She Left Me Roses By The Stairs

Dancing was her passion, more than anything. Her sister played, and she danced, and Graham sometimes sang. The faded black top hat made the rounds of their audience, and when they did well Alis always made sure that she got a bit of a treat.

Sometimes, it was as simple as a coveted bit of sweets, sometimes they would get to go out for a night, the three of them together. Sometimes it was a new skirt of scarf, or even once, a ridiculous hat that she'd wanted.

It sometimes reminded her of their father, and the way they had both always come running to his arms when he had that certain look. He never could keep a secret from his little girls, especially when it was a good one. When they were doing well, when he could still work, when they could still get pennies and sometimes more from the rest of the caravan with their playing.

Meg still misses him, and she is certain that , wherever her sister is, she won't forget about her life here. She's sure that Alis could never forget Papa, of Graham, or herself.

But she's worried that Alis won't find her way back home again, with them always on the move.

Her bow dances across the strings of her fiddle, voice raised to carry, one booted foot tapping out the beat.

""Kalinka, kalinka, kalinka maya," she sings. Words not her native tongue but once taught to her in the form of song. She has sped it up slightly from some of the more traditional versions for the purposes of dancing.

So far the audience is enjoying it, dance and drink, food and merriment carrying for once no resentment of silence and loneliness to come after.

She has found someone, now. Maybe she doesn't love him quite the way she loved Graham, maybe she is trying very hard to still believe she does not love him at all, but one day she will admit it to herself. For now it is enough just to be overly fond of him and enjoy her time in his presence.

Even if he is a fedora.

Boxes, books, moving, packing.

A million times helping a friend move, clean, pack. Always so much fun to play, chat, discover. Momentary lapse, timer that ticks away the seconds moments instead of letting them go by in silence. Impatient little thing, chugging away, tick-tick-tick, the sound of boxes being filled. The smell of dust and books, and occasionally a cat will wander by and gaze distrustfully.

Who am I? Why am I here among their things moving packing being talking?

Scattered things about, waiting. One thing at a time, box by box. It is only three floors down and along a hallway that these objects are being relocated.

Move, shift, travel, work, play.

After we finish for the day perhaps we will go out, have dinner and drinks and walk the two blocks back.

Tomorrow will be short and early, on a ferry in the afternoon to go with family, to enjoy that company.

Structure
Building
Brick building
Post Office

The old red brick post office at the end of the road

Structure
Building
Statue
The Statue of Liberty

Lady Liberty, standing tall and proud; a gift on our shores.

Remember the city, the way it once was. Remember the lights you would use to find your way home in the rapidly cooling desert night. Remember the love in the air, the feeling of belonging. A city of strangers, all of them here for similar reasons. Every single one of you becomes the city, creates the city, lives in the city, and when you all leave it is as though the city never was. All the remains is dust and wind and the feeling of that love soaked into the ground.

Piecemeal, the city grows one person at a time, one beautiful stranger after another.

Dance, there, in the pounding music in the desert night. Surrounded by the city that truly never sleeps, allow yourself to be lulled to dreams on the distant sound of revelry and awake as the morning becomes too warm. Step out into the softness of morning, the heat of daytime sun, the drowsy daylight company. Pass by strangers and friends alike in a haze, in a daze of wonder at all that came before and all that is yet to come.

Remember your dreams of the desert. Remember the city of dreams in the desert.

Remember to go home again.

There is no such thing as a true silence, except within sensory deprivation. There is always some sound, even if it is so commonplace in the background that we now consider it to be among the silence.

The humming of a refrigerator in the middle of the night, the breath of a sleeping lover, the creaks and pops of a settling house, the crackle and snap of a water heater clicking on to heat the water for your morning shower. These all comprise a sort of mundane silence.

The quiet of an early morning (or a very late night) before the sun is even beginning to peek over the horizon, walking in the silence of a sleeping city. The far-off hum of those few cars at such an hour, the barely-audible buzz of streetlamps and a passing neon sign.

These are all the best kinds of not-quite silences, to me.

In the dim reaches of the forest, where the sunlight is filtered through so many leaves and vines that it is dark and green and warm, heavy with the heat and the moisture in the air, that is where we are. That is where we belong, wild and feral and free. Surrounded by growing things, treading lightly through the vines and over the fallen trees.

That is where we pause, ravenous for the taste of one another, once-starved for affection and now unafraid to touch. Fingertips on bare skin, palms warm as they slide flat over heated skin, mouths hot and slick and right. Hands rough from days of work, fingers that taste of earth and greenery. Sweat-slicked skin, tanned dark from the sun's touch, the flavour of love on our tongues.

