A Muse to Live For

by Katherine Wyvern

  Amelia lived and worked in the Grimsbys’ house for the rest of her life. Lella married in 1906. Gabrielle made her wedding dress. Nathaniel gave the bride away. It is unknown whether or not Amelia or Lella ever met Gabriel.

  The End

  www.katherinewyvern.blogspot.com

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  BONUS SAMPLE CHAPTER

  WOMAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

  Katherine Wyvern

  Copyright © 2017

  Nina

  It’s 9:15 PM, and I am alone in my room. Alone and ugly, and clumsy as ever.

  Awkward. That’s the word.

  Lizzie’s old boots stand on a corner of my table, darkly gleaming among a ruin of disheveled old boxes. Alien, those boots, in this room. Black leather. High heels, buckles and laces. Sultry boots I’d never buy. I’d never dare. Never think I’d be worthy of them. But they are here now, like a promise, a challenge, a blessing, a gift from beyond the grave (her grave, God help us), a gift from beyond the world, from … where?

  They sit there, alluring and accusing, like a question mark. Who are you? What are you? What do you want to be? Do you dare … to be?

  I don’t know.

  I constantly think of Julia, dream of Julia, every last shade of Julia, so much so that I almost think I know her, that I know who she is, and what it would be like to be loved by her.

  But I don’t know what to make of me.

  ****

  Why Julia would want me is a mystery anyway. The glitch in all my dreams. The false note that makes the whole music jangle.

  Because Julia is … Julia is … she is … gorgeous. I sit here, dreaming of her, but she is not here. How could she? The thought of her inside this flat is grotesque, in any case. Her life is sparkle and glamor and music, and I … well.

  I can weld. That’s something. But not much.

  The first time I saw her, I thought I might fall over backwards. Now, every day, I feel that I will fall (forward) at her feet, flat on my chin like a bearskin, in deference to her beauty, but the first time I saw her, I thought I’d go down backwards. The lift’s door opened, I made to step out, and there she was, hard by the doors, waiting to step in, six feet tall and in the clouds.

  Well, truth be told the first thing I ever saw of Julia was her boots. But in Julia’s case that is a good start.

  I seldom look further up than my toes as I go about the world, so my eyes first locked on these boots, silvery, velvety, ankle-high boots with heels like skyscrapers. (I have never known anyone else who wears heels like those. And I have never seen Julia without heels. It’s like they are an integral part of her anatomy). Over the boots, black stockings over straight skinny legs that went on and on and on, and then this short, knitted dress, black and silver threads twisted together in a soft, crawling, sparkling darkness, narrowly framed by a long, unbuttoned black coat. And a grey scarf with silky fringes swaying down to her waist.

  My eye had to travel a long, long way to get to the top of her. Lipstick, poppy red, a rose of a mouth, impeccably painted, slightly smaller than the true shape of her lips. And over that, under a mane of brown-blond hair, a long nose, and … eyes.

  Julia’s eyes. Julia’s green, green eyes.

  Deep-set eyes, but sharp enough to poke a hole in your soul.

  Hard eyes, I thought, that day, although lately it seems to me there is mostly a sort of sadness to them.

  By then my head was so far back that, had I fallen, it would have been backwards, back in the lift. And down to hell for all I cared.

  ****

  There are boxes everywhere. I never knew Lizzie had so many clothes. Mostly I only ever saw her in faded slacks, stained with paint in a hundred different colors. If I were more of a party animal I might have seen her in her evening finery sometimes, but now I can only imagine her, or go through old pictures with John. She also had enough shoes to fill a shop. John gave everything to me after the funeral. We were the same size, Lizzie and I, and I could wear any of her things, but dear me, how would I ever look in these slinky, sparkly, elegant things? Like a sheep prancing around on two feet.

  The idea was to sell the lot on eBay, given time. John has no leisure to do it, and he just wanted the stuff out of the house.

  “I can’t bear to see them every time I open the wardrobe,” he said, and I understand.

  So now everything is here, in my tiny room. There is no space for all this. I move around among piles of evening dresses gleaming with sequins, tight leggings, bejeweled scarves, and high heeled shoes and boots and sandals of every shape and color known to human kind. I’d need a walking aid to wear these. Like a tottering invalid, hanging on for dear life. There’s enough sparkly around here these days to charm a legion of magpies. Half the time I don’t know whether to giggle or cry. Truth is, I don’t have time to put them up on eBay either, and neither can I bear to throw everything away, so here I am, living cheek by jowl with Lizzie’s manifold glittery ghosts.

  The black boots are the loudest ghost in the room. They never cease to chide and nag, and whisper their “What if… What if…”

  The thing is, they are so lovely, that once I took them out of the box I could not bring myself to put them back in. They don’t want to be confined to the darkness. They want to bask in the light. Poor things, they came to the wrong place, but even so, I keep them on my table. They languish in the pale lamplight, like a houseplant in too dim a room. But it’s better than being in the box.

  I know I cannot wear them. They have heels as tall as my palm. They are almost Julia-heels. Not quite, not even Lizzie could wear Julia-class heels, but almost.

  I might fall off those heels and break my neck. How do women walk in these things? How does Julia do it? She walks like gravity was invented for someone else. Probably me.

  I am all of the earth. A drab, slouching, house-bound kobold. I belong to the mine and the smithy. Julia is all of the air. A foot and a half closer to the sky than I am, that’s for sure.

  Perhaps I should try on the black boots. They would propel me a good four inches up into that rarefied atmosphere where Julia has her being, and that much closer to Julia’s mesmerizing eyes. Until I fall, at least.

