The Oxford Pixie

Hiatus

quirkysaur:

Just a quick note that I won’t be here for two weeks (London for a week or rehearsals, then Edinburgh for a week of a show - come catch me if you’re there, at http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/batman-holy-spoof-musical-batstravaganza)

That means that this blog, my writing blog (theoxfordpixie) and the feminism blog I help with (lashingsofgb) won’t update, or at least, in the case of lashings, will update possibly late, if at all.

Hopefully see some of you there!

(via theoxfordpixie)

Seasons: A Sherlock Fanfic

The door slams and it echoes like a gunshot down the street. There were words, words that began their lives as taunting little whispers and died as shouts on their speaker’s lips. Worthless, said the tall man. Freak, said the other. Silence had tried, and failed, to smother them, and was suffocated itself by sirens and traffic and the heartbeat of the city.

The tall man paces, rips the curtain from the window and stands in the glow of the bloodied sun. He sees the other go – shoulders hunched, his straw-and-grey hair washed with orange. Words spill unheard from his lips, tripping over each other in their desperation to deduce what was happening, but he was never fast enough – had never been able to keep up with the man. John, he says, and it’s both bitter and reverential, like Job cursing his God.

John keeps walking, his eyes on the pavement. The sun sparks, and his world is on fire. Once he dreamt of burning deserts, but now there’s blue and chlorine and smoke and flames, and him, pale as the white rider, a rose blossoming on his cheek. Sherlock. John curses the name in the way he curses the war – a tantalising, illicit longing that makes him feel like a ghoul.

The violin screeches, a symphony of agony, and it stops as the bow breaks in two on the floor. Sherlock flings it back on to the couch, hands pressed against the window as though he could call him back with a word. His mind races, a thousand thoughts fighting to be heard, colours and sounds and senses and feeling and words and John and always John and when John isn’t here he cannot block out the thoughts and he turns and remembers what he keeps, hidden, secret, beneath a floorboard under his bed.

London is cold, and the wind bites at John’s wound like a tender lover. He thinks of calling Sarah, wonders who on his list of somewhat-partners haven’t shut the door in his face yet. A name springs to mind, a phone number not deleted, and he calls, fingers shaking. Her voice is like spring as it washes over him, and at the click he changes course, heads for the main roads, for people and taxis and touches, however brief.

The needle is cold as it pushes against his forearm, and Sherlock remembers the night he lay out in the snow until his lips went blue and his mother sat him near the fire with blankets and books and he had never felt so loved. He focuses on his breath, slowing and controlling it, and feels the spike, the bliss run through him like a blizzard.

The door opens, and she is as beautiful as ever. John clasps his mouth to hers, and breathes in her scent – alcohol and jasmine, lined with the taste of chocolate. It’s wrong, he thinks, wrong wrong wrong but then she moans against his lips and they stumble backwards, hands on clothes then skin, and if John is too rough, biting and pushing her down, pining her below him, then she only writhes beneath him all the more.

Sherlock begins to feel the end – each hit lasts for less, takes more, leaves him breathless and trembling and empty. John, he barks, but John is not here, and he wants nothing more than to burn this place down. The couch is backwards, acid is spilling on the floor, and John’s jumpers are blazing in the street.

She opens her eyes, and John pulls up his jeans and heads for the door. He can feel her arms around his waist, tempting him, teasing him, telling him to come back, come back, but there is only one person he wants to hear those words from, and he leaves. He is halfway down the street when he remembers leaving his scarf – Sherlock’s scarf – but he walks on.

Time passes, the clock ticks slightly before the watch he is wearing does, and the noise begins to echo around Sherlock’s head. He sits, long limbs pulled close to his chest, and takes in the destruction around him. There is wine spilling from the table, mixing with something that could be blood. His blood? He looks around, deductions flying and decides it’s from the glass near his feet. His mind shrieks, a cacophony of noise and he curls up to the floor, slamming his palms against his skull, shouting to the air, begging for it to stop.

