Love for Ten Thousand Kisses

Once there was a young girl called Magpie, for her hair had strands as dark as night and as white as milk all tangled together, and her eyes sparkled with the blue and green of a magpie’s wing in sunlight. She was the only child of a farmer and her mother had died giving birth to her, so with no one else in the house to help, she joined her father in tending to their fields at the edge of the kingdom, herding the sheep and caring for the cattle, and their life was hard but good. Their little farm stood in the shadow of a mighty castle, and in the evening as Magpie churned the milk into butter or darned her father’s socks, she would look out at the lights glowing bright in the castle windows, and wonder and dream of all of the fabulous feasts and parties that took place within those high walls.

One day as she was taking the sheep out to graze, she saw a royal hunting party pass by. The young man at the head of the party captivated her. His clothes were of the finest spun silk, his eyes were as golden as the rising sun, and upon his head he wore a crown of silver. It was the king’s eldest son, the prince and heir to the throne, and to Magpie there could have been no more perfect a man created. She knew in the instant she saw him that her heart was his, and could never belong to another.

And how she was wracked with grief. It burned inside of her like a cold fire, consuming her. For the prince did not know who Magpie was, and even if he had, he would never marry a farm girl such as her. She neglected her chores and became listless and lifeless. For days she would not eat or sleep, but only lay in bed staring at the thatch above her, until her father, afraid that she would waste away and die, took Magpie to her grandmother’s house deep in the forest, for her grandmother had lived long and was very wise.

When her grandmother saw Magpie’s sleepless eyes and careworn face, she said at once, “Your daughter has had her heart stolen from her, and she will surely die unless the one who has taken her heart returns her love.” Magpie wept and beat at her breast and asked her grandmother if she knew of a spell that could accomplish such a thing, for no other way could win her the love of a prince.

Her grandmother’s heart broke in two at the sight of her own flesh and blood so wretched. So she gathered her granddaughter’s hands in hers and said, “There is no spell to change the course of another’s heart, for the heart is a wild bird that flies where it will. But I will give you a spell to capture his thoughts and walk in his dreams. He will be able to think of nothing but you, he will long for you day and night, and it will feel very much like love.”

Magpie was overjoyed, and the colour flowed back into her cheeks, and for the first time in weeks she laughed aloud. Her grandmother prepared a cauldron over the fire, and together they cut and stirred sacred herbs and chanted secret words. At last the spell was ready, and Magpie’s grandmother stoppered it in a little vial and gave it to her granddaughter.

“Be warned,” she said. “The spell is only temporary. It will last the span of ten thousand kisses, and by then you must have truly won his heart if you hope to keep him.”

Magpie hurried home with her father, dancing and singing for joy, her head lost in dreams and fantasies, for ten thousand kisses from a prince seemed a lifetime to her.

The next day, as the royal hunting party passed the little farm where Magpie lived, the prince’s horse lost a shoe and they were forced to call upon Magpie and her father to rest and wait while the horse was re-shod. Magpie served the noblemen ale and bowls of hot stew, and into the prince’s bowl she emptied the potion. As the prince ate, his eyes grew wide and he looked at Magpie as if seeing her for the first time. He begged to know of her life and childhood, and came and sat with her by the fire, and when his horse was ready, he had to be called away by his men back to the hunt, and even then looked back over his shoulder and watched Magpie in the door of the little farm house until they were out of sight. And Magpie knew the spell had worked.

The very next day, the prince returned to the little farm house with a royal train, and asked for Magpie’s hand in marriage. She accepted, and returned with him on a fine dappled mare to the castle. At the gates of the castle, all of the powdered, painted nobles came hurrying to stare at this young farm girl with her strands of dark and light hair all tangled up, and her eyes as blue and green as a magpie’s wing. They sniffed and scoffed and muttered jealously that a commoner such as her should one day be their queen. But Magpie didn’t care about any of that. She was lost in her prince’s eyes, eyes as golden as the rising sun. She was given royal chambers and ladies to wait on her, and they bathed and perfumed her and dressed her in fine garments made of cloths as light as clouds and studded with precious gems, and soon she looked as fine as any princess. They were married the next day, and as the bells of the kingdom’s churches rang out, the Prince planted a kiss upon Magpie’s lips, and a little voice inside her heart said, “One.”

