Bone Circus--an excerpt

I have a zillion mutually exclusive versions of this story. This is an excerpt that, hopefully, I will use. It's too vast for me to figure out how to piece it all together coherently--I think it wants to be longer than my usual fare, and I'm not sure I

 

Dawn broke slowly over Harbor Point, the sun’s watery reflection rippling in the blue-grey light.  Somewhere in the city, lovers slept with limbs entwined, children clutched their teddy bears, and even the sturdiest insomniacs were dozing in front of their televisions.  Somewhere in Mansford, the night people had just drifted off to sleep, while day people lingered in their beds; and in the still between the nightingale and the lark, the city breathed its silence.

In the ruins of a fire in the Ruins of the city, amidst charred wood and garbage and ash, a bone, bleach-white and unsinged, stood stark against the burning black wood.  Seven letters were carved into its face, the etching darkened by soot.  And as the sun rose, burning away the last of the morning fog, the fire slowly died.

In a tattered tenement, a faded floral sheet created a triangle of a room in a corner where two walls still stood.  There were scraps of newspaper and a chipped teacup filled with rolled-out tobacco from cigarette butts, bottles of colored sand and an unfinished mirror mosaic.  And in the middle of the scatterings of a searching mind, the treasures of trash redeemed, Jilly slept.

In the corridors of dreaming she walked.  It was a deeper dark than Jilly had ever known, yet still she knew her way.  She stumbled over slime-covered stones, crept in the long halls of night.  There was death here, she knew; the scent of lilies, the salt of mourner’s tears, the slick polished granite of a gravestone, the soft scattering of earth on wood.

A turn, then, as the corridor forked, and Jilly, blind, veered sharply left.  Away from the funeral scene, she continued through the labyrinth, her palm lightly running along the rough stone wall.  Slowly, her way became lighter, but only a dim half-light that seemed to do nothing more than give the shadows depth.  An outcropping along her path—a cell it must have been, for there were iron bars—held a man, his mouth sewn shut and his eyelids cut out, watching a woman without a face clawing at her chest.  Ribbons of bloody flesh hung from her taloned fingertips, and she dug deeper still, contorting her body until legs became arms, grew claws and became bloodstained as well.  She’s trying to tear her heart out, a child’s voice whispered.

She knew she mustn’t stray, but Jilly lingered a moment to find the speaker.  In the back of the cell, surrounded by eyes and teeth and mist, was a little girl.  She was crawling on the floor, searching for something, trying to find whatever it was that would save the woman from herself.  But as the mists rolled along the cold stone floors, they wore away at the girl’s flesh and bone and essence, leaving one arm faded and blurred, the other one gone completely.

The Trinity, the whisper came again, and not from the little girl.  The sinner, the savior, the silent witness.  A pause, then, a silence speaking of finality and futility.  Go now.  This is not your place.

Further through the passage she walked, and because she knew it was a dream, Jilly was not afraid.  She walked until she no longer felt her legs, until she forgot she was walking, so automatic was the movement of legs and feet.  The stone gave way to metal, dull steel, and through the silent hall she continued. 

The rock was not even a memory, it had always been steel.

Another fork, another choice.  Right, Jilly knew, from a place outside herself.  There was another outcropping, another cell, and she tried not to look inside.  She heard the ripping of a sheet, a wordless, animal cry.  There was a sudden, overpowering odor of blood—she sucked her breath in through her mouth, tasted copper on her tongue.  The chamber vanished away behind her as she ran, faster than she knew how, her footsteps swallowed by the silence of steel.  From the receding cell, a clacking sound arose, like stone beads falling to the floor.

Don’t you want to know what that one was?  the voice taunted, and Jilly knew it was inside her head.  She wanted to cover her ears, to stop running, to sink cold and alone onto the unbroken surface of the floor and weep.  There was no fear in this, no terror, only grief.  A desire to not look upon the pain, to not understand, to forget.  Jilly wanted to wake up.

Another Trinity:  the Ideal, the Truth, and the Believer.

Nothing could keep the voice from her head, and nothing could keep her feet from moving.  Further she went and further, each corridor a parallel of the last.  Through stone she had come, and metal.  And when metal turned to glass and glass gave way to sand, Jilly found herself no longer in a hallway at all, but a long and vast desert.  With a grim smile, she realized that this time, at least, there would be no prison, no tortured trio to encounter along her way.

The way out is through, the disembodied voice reminded her, and for the first time, Jilly realized its familiarity.  She had heard it somewhere before, in her waking life, the life that seemed so distant from here—the memory of a ghost of a stranger.  But she knew that voice, was so close to naming it, and her inability tasted bitter in her mouth.

There was no sun in the desert, no clouds and no cacti, nothing by which to mark her way.  The dunes shifted in the distance, in the direction she’d established as forward.  Jilly continued, lips parched and limbs numb, leaving tracks in untracked sand.  And when the winds whirled about her, and she felt she would sink away, through the dry sand and the wet far, far beneath it, through dirt and clay and stone, into the center of the earth, Jilly found herself weightless, and was afraid for the first time.

She closed her eyes tight, lashes laced firm against the sand, and hung in buoyant stasis.  She floated until her skin could remember nothing but the pelting of sand on flesh, until her eyes forgot sight.  She hung in the air as every memory she had ever had was stripped from her, every kindness and every kick, every pleasure, every pain.  And when she finally opened her eyes, because she could not remember why she closed them, Jilly had forgotten her name.

She hung suspended now, not above a desert, but amidst a field of night, flecked with the diamond dust of stars.  Because she could remember nothing else, she was not surprised.

And so came Jilly, cast off from everything she was and everything she knew, to the Bone Circus.

Author's Note

Is it too descriptive? I suppose that depends on where it's going to go in the story, right? I'd hate to screw with the pacing just because I like pretty words.

Reviews

[Dj Golden]

I've read nine different versions of this and each one gets better and better, and also seems to have more and more subplots. While I'm not saying remove them, I am saying that you are EXTREMELY brave to take on so many. If you forget even ONE you're going to ruin the whole story for your reader, but if you get them ALL then it will be an amazing story. We'll talk about this more on Wednesday (if you want), but I can't really say much without it having more written.

[E. J. Gette]

Wow! Excellent work usage. You use good descriptions without using big flashy words. I don't know what else to say. Excellent story.

[William J. Wilkins]

"and in the still between the nightingale and the lark, the city breathed its silence." -- Marry me! (just kidding, but I love that line).

I'm hooked. What's next? Pick a plot and go, already ;)