story snippet
Nov. 19th, 2004 04:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanter1944Simply because I got hit over the head with an inspiration-by-four sometime between three and four. If anyone wants to see this, be my guest. If it stinks it stinks, if it's halfway decent that's cool too. One weird idea brought on by too much mbalax music in one night, spawned from another trippy dream--yes, I am Lyason and yes I did dream myself mute. Read on at your own risk. And I'm not telling who the narrator is just yet. We'll see how obvious it is.
Mind you I left the beginning bits out and the end I'm not posting here yet since it's a sharding long story and it's not even close to being finished yet.
“Your first attempt isn’t going to be great,” so said the apparition in white, that sandy-haired savant of muscle and flesh who had worked a consummate miracle, presumably, on the nymphlike creature draped in starched cloth, buried beneath wrinkles of ivory sheets, turned to one side so all I could see that wasn’t hidden beneath hospital veils was a single, long, two-inch thick dark braid. Was this person black, black like me?
I couldn’t understand what was first said, what came out of that raspy, reassembled, pieced and patched raw throat, not at first. A hissing and whispering, a rush of useless air--he was right, the first attempt was not great, not by the standards of a musician’s ears, not by the standards of human speech.
Flaccid seconds passed, seconds through which I could see even through the partition and the white sheets and a profile turned with its face away from me the disgusted, self-depricating rolling of the eyes I knew was there. I’d done it, why shouldn’t this person?
A repeat of the rattling, half whistling intake of tortured breath was all the warning I got before those whispered words, half gasp and half rushing exhalation of air, desperate to communicate and torn across newly-sewn tissues, exactly as mine had been. “My name,” wheezed across the atmosphere in the sterile room, row upon row of empty beds with only myself and this sanctuary seeker within, so low and so garbled that I could barely hear and had to strain against the false wall’s framework to drag myself nearer, risking toppling towers of weakened lumber and an unwanted discovery with each silent centimeter I gained, “is Lyason Verity Alwadi.”
Lyason, so rough with recent reconstruction that it crackled, laced with an accent that carried through hoarse gasping and fragmented, fractured attempts at speech, a dialect so strong as to create physical impressions where I could see none; Lyason Verity, I knew that name. Alwadi, Senegali, a Senegalese name as old as griot roots, as definite to me as the likelihood that instruments were shattered and vocalists like this one made mute, like I myself had been made mute until the starched sandy-haired surgeon now retraining a blues musician in the cubicle beyond had worked an equal miracle on me.
Lyason Verity Alwadi, the one across the creaking, hastily erected barrier between us was female. Lyason, Lali, my old friend. Yes she was black, undoubtedly so. Her cora was certainly smashed, torn apart and lying somewhere forgotten in the crimson sand of Mars, she was exiled and virtually voiceless, but indeed she was black like me.
Like it? Hate it? I'm curious. I'm also sleep deprived.
Mind you I left the beginning bits out and the end I'm not posting here yet since it's a sharding long story and it's not even close to being finished yet.
“Your first attempt isn’t going to be great,” so said the apparition in white, that sandy-haired savant of muscle and flesh who had worked a consummate miracle, presumably, on the nymphlike creature draped in starched cloth, buried beneath wrinkles of ivory sheets, turned to one side so all I could see that wasn’t hidden beneath hospital veils was a single, long, two-inch thick dark braid. Was this person black, black like me?
I couldn’t understand what was first said, what came out of that raspy, reassembled, pieced and patched raw throat, not at first. A hissing and whispering, a rush of useless air--he was right, the first attempt was not great, not by the standards of a musician’s ears, not by the standards of human speech.
Flaccid seconds passed, seconds through which I could see even through the partition and the white sheets and a profile turned with its face away from me the disgusted, self-depricating rolling of the eyes I knew was there. I’d done it, why shouldn’t this person?
A repeat of the rattling, half whistling intake of tortured breath was all the warning I got before those whispered words, half gasp and half rushing exhalation of air, desperate to communicate and torn across newly-sewn tissues, exactly as mine had been. “My name,” wheezed across the atmosphere in the sterile room, row upon row of empty beds with only myself and this sanctuary seeker within, so low and so garbled that I could barely hear and had to strain against the false wall’s framework to drag myself nearer, risking toppling towers of weakened lumber and an unwanted discovery with each silent centimeter I gained, “is Lyason Verity Alwadi.”
Lyason, so rough with recent reconstruction that it crackled, laced with an accent that carried through hoarse gasping and fragmented, fractured attempts at speech, a dialect so strong as to create physical impressions where I could see none; Lyason Verity, I knew that name. Alwadi, Senegali, a Senegalese name as old as griot roots, as definite to me as the likelihood that instruments were shattered and vocalists like this one made mute, like I myself had been made mute until the starched sandy-haired surgeon now retraining a blues musician in the cubicle beyond had worked an equal miracle on me.
Lyason Verity Alwadi, the one across the creaking, hastily erected barrier between us was female. Lyason, Lali, my old friend. Yes she was black, undoubtedly so. Her cora was certainly smashed, torn apart and lying somewhere forgotten in the crimson sand of Mars, she was exiled and virtually voiceless, but indeed she was black like me.
Like it? Hate it? I'm curious. I'm also sleep deprived.
