revolving rhythmically before its twisting circumference, but always bending from its touch. Then I saw the stars dislodge from the sky and loom towards her, the center of the universe. The terrible illumination changed all colors to white. Peals of melodic thunder followed in their wake.

I closed my eyes at the apocalyptic glare and followed her dance through my intellect. She pressed her breasts to the wall of my mind, drowning the beat of my pulse. All was white and shades of white, except the pink of her skin and the dark honey of her auburn hair.

I blinked my eyes open and her form became sharper and clearly distinct.

"How are you feeling today?" she asked in my direction as she opened the curtains.

"Huh? Oh better, I think," I told her, slightly dazed.

"That's nice. You take it easy now."

As she walked past my bed I saw that she was a nurse.

Story #367

Thanks to Tilley, whose artistry is simply amazing, for sharing her photo.

Thanks to everyone who contributed a story (I'll comment on them shortly), and my apologies for being so impossibly late with my own story. My excuse:

Because of work and family I've had no time to concentrate on Indeterminacy - and it's been hot. The hottest July in Germany in over a hundred years, they're saying. My muse and I are reading "A Tramp Abroad" written by Mark Twain over a hundred years ago about his travels in Europe. He describes how hot it was here in Germany:

We followed the carriage-road, and had our usual luck;
we traveled under a beating sun, and always saw the shade
leave the shady places before we could get to them.
In all our wanderings we seldom managed to strike
a piece of road at its time for being shady. We had a
particularly hot time of it on that particular afternoon,
and with no comfort but what we could get out of the fact
that the peasants at work away up on the steep mountainsides
above our heads were even worse off than we were.
By and by it became impossible to endure the intolerable
glare and heat any longer.

I'm one of the peasants at work in a hot office. But now it's cooling off and I hope to post a story, and maybe a photo for the next round. Sorry to everyone who stopped by here hoping to read something.

26 comments:

The Clown said...

The fishermen invented her on the shore, senseless. But there was such peace in the way she had laid herself on the white sands that it seemed as if she has fallen asleep in her senselessness. When she woke up a few days later, the fisherman found that she had inherited a strange disease: she couldn’t touch things that were not the color of the gown she wore. Whenever she got inside a gown she was lost into it forever. She became a property of the color itself and all other objects of the diverse colors became insubstantial.

After the wars, the village had to be reconstructed from its ruins. As a message of the eternal peace that it longed for and the gloom from which it was waking up, every wall in the village had been painted in a dull shade of white. When the fishermen found the girl they decided to dress her in all the gleeful colors. She was like the new-found hope that the sea had brought for them. This worked wonder for the girl. She could pass through every wall in the village. Unknown to any boundaries. She danced away the gloom on which the fishermen slept.

“I’ve to go away, now”, she said, one day.
“Why?” the fishermen asked, puzzled.
“Because all colors’ been given back to you. Your dreams have become colorful, once again.”
“But we’ve made you our goddess of peace and hope. Without you all colors would be incomplete.”
“I’m no goddess. You must let me go.”
“Sorry. We can’t let that happen. You’re our only hope.”

And so, she was stripped of her gleeful dress and was arrayed in a white gown. Then she was put inside one of the rooms.

She went and touched the wall. It was the first time she was touching the walls of the village. It was cold. For the first time she saw her shadow on the wall. She felt that from now onwards she belonged to the walls. And perhaps, to the transparent block of air that was her companion inside the wall.

As days passed and she played with the wall and the air and the dust, the dark blanket of gloom that she had lifted from the village started coming back to her. Slowly, the gloom and the dusts started covering her. Slowly, time turned her white gown to grey to deep ashes to dark. The fishermen discovered soon that the color of her gown was changing and that she could escape their village. So, they robed her in a new white dress.

That day the girl realized that she was no longer the goddess or even a girl for them. She was nothing more than a fish for them. A big catch!

That night, when darkness spread its independent arm on the village and all its walls darkened, she disappeared forever into the black. A pitch black!

The Clown said...

There's one more thing, Indie, that I'd like to mention - I'm not here to compete with you. Please don't bring in any concepts of competition here. Your writings are as different from mine as mine are from yours. I sincerely believe that the only person you can compete with in fiction is yourself. So, I'd request you or anyone else to make such undue comparisons if ever my writing succeeds in becoming even half as interesting as yours.
Have a wonderful weekend. Smile.

The Clown said...

*Correction*: it's 'not to make' in place of to make. Sorry.

alix said...

greetings, inde dear... long time no read.
hope you are well, and hope to get by more often.

Enemy of the Republic said...

This isn't a story: gosh, I like doing them and I don't do enough. Apologies for the lack of visit--how much for tickets to that festival--I am a medievalist--will they throw in the plane tickets from New York for free?

Doug The Una said...

"I should have known having all my keys made in white was a bad idea."

Mutha said...

"I know I left that magical portal around here somewhere...I've got to get out of here before someone sees me in this toilet paper outfit."

Anonymous said...

indie indie: enjoy and don't worry...........enjoy.............

Frances bo bancess said...

the room spun around once more and she was slammed against the wall. or was it the floor? or the roof even? she couldn't remember when she entered the room or how long she'd been there, but she was sure the light had been on the floor. or maybe it was on the ceiling and she had entered mid rotation. how had she entered the room in the first place? as she pondered where the door had gone the room spun around and she hit the roof now floor, knocked uncontious, blood dripping from her ears...

i'm a sucker for a bit of blood, confusion and tragedy. have a good one.