  There always comes a fall, for those of us affected by the laws of gravity.

  ****

  Julia

  Julia locked the door of her flat quietly and walked down the hallway towards the lift, careful to step on the long, blue carpet that ran the length of the corridor. Not quite in the middle of the carpet, where it was most worn, but towards the edge, where some body was left to the old threadbare thing. It can be tricky to walk in tall heels down a plush carpet, but this old thing was not plush anymore. And she preferred to walk her heels quietly if she managed, in this building. Only last week the ratty old man two doors down had stuck his pinched ugly face out of the door to check her out when she passed. Minding one’s own business was not a popular pastime in this neighborhood.

  Abbie was all right. A former beautician now turned door-to-door seller of cosmetic products, in this condominium (pandemonium, she called it, charmingly) Abbie counted as a woman of the world, and indeed there was something endearingly whorish about the easy way she had instantly introduced herself to Julia (and into her flat). It had taken Abbie less than a minute to figure Julia out, which was not bad. Some people never got ‘round to it at all (something Julia still found astonishing, in a very pleasant way), and those who did usually needed quite a bit longer than that. Julia had taken to Abbie, who was remarkably unprejudiced and liked to talk about people’s quirks, about cats, the mysteries of mascara and really good shoes, and loved to bake. Julia had a fondness for rare black teas, and the two of them had had many a good chat over tea and cake, even if Julia had to go easy on the cake, and Abbie looked like she liked gin rather more than tea. />
  It was not quite 7 o’clock, and it was pitch dark outside. Dark, rainy and cold. Julia was not especially fond of summer weather. The sun brought her freckles out like nobody’s business. She had had a boating holiday in Greece two years back with some friends (Julian’s idea, not hers) and came back home looking like the 101 Dalmatians, the whole fucking hundred and one of them together. Still, there was just so much winter that she could stomach. A good concealer will fix freckles, but nothing could fix the depressing feeling that had settled in her guts for the last few months.

  The new flat was supposed to be a new start, yet here she was, still alone, still uncertain where to go from here. To be or not to be? she thought. It came to her from Hamlet, of course, that is the question, but then it morphed into Diana Krall’s gorgeous contralto voice, and from a tiny Hamlet prompt, “Let’s Fall in Love” started playing in her mind. Almost anything took the shape of a song in Julia’s head, soon or late. Usually sooner rather than later.

  To be or not to be… And indeed, it would not be such a bad thing to fall in love, would it? I am still sort of young-ish, right? And there’s no need to be scared of it, is there?

  She hummed quietly to herself while she waited for the lift to appear, but, honestly, there was a scarcity of people willing to be fallen in love with, and very good reason to be terrified of it in any case, not to mention that Julia didn’t feel as young as all that anymore. Is forty-two too late for romantic antics? she wondered, and she was half inclined to answer, yes.

  When the lift did arrive—it was the slowest lift in the world—the odd girl from six doors down stepped out of it. Odd, as if I were in any position, thought Julia with a touch of grim humor, but the girl was odd, and no mistake.

  Nina. Abbie had told her the girl’s name was Nina. Abbie knew everyone in the building, and could tell each life’s story in five sentences, with a wickedly vindictive turn of phrase at times. But she had never quite got ‘round to explaining Nina. When Julia had asked, she had only hesitated and shaken her head with a little frown. There was some unhappy tale in it, for sure.

  Julia gave the girl a small nod and a smile. It was the best thing to do, she had discovered. Talking to Nina only made her nervous. Julia had never met anyone so keen to remain unnoticed.

  She was bundled into the usual bizarre and haphazard collection of clothes she always wore. Faded workman blues five sizes too big for her, like her clownish boots. It would have been comical if it had not been so sad. Some girls like to dress as boys, and that’s fine, but Nina did not really dress like a boy. She merely holed up into her clothes like a squirrel in a pine tree. A pity. There was a cute little face in that pine tree, under a close-cropped, almost shaved scalp. The scalp was the most shocking thing.

  The first time Julia had seen her, she had taken her for a boy, some churlish, famished urchin dressed in some poor-man version of a rapper’s kit. She had had a bit of a scare that day, gang boys and teens in general being the worst nuisance she had ever encountered. The thought of having one in the building, just six doors down from her flat, gave her the creeps. She must have regarded the poor girl in some pretty forbidding way, judging by the shocked look on her face. Afterwards, when she had realized how things were, she had felt sorry for it. She always made a point of smiling to Nina now, hoping to make up for that first blunder, some day.

  There was something exotic, vaguely gipsy-ish about Nina. The stubble on her fragile, cropped head was dark, and she had smoky brown eyes, wary, guarded, but very beautiful. They would have been breathtaking with a smidge of makeup around them.

  As Nina scurried out of the door and Julia stepped in, she caught a glimpse of the both of them in the mirror that lined the back of the lift. The top of Nina’s head reached no higher than her shoulder if at all, and as they crossed in the door, the girl looked up at her like a boy looking for a lost kite in the sky. Julia felt impossibly and awkwardly tall, as she invariably did, to this day, in the vicinity of short people. It was rather embarrassing, in fact. In her youth, she had worn flat shoes and walked in a contrite, hunched way that had made her look even more gawky. In time, she had come to the conclusion that flat shoes in her size bore a sinister resemblance to canoe boats, and that however much she hunched down, she’d still be six feet tall in her socks.

  “So I’m a tall lass,” she had finally decided, “well, sue me.” And she had thrown all her flats out, taught herself to walk in heels like a pro, and started strutting her stuff. Life had improved quite a bit after that. It was not perfect, but it had improved.

  End of sample chapter

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