Writing Spaces

 

"The Moving Finger writes; 

and, having writ, Moves on . . . "

(Omar Khayyám)

image:  photographer unknown

Ghost Light

 

"a kind of glow—humanity, noblesse, beatitude—lingered in the great spaces that like Space itself held stars already dead but luminous, inherently present, the residue of suns long since burned out.  Ghost light, Aash thought of it."

 

Just published in Livina Press Literary Magazine, Issue 2, Fall 2022 (print only)—my short story "Ghost Light," set in the ruins of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a museum which was originally a collaboration between the places and peoples of its collections and between the collections and the viewers who engaged with them.  And then between me, the author, who's collected them again, and the characters I have sent into the ruins to collect what they can of what's left after the world's culture has been destroyed and most animals and plant-life gone extinct.

 

This work is a collaboration too with the author of a book one of the characters once read—Russell Hoban, who offered his amazing The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz to the world.  The book is integral to my main character's identity, and has remained for many years in my own consciousness, now informing my writing.  In it are extinct lions, which are regenerated in the haunted spaces of the museum, later joined by other extinct animals gathered between the covers of a salvaged bestiary.

 

And finally, or really first, the work is a collaboration between me and a writer friend's grandson, Westley, who offered us the first line as a gift.

 

At its heart this story is about the essential shared responsibility of carrying the memories of things past, things gone, as we all do—together saving what we can in these destructive times.  It no longer takes a village.  It takes a world.  A museum, with all its salvaged, plundered ghosts.

         

 

image:  photographer unknown

The Queens Gambit [sic]

 

I've had a quirky short story published in Flights (just print, so far, but online someday, it's suggested)—"The Queens Gambit."  Not a typo; indeed there's no apostrophe, because the story's set in Queens, NY, and involves chess somewhat peripherally.  A gambit is the core of it, "a device, action, or opening remark, typically one entailing a degree of risk, that is calculated to gain an advantage," and specifically, as in chess, "an opening in which a player makes a sacrifice, typically of a pawn, for the sake of some compensating advantage."

 

A subconscious long-ago inspiration was apparently Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace," which I hadn't remembered, and I much more consciously had in mind the twist in O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi."

 

It's a playful tale at heart, and was great fun to write.  Fun to remember some of the chess moves and concepts from the also long-ago days when I played often and voraciously.

 

One of the main characters is Tante Cristelle, moved from Guadeloupe to Paris for art school to Far Rockaway, Queens—

"In recent days he'd seen his landlady becoming a ghost-in-training.  Gliding around the house both day and night, moving chess pieces stealthily in games they'd left out to finish (always to good effect), cunningly challenging the stairs as if they were an ascent of Kilimanjaro.  She went unseeing and all but unseen, shuffling along the upstairs corridor in a bathrobe the color of oatmeal but set off by her many-colored carnival headdresses, meant to hide her nearly hairless head, with her wheeled walker—a skeletal companion who Gino had seen her do something like salsa with, Haitian kompa he thought she'd said.  The last of her dance partners in this world, likely.  And on her ancient phonograph at odd hours she set playing Maurice Ravel's "Five O'Clock Foxtrot," a favorite of her Paris beau ("prince of the sturgeon eggs," she'd called him).  Ravel had been in Paris when she got there, Cristelle had once reminisced, her proud head cocked sideways, seeing it all, her young-again profile splendid."

 

image:  Chess Game, artist unknown