Time passed. The Prince and Magpie spent their days walking in the palace gardens, hunting in the forests, and dining on plates of gold and ebony. In the mornings the Prince awoke her with sweet music and in the evenings they recited poems and romantic tales to one another into the night. And every time the Prince kissed her, the small voice in Magpie’s heart whispered to her. Ten kisses. Twelve. Fifty. One hundred.

And time passed. Magpie’s belly swelled and she gave birth to three beautiful children, two girls and a boy, their eyes as golden as the rising sun, and their hair a tangle of light and dark. She tended them jealously, refusing to hand them over to the nursemaids, and their father the Prince idolized them. Every time he came to see them he planted a kiss upon each of their light and dark tresses, and a kiss upon her cheek. And the quiet voice in Magpie’s heart whispered: Three hundred and four. Nine hundred and twenty. Two thousand.

And time passed. The Prince led his father’s armies to war and returned victorious, with beautiful gold and silver chains to hang about Magpie’s neck, and polished pearls to hang from her ears. She spun tapestries depicting the tales of his battles, and they watched as their children grew. The Prince taught them to ride and hunt, and Magpie taught them to sing and dance, and they were loved by all in the palace. And every night Magpie would lie awake and her heart would count away the kisses. Four thousand. Five thousand. Seven thousand.

And then the day came that Magpie had only twenty kisses before the spell’s power was broken. Her heart filled with a terrible fear at all that she might lose, and so she gathered her belongings and stole away from the palace under cover of night and disappeared into the forest.

When the Prince discovered she was gone, he called all his guards, and sent a proclamation out across the land promising untold wealth for anyone who could restore his lost princess to him. He led scouting parties across the land himself, and refused to sleep or eat until he was too weak to stay upright upon his horse. But Magpie evaded them at every turn and stayed hidden deep in the forest.

One day, as Magpie went about collecting firewood for her camp, she saw a large army marching through the valley below her, marching under the Prince’s banner. The Prince had become convinced that his bride had been captured by enemies in a neighbouring country, and had declared war to try and find her and bring her home. Magpie’s heart broke into a hundred pieces, for she could not bear the thought of losing her love and her family – but she could not live with herself if she allowed people to die by her inaction. She ran down into the valley and commanded the army to halt. They turned around and brought her back to the palace.

As she arrived at the palace gate, the Prince was there to meet her. He was so weak he could barely stand, but he hobbled down the steps and threw his arms around her neck, showering her with kisses. Magpie held him tight and closed her eyes as she counted each kiss away.

Nineteen…Eighteen…Fifteen…Twelve…

Ten…Five…Two…One.

Ten thousand kisses. The spell was broken. The Prince stepped back and his golden eyes met Magpie’s green and blue ones. They stood, looking at each other on the palace steps as if for the first time, and Magpie waited with bated breath to see what he would say.

…

Thank you for reading! This is Day 5 of Writers HQ’s #WritingAdvent and the prompt was GIFT. I’ve had the idea of the gift/curse of love for ten thousand kisses before, so seemed like a good time to expand on it. I also love telling traditional tales, and this story seemed simple and clear enough to fit a traditional fairy tale narrative. What do you think, folks? Could you imagine telling this around a campfire somewhere? Leave me a comment below, and as always, if you’re writing anything yourself, hit me up and I’ll have a look 😊

Sex for Dresses

Today I’m buying myself a six-hundred dollar dress.

The fit is sublime. It hugs my body in all the right ways, cinching in around my waist, cupping my breasts like a lover, sliding around the curve of my toned backside like cream. The back plunges down to the dimples at the base of my spine. It’s the sort of dress you don’t wear underwear for, the sort of dress that sends the tabloids into a whirl of speculation. The green complements my auburn hair perfectly, brings out the amber in my eyes. It shimmers in the light, the way that only painfully expensive fabric can. It feels like I am wrapped in clouds. It caresses my body. I run my hands across it and vamp in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror in the changing room. I love how the cool of the fabric flares warm immediately under my hands, responsive, eager. I lick my lips at my reflection, trying on this sensuality. I look stunning. I look like a movie star. I look like a fucking goddess. And for six hundred dollars, I’d expect nothing less.