Doug The Una said...

Indie, your fans are a patient people, but we do have rooms like the one in the picture.

Indeterminacy said...

The tempation to read the stories posted already is very great, but I'm going to wait until mine is finished. It's about half-baked at the moment. It's very hot here, and impossible to think. Plus I found out how much I have to catch up with these days.

Cooper: Let's you and I disappear somewhere and procrastinate together.

Doug: I'm touched. Do you really think I have more than one fan?

Alix: I miss the days when you and Retarius were blogging. Those were great times.

Enemy: The Libori fest is free. The religious part of it is celebrated in the Paderborn Cathedral - once a year since before the year 800 or something there's a procession with the remains of the Saint Libori. That's truly incredible. In modern times the city has one week-long long party to accompany that. Music and events everywhere. It's well-kept secret. I used to live there too. There's a site but it's in German: www.libori.de.

Mutha said...

No apologies necessary Indie. Hang in their with Twain and the heat!

Anonymous said...

Coelia had spent the last ten years as a teacher, before that, ten years in service, and before that, ten years in training. She could barely remember the years before that. Certainly, her hand-ground grain childhood had been transformed into an ostrich pâté, dormice stuffed with nuts, and fricassee of roses in pastry shells maturity. In all that time she had kept, true in her heart, a flame which could not be quenched - ignis inextinctus she called it, being true to the romantic that she was.

And now, after the years of waiting, Coelia could be free of the vestments of the refined living, she would finally be free to follow her heart’s desire.

In the fleeting moments, the throbbing silences, she made herself even more beautiful using the unguents and the colours available to her in that time, anointing her most secret pulses with rare fragrances from the East. Coelia donned her gown, and fixed the sacred ribbons in her hair like a bride. Her breath was uneven as her heart pounded with the excitement. The years of training coupled with the ever present burn of the flame, had honed her desire, her lust, her passion to an intoxicating frenzy that now, finally could be made manifest.

Quaking, she stepped forward, and a voice, animal with desire, called from the core of her heart - ‘I seize you, beloved.’

No woman, none, neither before nor since, has ever felt so sure about wallboard.

Doug The Una said...

Indie, there must be a half dozen of us or more. Heat is misery.

~Nitoo Das~ said...

Hi Indie,
Just came over to say hello. Too busy with work to get much blogging and commenting done. :(

Indeterminacy said...

Clown: I'm in awe at the poetry of your story.

I never want anyone to think this is a competition with anyone - it's all about the varying impressions to the photo.

Mutha: You have a great sense of humor and fantasy. Fantasy humor. I'm long overdue to write a funny story, but I can never chose what comes out.

Lynsey: Your choice of words and vocabulary are inspiring to me. It does seem like something magic should happen in that gown.

Doug: I do hope you're surviving. It's bad enough that I stopped blogging for a week.

River: Hello back to you. I had bad luck with work this week, that is, I had a lot of it - I've been staying late a few days and that took away all my time I usually had to visit and to write. You're always welcome to stop by as often as as seldom as you like.

---

Everyone: My apologies for the delay with the story. I'll tip you off to a post for next week. I was going through some boxes and found some early stories I wrote when I was about 10 years old. You will all find out what a prodigy I was at that tender age. Even then I was experimenting with short fiction, shock endings, stories msatched with a picture I drew myself. Oh will you all be amazed :-)

Indeterminacy said...

Frances: I forget to thank you for your story yesterday - sorry. I enjoy the blood. Way back whenever I wrote something there would be blood, or something drastic. Usually I blew up everything in the end. I'm yearning for a return to the days when I could write a story that was one paragraph.

Doug The Una said...

Indie, that's the best thing I've read in a long time. Worth the wait. Or most of the wait.

Indeterminacy said...

Thanks Doug! And that takes a lot of pressure off. Because now all I have to do is write the worse thing you read in a long time and I'll have done everything. I'm sure that won't take long.

Miz BoheMia said...

Wow Indie! That was beautiful and I do not quite know what to say! Glad to have you back and yeah, this heat is unbearable! Hope it gets down to tolerable soon!

Indeterminacy said...

Hey Miz B, It's a warm feeling knowing you enjoyed the story. To me the photo is especially lovely and aesthetic to look at. Now I hope I can get my next story written by Monday.

Anonymous said...

That was worth the wait inde.


I wish people would stop feeling like they have to make excuses for not having the time - i mean i do the same thing.

Maybe we could all go to some kind of therapy together say in..........Istanbul.

Doug The Una said...

Indie, just get in on time, ok, buddy?

Cooper, sounds grand. Those of us who still post regularly need the therapy even worse.

Becca said...

That is a beautiful story... it means all the more to me because I am a dancer! Thankyou for using my photo, and thankyou to everyone who commented with their great stories too!

Indeterminacy said...

Cooper: Thanks - I feel better now about being so late. Istanbul sounds great. I also enjoy the therapy of the North Sea strand in the Netherlands.

Doug: Stop hetzing me! Cooper said it's ok.

Pizazz: Your thumbs up means a lot to me. I forgot to mention, if you'd like to repost this anywhere, that's fine. It is a lovely photo.

Becca said...

Indie - I have posted your story here, and credited you. http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/38751729/

Everyone else - I posted all your stories there too, with your names and links to your blogs. Hopefully that'll be okay with you all, if not, let me know and I'll take them down right away.