John walks through the nerve-system of the city, the backstreets and alleys. They stink of piss and blood and alcohol, and he drinks the scent in, blocking out the heady stench of jasmine on his jumper. He stops at pubs he can’t remember the name of, slamming fists against brick, the weight in his chest growing, and hurting, drawing strength from the pain in his shoulder and the ache in his leg. There’s a bridge, and another, and at each one he stops, stares down into the silver and wonders whether landing among the stars would fix things. He thinks of dark curls, bright eyes, and the joy in the voice he would follow anywhere, and walks on.

The door opens, closes, locks.

Seventeen steps are too slow, and John takes the stairs in less. He recalls the scent of spring, surrounding him, shouting his name, and knows it is fleeting – Sherlock is the weather itself, uncontrollable, and John’s to watch, but not to have. Sherlock thinks of winter, and how John is the desert, barren and open and blissfully quiet, and of how he wishes to fall into it and never leave.

Hands grip shoulders, foreheads press together, and pulses begin to beat in time once more. The floor is hard beneath their knees, one of them is trembling, and one of them is cursing, but it doesn’t matter – nothing matters. The world slows, and they stay, fists bunched in shirts and jumpers among the chaos. They are each others air, one of them mumbles, let me drown in you, replies the other. Stay, one whispers in the other’s hair, and I will I will I will is the next breath. There are kisses on curls, and fingers digging into wrists, but nothing more, never anything more. Silence spills over the room, and they know John will leave for the spring and Sherlock will be left in winter, but for now they drift together, letting the waves of the night wash over them.

Summer

Summer swims over the hills,
Swarming into the grass,
Sparking off spires,
Skittering in the streets,
Sending out the signal -
I’m here! I’m here!

It begins.

Streets crowding with sweat,
With smiles, with sweet, stolen kisses,
All stress and strife slipping away,
The world slows, days slide by,
Each one a sensuous burst of song
As we spiral in the sunsets,
The sunrises,
The sun high above,
You swim over my hips,
Swarm over my skin,
Spark off my lips,
Skitter over the swell of my stomach,
And send out your signal -
I’m here! I’m here!

It is now.

Summer.
Stolen moments in scorching heat,
And you, shouting our secrets to the sun,
As I simmer under your gaze,
Hotter than the single star beating down,
The world slows, days slide by,
Each one a sensuous burst of songs,
Your every touch a sunset,
Each kiss a new sunrise,
And you, burning like the sun above.

It will end.

But until then, Summer is here.

A World Of Wonders

Frost sparks like dew-drop cobwebs,
Snow shivers from laden skies,
Fate weaves lace ‘tween blades of grass,
A world of wonder before my eyes.

And I’m always questioned when and where,
Who and what and how and why?
As though I’m meant to have a goal,
And I should stop dreaming of the sky.

Do you realise I’d be happy with ink?
Some paper, some cloth, or some skin,
With words to spill, a world to see,
A thousand cities to find a home in.

Gold dust shimmers through fairytale forests,
Starlight pours into faraway lakes,
And yet you attempt to tear me away,
Saying there are better things, higher stakes.

But how can I stare into the future,
Drawing maps, planning where to go,
When I change with each passing fancy,
So there’s nothing that I really know.

Life’s a harsh mistress, a trickster too,
Playing games with hearts and fate,
Yet you tell me that I should stop wondering,
That my fascination with it can wait.

So, I’m not sure where this is heading,
But I guess that’s exactly like me,
I’ll just keep on staring out windows,
Recording the little things I see.

This is the answer that I’ve never given,
Because you just wouldn’t understand,
So I’ll smile and tell you I’m clueless,
But I’m keeping the pen in my hand.

Unravel

We used to unravel pretty words, teasing out meaning like knots in the weave, then re-stitch them, hoping for their beauty to tip-toe into our spider-like scrawl, feeling as though we were tearing the wings from butterflies and stitching them to cockroaches, pinning beauty onto well-worked purpose.

We learned the mystery of long sentences, losing ourselves as we stumbled towards the final point at the end, wrapping ourselves up in lazy, clumsy words. We nailed ourselves to crosses, marvelling over the enchantment of imagery, the wonder of metaphor. Our footprints stained dictionaries, thesauruses, until our pages were incandescent with eloquence.