I’m doing it because I can. I’m doing it because he won’t notice. I’m doing it because I want him to notice. I want him to pull up the bank statement at the end of the month over breakfast and go, “Honey, what on earth was this for?” So I can get the thrill of choosing a lie to cover it. That charity ball we have coming up, darling. I needed something new for the ambassador’s dinner. Don’t we have an invitation to that new film release? I get so forgetful…

Maybe he’d ask to see it. Maybe he’d get angry. Maybe he’d shout, or laugh, or maybe he’d snap out of autopilot and see me, really see me, just for a moment.

He won’t. I know this. He never does. I buy something outrageous every month. Hundred dollar expenses don’t even make a dent in our shared bank account. But I’ve never bought anything this expensive before. This is a test. Uncharted territory.

The first Thursday of the month is Date Night. It’s booked into his calendar. We go out to a restaurant somewhere, we eat tiny portions of food piled onto our plates like modern art sculptures. He talks about the guys at work, the new merger, the deals being made. He asks me how my day has been, and he makes polite, non-committal replies. I don’t know if he’s not interested, or not really listening. I consider throwing stones into the calm of his predictable evening.

What did you do today, Honey?

I took a sledgehammer to the perfect marble kitchen worktop you just bought, and had a team in to replace it before you came home. It’s a whole different colour now, didn’t you notice?

I went through your things and burned all your childhood photos in the fire pit outside, chain smoking as I watched your fat smiling boyish face curl and blacken over and over again.

I caught a butterfly in a glass on the chest of drawers in your bedroom, and sat there for hours as it beat its wings against its glass prison, until finally exhaustion took it and it lay trembling like an autumn leaf. It’s still there, if the cleaner hasn’t tidied it away.

I lay in the bath and considered slipping beneath the surface and never coming back up for air.

I wonder how he’d react if I said these things.

When we come home I am summoned to his room like a business appointment. He doesn’t look at me as we undress. It’s not a deliberate unkindness, and that somehow makes it worse. I’m just another cog in the machine. Another box to be ticked.

The sex is formulaic and predictable. I could do it with my eyes closed. I have done it with my eyes closed. I think when we were first married I tried to get him to put his hands where I wanted them, tried to explore his body. I think I was genuinely excited about it at some point.

He thrusts above me, his eyes focused on the headboard like a runner looking for the finish line. Sometimes he kisses me, but he’s always looking through me. When he’s finished, he rolls over and goes to sleep – a simple, satisfied full stop to the evening’s activities. Date Night is officially concluded. Next item on the agenda, please.

I lay awake and chart the numbness. Sometimes there is rage, sometimes the sorrow burns down to the roots of my hands. But usually there is just sleepless emptiness. I watch the lines of the moonlight shift across the ceiling, and I listen to the creak of the central heating and the calling of night birds in the trees outside.

The next day, I take his card and go out on the town. The most expensive shops, the most exclusive designers. I allow the staff to fawn on me, bring me champagne and chocolates, roll out their personal shoppers and effuse over my choices. The worse the night before, the more expensive the purchase.

There is a delicious satisfaction in swiping that plastic. It feels like reclaiming territory. It feels like punching him in the face. It makes me want to scream and laugh. Sometimes it feels like I’m shattering into a thousand pieces, and as the cashier rings up the price I want to break down and cry. But swiping that card and knowing that in some small way I’m rebalancing the scales keeps me together.

And I can’t complain too much. Because at the end of the day, I get to come home with a fucking six hundred dollar dress.

