Wow, OK.
So...
I'm really very sorry. I was having some health issues earlier in the year, and it left me without a lot of energy for simming or writing about simming, and at the time, I felt it best for the project to slink away quietly. Recently -- Oh, I don't know -- recently, I felt not just bad about it, because I always felt bad about it, but like I really missed it, and was feeling more like tending to it, and really putting forth the effort to try and finish -- or at least play until it's unplayable, or whatever.
So, if you'll have me, I'm back with a little more. To get my feet wet, this'll be a short first part of a double-part section, because, I dunno. It feels appropriate, and it'll get through everything I had waiting in the wings before my hiatus.
I really am sorry. I hope you'll enjoy this once more.
Sacred and Profane Love, 1/2For a minute, I was free. The great sandy dunes stretched before me, with only the eyes of the moon upon me. The sounds of pursuit behind me, the papers blowing in the wind like a tornado, a desperate laugh clawing up my throat. It was a perfect moment.
And then a moment turned into a few months, most of which I spent huddled in a cave, living on sand-lizards. Never again. Do you know how impossible it is to pick sand lizard bits out of your teeth? Oh, and they’ve got tiny little bones like fish, and if I have to get one more sand lizard bone out of the back of my mouth, I will punch someone…
A-hem. But I digress. It couldn’t last; I should have known. Water table readings and all that. It just couldn’t last. I was found, and brought back here, for my shadowy patron’s continued amusement.
And here we are again. Perhaps this time, we’ll make it. I certainly won’t promise anything… That I am not obligated to promise, on weight of a variety of colorful threats.
Now, where were we…? Oh, yes. Venus – Our Venus, the one with copper skin and eyes like a cloudy sea (it’s better not to ask which Venus I do not mean) had just become a toddler, and the household was a-bustle with the beginnings of her museum pieces…From the Personal Journal or Ferrus Alchimia
My little Venus; I can’t think that there’s a more perfect girl in the whole wide world.
Except, maybe, her mother. I’d like to appreciate, just for this moment – and by this moment, I mean, forever – that she has her mother’s eyes, existing on the exact center of blue’s shades.
”Well, we've gotten this far,” She says, nervous in the face of the absolute mountain of…everything… we still have ahead of us. The real work of parenting’s still ahead,
”I’m glad at least you're a stable type.” She did not say "for once," thank goodness. Instead, we just embraced and got to work painting and sculpting our little girl, to hold her forever.
There was, uh, a bit of trouble with her sculpture, but we managed to recover. Just a bit. A bit of me ached for wanting to manage it myself, really. I mean, all the bits flying everywhere and – oh, there’s that edge on the corner and – well, listen, it’s not that I minded her doing it…
In fact, really, I’m the one that insisted. I just had to repeat that this would be something we’d have, Venus and I – we’d have these works to remember her hands and her smile and her love by, stretching forever.
Besides, could I have really done better? I mean, this is our daughter’s first museum piece. It has to be
divine.
Thank goodness she has grandmothers to watch her; she doesn't always have the patience for these things, and, well…
There’s cause for the rest of us to be rather distracted. Quicksilver was my mother’s first friend… But he’d spent the last days of his life as happy as he could be; I don’t think he wanted anything.
And, perhaps because we’d all felt so bad about Neon…
When Death came, he did not come into the empty darkness. I can’t say exactly what happened – only what Diane said – but that his voice was like the rattling of autumn leaves and the buzzing of insect wings,
”Like a plague of locusts, she said. But that what he said was not unkind.
“Aww, aren't you a precious snuggle-kitty…” Said the reaper, petting our family friend. My mother did not try and plead – I wonder: is it because you cannot plead with death over a cat, or because my mother will not plead with death? She will only dissect it like a frog, and balance it like an equation on her finger?
”Well, let’s come along, little fellow.”
And he lured Quicksilver Alchimia up, at what age I can no longer say – Um, older than I am, at least... He seemed like a fixture; a piece of the universe, suddenly gone.
For all that my mother pleaded, she wept. When she’d had nothing, she’d had Quicksilver. When she had everything, she’d had Quicksilver; I’m not sure I entirely understand having that sort of feeling about a cat… But I understand having that sort of feeling.
The reaper nodded, almost cordially, to the assembled mourners, and with particular inflection to my mother, whom he’d met before, and – and here Diane looked only concerned in her retelling – and to her father, the oldest person in the house.
”Lady Alchimia…Mr Dreamer. Do remember; He got what everyone gets. No more, and no less, no matter how it seems. A lifetime.”[/i]
The day advanced slowly; we don’t exactly know what to do about the graves yet. The best bit of levity came when Stan got home. After all, in all the fuss, we hadn’t forgotten…
It was time for his birthday. Complete with terrible birthday hair.
”My sons have grown into very handsome young men. I’m pleased with the results of this parenting experiment of mine…Oh, though… I would like to request perhaps some deep tissue sam—“”Mooom!””Mooom!”
”Hm. Synchronicity, despite the difference in age. Fascinating.”“Look, I’ll give you your sample. Just, please…Stop fussing about it so much, OK? At least for a while.”
”At last! I will have the results for you shortly.”Or a clone. It’s one of the two.
He pretty much immediately high-tailed it out of there; the allure of a night without curfew must have seemed like a siren song. Who can say what he was getting up to? We had other concerns.
Our little Venus had messy skills to learn.
And some cleaner ones.
Oh, what if I drop her hands she’ll never trust anyone what will I do? Her hands are so tiny…
Is that what happened to you, Ferrus?
Well, since his older brother didn't know what Stannum was up to, it’s left to me to say what he went out to do: Flirt. Find up every lady in or around his new age bracket and see if she was home.
His first effort met not with success, per se, or failure, per se, but…
With her moving rather rapidly out of his age bracket. Dejected, but not yet discouraged, he called up a different family friend (on her identity, I’ll have to do further research), hoping for a night out.
“I’m really happy I got to see you… Mind sticking around a while? With me?”
“You know, I really can’t stay out that late,”
she tells him, coyly. She says it many times over the course of the next several hours, as they talked about a number of topics.
“You know, you say you need to get going…But I can’t help but notice…You’re still here.”
“Well, that’s….You’re very charming.”
She admits, giggling a little.
Stannum wonders, briefly, if he’s doing the right thing. There is, after all, a boy who he has a bit of a crush on – who has a bit of a crush on him. They don’t owe each other anything, he tries to tell himself.
He’s not his brother, with his soppy, almost predestined, romance.
He thinks about the death on the lawn the other night, and goes for it: his first, and far from final, kiss.“A real heartbreaker,” He tells her.
It’s a kiss that doesn't mean much of anything, even as she returns it fervently – and he felt, he hoped, she understood that. It tastes of the sudden passions of a young man, and of everything flung out around him like a windstorm. He tasted the desert air humidified on her tongue, like a foreign vista, some swampy tropics, where the air tasted of salt.
It was free, and he’d remember that taste and that freedom for a long time, and so, perhaps it meant everything. Certainly, it meant that things were ending – and beginning again, there in that kiss.