The ink was forget-me-not blue, the page the colour of snow-filled skies, and we danced among the lines as though they were the stones of a fairy ring.Sparksflew as pen touched paper, electric coursing through veins, blood being set alight with iridescent, fragile letters clamouring for release.

We kept our work free of knots, of awkward things like beginnings or ends, filling it instead with smooth phrases that flowed like silk and felt like depth.

But she was never beautiful; she was like a thorn on an otherwise perfect rose, like a mist obscuring the morning sun, like the wind stirring in golden fields. She was an addition that confused me, with so much potential, and so little respect for the elegant trails I laid for her. She would stumble, tear apart my exquisitely ethereal pathways, replacing them with something solid, something bare and unadorned.

I could never pin down her name, for she would take nothing that I suggested – she was no Cassandra, no Ophelia. She would snub her nose (which was never delicate and upturned like I wished) at the suggestion of romance, turn a blind (slightly plain, mud-like) eye to the notion of anything against her will.

She did not allow me to paint her with my lengthy, highly strung phrases, but drew herself in my mind – all angles, sharp and thin, a skin too sickly a tone to be likened to a winter moon, a face that wouldn’t allow me to use the word vivacious, or striking, but could only be known as plain.

And yet she gave my pages life, the ink flowing freely, no longer dancing precariously, but storming onwards, with an end and a meaning in sight. She stripped the fragile words away, revealing the bird-like bones of a story, as immature as a newborn child.

She would whisper to me in my dreams, teaching me to use words as tools, and not to treat them as finished works. They had beauty, she told me, but it was rare – the stars need the darkness between them to inspire the minds of men below, she said, and so too do your entrancing words need the plain, uninspiring between them. Tell stories, she would tell me, and I would unravel myself like I used to unravel the words, searching for meaning to pin to the plain pages.

I wrote stories then, but they lacked the charm of hers. I unravelled myself until there was more of me on the page than in my hummingbird heart, but the meaning was as incomprehensible as the poetry she had scorned. She would smile, and stitch me back up again, telling me that no one person can hold enough meaning for one story. She would show me the world – not the dew-drop-strewn grass, or the hazymidnightmoon, but the people, the stories that hid inside their souls like a secret fire.

I tried then, to spill the rainbows I had glimpsed in the broken glass eyes of many, the unwavering resolve of others, the diamonds I had seen in the dirt, but she berated me still. You are still lost, she would say, and letting the words use you. Use them.

I tried to write her story many a time, but each time I would trip up, and she would laugh like a raven, and tell me to start again. So I did, and each time I would come closer to her name, to the story she held in the space under her throat.

I lost her once, and words flooded back, echoing into my work, destroying it from the inside. The stories slipped lose, their threads tangling, their knots loosening. There were moments were she would return, her eyes sad, knowing I could not hold her close, knowing my thoughts were filled with others than her. You don’t even know how to tell my story, she would murmur in my ear. How will you tell theirs?

I searched everywhere then, through my bones and my heart, down into the soul and out through the brain, but she was not within me. I dreamt of spires, of sunrise, but she was never there. I walked the streets at night, desperately calling to her with every ounce of my being, but she never came, and slowly, unwillingly, I ceased to write.

I never thought it would take a cessation of thought, a truce with the words, an empty space, for her to return. I should have realised that she would never visit a mind full of meaningless phrases, but rather, a mind full of the world. She is different now, her tone more assertive, her face no longer plain to my eye. She tells me off for writing that – it is not her who has changed, but my view of the world, apparently. Are you done yet, she asked, all of a sudden sounding like an eager child rather than a teacher. Only you’ve been writing this self-absorbed confession piece for too long, and I want you to tell me a story.

So I do.

Writing

So I’m going to make this blog a joint writing/craft one since I do a bit of both :)

Craft Times

I have been broke, and therefore craftiness paused for a while.

Do not fear though, as today I am going shopping!

:D