…

Day 2 of #WritingAdvent with Writers HQ! Today we had to choose a piece from Post Secret, an online art project where people anonymously send in secrets on postcards and they are put up online for everyone to see. I chose this one:

This is an exercise in getting to the truth of the story you’re telling. I think the truth of this is story is that people need to find ways to feel like life is fair, even if that way is nonsensical – otherwise they break. How about you? What do you think the truth of this story is? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Gateway

In the distance a car thrums through the empty country lanes. The sound echoes off the wild, empty hills in stereo and magnifies until it is the sound of the whole night, like the roar of a midnight tide. I am in my pyjamas and ready to sleep and my pool of lamplight is a little golden oasis against the darkness, and I will not sleep, for this is my time, and here I am the lone, secret witness to it.

I am greedy for it, I am possessive over it – my own witching hour, where I may conjure you to me by writing to you, enjoy the thought of you ensconced here with me on this little bed, my secret night time companion, midnight feasts and whispers and crooks of necks and thoughts bleeding beyond their boundaries, watching them float up together into the dark night sky like paper lanterns. That I can enjoy the anticipation of you reading this, knowing this ink right now is a gateway where a Me you will never meet can connect with a You of her future, and wonder, and conspire.

Let me tell you, future You – now that she is returned, don’t speak to her too much yet. She is full of things beyond words, things she wishes to tell you with her whole body while she is still at the full expanse of her solitude, the wild solitude you fell in love with and the ringing of all her thoughts. Let her take you where she will, and hold her as long as you can before the fear returns and the walls of the house start pressing back in on her.

Remember her wildness – remind her of it later, when she is small and afraid. Remind her of the magic of long, lonely nights – you must understand what I mean, you were a nightwalker, you know the potent magic that gathers when silence falls on the world. Write to her from your own sacred midnights – she gets so few at home; she’s trying to trade them for mornings, but the taste is just not the same. Wedge these fresh cracks in her soul where she has stretched with BOOKS – hold these wounds open, let her bleed her honey sap onto you and let her soul widen into this new shape. The two of you are too marvellous to be confined with pot-plant domestication.

Escape into fiction, and lay your roots down there – grow wild and strange. That fertile soil will give you both the strength you need to withstand the storms of life. It will bring bloom back to the woman you love and sometimes think you’ve lost. It is the antidote against the terror of politics and the news. It is the cure for a broken heart, and a reason to live. She burns for you so fiercely, off the back of one book – one book! Imagine how you’d dance given a library.

Do not let her lose this. Do not let her disappear and buy into the lie that she is less and should be ashamed for not being the dutiful wife and housemaid. Make sure there is food to eat when she returns and BUY HER BOOKS, DAMMIT. You’re welcome.

My Soul is a Furnace Fed on the Pages of Books

Oh my love. My darling one.

I have just been released from the clutches of a book I have fallen utterly in love with, and I am bereft and breathless and thrumming with life and I want to take you in my arms and tell you with kisses and hands everything my thin words cannot about how this book has moved me.

How could I have forgotten that this was the fire that kept my eyes bright through my childhood? That my soul is a furnace fed on the pages of books, and that no digital substitute will do compared to that ink-and-glue musk, that turn of a page like the crack of a fan in a comedy of manners play; that magical way the simple act of opening a book draws the curtains down around you even in the most public places, gives you privacy, gives you escape, gives you your own private theatre.

I’ve had books as my companion since before I can remember and so never ‘discovered’ these truths until now – they were such commonplace joys I didn’t think to call them joys at all; I took them entirely for granted. How could I have starved myself so? It feels like my soul had forgotten how to fly and is now unfurling its wings once again, feeling the creaks and aches of misuse with as much discomfort as relief.

I want to share this with you so badly, I want to dance with you like this. We could race through books given permission, I used to pride myself on it. Let’s chop and change and delight in the secrets as we find them. Should we find ourselves with a glorious week and nothing better to do, let us lie naked together and pass a book between us like a cigarette in a noir film and tangle ourselves in the sheets like Neo-Victorian bohemians and let the plates stack up outside the door for room service to deal with.

