Hello again! It’s been awhile hasn’t it?
CR has been blipping in and out of conciousness a lot lately. People are busy, etc. It’s looking like FINALLY our next show might be under way. It might not be for awhile though however becaauuusseeee… I got a directing job!
Outside of CR with University of Queensland’s resident theatre company, Underground Productions. I’m so EXCITED! It’s weird working outside my comfort zone, but that plus applying for Short + Sweet festival as a director, really makes me proud of how well I’m doing. Our next show should be casting in around early June/July.
But for now, here is something you haven’t seen for a VERY. LONG. TIME.
An original fiction excerpt! Feel free to make any comments or queries on this post about it 🙂
Buh-bye for now,
Jay x
“Arlyn in the bath”
“I’m in here!” she called.
I followed the voice through a white door with cracked paint, and into what I realised was the bathroom. I turned to leave, obviously there had been a mistake. Had I heard her wrong? She couldn’t have meant for me to meet her in here, like…well, that.
“Where are you going? Stay. Sit.”
She lay there in the tub, head lolled back. Her lips parted and I swear it was like she was breathing in my ear from across the room. It was like listening to the ocean in a shell, ebb and flow. Each shuddering breath sent a shiver down my spine. The hairs raised themselves on my arms. I moved to the toilet and sat down on its closed lid. I kept my eyes averted.
Reaching her hand into the air and out of the water which tinkled softly when it came back down to its mother source, Arlyn curled her hand like she was caressing a ball of glass. In the centre of her hand, appeared a ball of slowly tuning liquid. It floated in the air and when she gently waved her hand over it, it slowly tipped and poured itself into the bath. The bubbles dissipated quickly and for a brief moment the water was clear and her body was exposed, before the water turned a milky blue colour. A scent of something distinctly berry like wafted into the air on the coattails of the steam.
“Like what you saw?”
I distinctly got the feeling that I shouldn’t answer that. I shot her a quick sideways glance and was sure I saw something slither up into her hair, towards the nape of her neck.
“Well?”
“Ah. Well, I wasn’t really looking. I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Well, yes. I mean, I wasn’t looking, intentionally. It was an accident.”
“So you don’t want to look at me?”
“Well I… I would look at you if you wanted me to. otherwise no, I would not look at you.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
I could feel face starting to perspire. I lied to myself: said it wasn’t nerves or fear, it was the heat of the enclosed space, filled with steam. It didn’t help. I’m a terrible liar.
“Do you, want, to look at me?”
I stayed silent long enough for her to conjure another one of her water changing air ball thingies. This time, the water turned a bright shade of pink. I could actually taste the bubblegum in the viscous air around me.
“Who doesn’t want to look at beautiful things?”
“So you want to look at me. You like looking at me.”
Every answer that slunk its way past my lips felt like another nail in my coffin. “Err, I suppose.”
“Good.”
I didn’t have to look at her to know she was smiling. Not a sweet, shy smile; or a confident happy smile, but sharp edged smile, like a kiss from her would slit my throat.
“I assume you want to fuck me. Take me, like a damsel in distress, save me from the evil of the world and have me faun over you like a sad little puppy that’s been beaten by its owner.”
She was sitting up now, I’d heard the bathwater move but I barely dared to look at her. Her voice seemed to be reverberating off the walls in the small humid room. Slapping and splashing against the ceramic: the bathwater was moving on its own. The toilet water underneath me was making a ghastly racket and the pipes were groaning like they were about to be ripped out of the wall.
“I’m sorry to inform you my darling little guppy brain but I am not your manic pixie dream girl, and I will not be allowing you to spread your foul semen into my lake of eternal purity!”
After this point her voice had become nothing but a squeak, almost like a dolphin. Actually, exactly like a dolphin. She was standing now, her body hidden behind a vortex of pink bathwater, her hair moved around her face writhing like leeches against her skin. I sat, legs pulled up off the flaw, curled in a ball, on top of the toilet. Like a huge wuss. I lifted my head and called to her through the din.
“Actually, I just wanted to know about your childhood! Nothing else! No fucking! Not taking! No foul semen tarnishing lakes of eternal purity!”
She seemed confused at my words. “Oh?”
“Yes.” I nodded my head slightly.
“Well then.” she said. With what I’m sure was with a flick of a tentacle like tendril of hair, the house storm ended. The water sloshed back down into the bath and Arlyn with it. She sat, bathroom dripping, exactly as she was before. “I suppose I could share a little of my story with you, if you don’t intend to defile me.”
“No defiling. Promise.” I said giving her a shaky thumbs up and lowering my feet to the floor.
She launched right into her mental memoir, “One of the first houses we lived in was like out of a fairy story…”
For I Am Made of Stars 