Fresh fruit, found ripe on the vine and playfully finger-fed in avid adoration. Berries stain our fingertips, peaches leave our faces sticky-sweet, apples are a wondrous burst of crisp across our tongues. Childlike, they'd say, but they have no idea how very adult we are. We have transcended the limits of their reality and become Other, and we have lost our way back but we do not care.

We do not care to go back, to stay among the buildings so tall, the speeding cars, the rules and limitations of their lives. We do not want that for ourselves. Away from them, we have all we need. We have each other.

We lose ourselves in one another, in the wilderness and the wildness. Rarely do we stray from our self-imposed exile, for necessities we cannot make ourselves, things stolen in the dead of night. In the silence of the before-dawn hour, we creep around the edges of your real world, thieves and beggars with wide blue eyes and leaves in our hair.

In the remains of our tattered clothing, new scratches and age-old scars adorning our ankles like jewelry, we emerge barefoot into the realm of your harsh streetlights and exhaust fumes. Clever fingers pick out clandestine notes on street corners, while bare feet dance uncaring of the litter on the sidewalks. Our laughter rings out, and the jangle of occasional coins tumbling into a hand-made jar becomes a part of the music.

Like the sun, we disappear back to whence we came, wild children with our pockets full of trinkets. Fingers entwined, heads together as we whisper dreams into the twilight hour, weaving castles with our words. Building shelter out of vines and scraps, lying together beneath the stars, we count our treasures. First and foremost among them is always each other.

We count every inch of skin, mapped beneath our fingertips and mouths, laughter in the muggy autumn evening. Every breath in tastes of earth and green and pheromones, and we are dizzy with the touching. Travel the universe in a dizzy spiral, wrapped up in one another, moving in unison towards a shared goal.

Translocated, sharing hitched breaths, lost together as one into the planetary spin until we crash like waves and come down again to earth. Breathless and amazed, we stare, panting, at the sky, and laugh together with the slow ebb of our racing pulse. And then we drift, in quiet tones, beyond the dreams of daytime and into the dreams of the night, alone only behind our closed eyelids.


~Unfin~

Title: Unrequited Love
Author: wild-dreamer
Fandom: Angel Sanctuary
Pairing: Sara/Setsuna
Summary: Sara thought she knew the truth about her brother, but when he leaves her with the idea that he might not love her after all, she can't help feeling like there's still something he's hiding. The next evening she finds her way to him in order to convince him to tell her the truth.
Warnings: If you've seen the series, you know there's incest everywhere you look. If you haven't, well, there's incest everywhere. Read at your own risk.
Beta thanks to Teh Antisecks and FMTenpo for the story, and to Packmentality for beating the spelling and grammar mistakes out of it. Violently.

( Unrequited Love )

And thus ends Part One. I'm trying to decide if I want to finish writing Part Two (which is from Kira's PoV)...

Comments?

And the child wants to return to Wonderland. Beauty in the night air, comfort from the cold, but yet the adventure awaits.

Always waiting. Follow the Cheshire Cat, and not the Rabbit, child. The Rabbit is always late, though he hurries; it'll do you no good to learn from that. Follow the magic, mind your manners, and don't forget the nursery rhymes of your youth.

Yes, those ones, no not that, you've got them all wrong, child. Speak up, speak up, you're so timid you'll never be heard in all this din. Only that Cat might hear you, sitting on your shoulder as he is.

What, you didn't notice? He weighs as much as a grin, and that's all, my dear, or didn't you know?

Sometimes, little Alice, things are not always what they seem. Smile back at the moon.


She glances at the cigarette in her hand, wonders if she's had a bit too much to drink tonight. The woman speaks to her, but the words roll over and she doesn't remember what her responses are. The edges of everything are off, the world seen through gaussian blur, except the crescent moon in the spring sky. Between the clouds, it hangs sharp edged and oddly familiar, she finds herself staring up as the woman's voice fades, and she wakes up to the sound of her blaring alarm clock. Her head is pounding in time with her heartbeat, aching and fierce, and there's a strange sense of something missing but she can't figure out what.

She writes it off as another bizarre drunken dream that she's forgotten in the early moments of waking, and goes on about her life, never knowing who she is, never knowing where she's been.


~FIN~

Hell if I know where this came from, guys. But here it is. Random ass Alice fic, about ten or fifteen minutes in the writing of it, and no editing. Happy Cheshire Moon to y'all.

(Original post date: January 31, 2009 @ Livejournal)

Title: The Dragon
Author: wild-dreamer
Fandom: BBC's Merlin
Pairing: None.
Words: ~200
Summary: The last words the Great Dragon ever said to Uther Pendragon are also the words that condemned him to chains beneath the castle; they are the only reason the Dragon yet lives.

( The Dragon )