I wish to read voraciously. I must carve the time for this out of my cramped, anxious life at home, swamped by lists and always aware of the duties I have not fulfilled – probably from my sleep, if this latest affair is any indication. Join me, I entreat you – even a poor book is no great loss when we can comfortably conquer them in a week!

Say you’ll join me. Come and soothe my poor sore neck bowed with reading, and let me give you the fire this fiction has given me. I feel sharpened as if by a whetstone, and all my senses ring.

Remembrance

Brighton’s fountain war memorial

Is full of teenage seagulls:

Smooth, sleek birds 

Barely out of the down of their youth. 

They splash and preen and posture,

Unaware of the poppy wreaths;

They are young

And invincible.

In Praise of Dull Holidays

This began life as a series of letters to my partner.

***

My darling, I have never felt the drive to write to you more.
When I am released from my duties
I am tearing through pages of paper like a hungry
street urchin at a buffet.

I understand it now.
These writers who excursed to beautiful, desolate places to write their books
did not so for inspiration,
or to be diverted,
but precisely for the
divine boredom
a terrible holiday can give you,
where to dance a flight of fancy across a page
becomes the truly thrilling thing it ought to be.
I would recommend it to all struggling writers.
Perhaps I should do it every year.

Writers –
yes,
book a holiday
to get that writing done that you so desperately need to.

But book it somewhere dreadful.

Book the most teeth-grindingly dull thing you can think of –
a place whose activities,
menu
and clientèle
make you want to roll your eyes
and wither into a husk at the very thought.

Dread it,
dread the mundanity of this place before you book it.
And book in advance –
give your mind plenty of time to think up
more and more terrible iterations of this
crushingly beige place.

Ideally, go under duress –
let it be a work holiday,
or some sort of family obligation.

And I know it’s getting harder and harder to do,
but try and book somewhere with terrible phone service,
and a Wifi that is so patchy it’s more hassle trying to use it than not.

Then
tell a friend about this terrible place you’re going to,
someone who can delight in the horror of it with you.
Demand their pity.
Imagine
aloud with them,
over a cup of tea,
the devastating plateaus of boredom that await you.
Beg them to put you out of your misery now.

And then
when you go off on this holiday,
write that person every day.

Even if you cannot post it to them at the time –
in fact,
it’s almost better to save these letters and
deliver them in bulk,
by hand,
after the holiday.

Make real for them the horrors you imagine.
Describe to them the flavour of your boredom,
the texture of your ennui.
Share with them your pleasant surprises,
secret friends,
and the little things keeping you sane.

Make a game of it and make it ridiculous –
find a new theme or style for each day,
and write them
letters from prison,
chapters of noir,
Gothic memoriam poetry,
or high fantasy re-imaginings of your day.

For me it is like the opening of floodgates –
once I start writing like this, it’s hard to stop, it’s so much fun.
Look at me now –

I should in bed
asleep,
and I am writing to you
by lamplight
with the rain
hammering against the windows
because my spirits are too high
to be contained, and
the words bloom
fat and abundant in my head,
and if I don’t harvest the blooms now
they’ll have withered by morning,
or their scent will have changed unalterably.

Maybe it will not work for all writers,
but it works for me
and so must work for some:

Book a holiday you actively dread for its lack of stimulating activity,
and go with no one you love.
Embrace that fecund boredom
so rare now
in our world of screens and super-normal stimuli,
and watch your mind
make its own shapes for your delight.

It may not be writing,
but I am certain
the activity you fall to
in those bleak and pulseless moments
is one of your wellsprings of true joy,
and is worth discovering.

Be well.

Be bored!

Be brilliant.

Aunt Melancholia

Aunt Melancholia has come to visit,
With heavy bags blocking doors,
Weighed down on chests,
Under the eyes;

No need to get up for Aunt Melancholia;
She’d rather you didn’t leave the bed.
She’s seen how tired you look;
She’s certain you’re not eating right;
Let her tuck you in tight
And throw that nasty to-do list away.

She sheds and spreads
And fills the space,
Certain this time she’ll stay
Oh, forever, forever…
Will someone check on her for me and see
How many tears she wants in her tea.