Young Adult / Black Swan - Chapter One
If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
The Bible 1 Corinthians 13:1-2
Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur
Whom the gods love die young.
Plautus Bacchides 1.817
1. The Life and Death of Myself
The sixth and final thing you should know about me is that I died young. And in love.
There. That is everything. It is over.
It was, at least, a downfall as appropriately momentous and painful as my life had been.
Well, as painful anyway.
The freezing ocean broke my long fall, knocking the breath right out of me. I was sinking into the sea like I was made of stone and not of human. Whatever human is made of. Cold water started to seep into my blood the second my heavy coat dragged me below the surface, until it felt like only ice was running through my veins, putting out the last fires of my life. The ocean itself was as dark and dense and silent as space, but I could see little air bubbles floating like stars above, deserting me for the surface and the moonlight. I marvelled at the sheer audacity of that moon – still trying to reach for me with its long fingers through the water, even at this late hour of my life. Then it was all washed away, as easy as that. A huge surge at my back picked me up, like I was no more than flotsam, and tossed me at the waiting rocks. My shoulders and upper body hit first and I felt things in me – bones, I presume – snap like matchsticks. Then even the little air bubbles were gone. My head collided next; pain blossomed and brightness sparked before my eyes. Now my blood was seeping into the water. My very last thought was to hope that my next life would be better – warmer and drier, in any case – and that I might get to have that which I couldn’t have in this lifetime.
Mors vincit omnia.
Death always wins.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
If I am going to tell this story then I had better start at the beginning, with my life, rather than with my death, which – obviously – is at the end. Because that is logical and logic is something I valued a great deal in my life, though you’d never guess it from the way it turned out.
And, as this is my story, I want to introduce everyone formally first. It is only polite.
My name was Eliza le Fey. But please don’t hold that against me. I hadn’t known it then, but it had been held like a knife to my throat my entire life. Though – I had always wanted to be rid of it; which just goes to show that sometimes in life you actually do get what you wish for.
I should also point out here that, for most of its eighteen short years, my life had been neither momentous nor terribly painful. It had been rather dead, actually. I didn’t start to feel really alive until right before my death, which is a cruel sort of irony. And, for the longest time, I’d never thought I would be able to consider myself as someone in love.
There are six things you should know about me before this story begins.
The first thing you should know is that I had been quite possibly the last person in the whole world that any of this should have happened to. That’s not to say that it wasn’t my fault; just that not believing doesn’t necessarily mean not seeing.
My name had actually come from my mother, and I held her fully responsible for it. I hadn’t minded the Eliza part so much, except when people automatically assumed it was short for Elizabeth, which it wasn’t. Nor had I been the princess from the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale (though few people ever made that mistake). My last name had been a whole other issue. Names had always caused me trouble.
My mother had been Anna Wells, and, in addition to being a romance novelist, she had also been the vaguest person I’d ever come across. Actually, she’d been more of a part-time author – though I don’t doubt that she lived her stories 24/7. But she had only been able to write the ‘inspiration was flowing’; when it wasn’t, she worked in the local library, so we all could eat and pay the power bill. Maybe it was an excess of romance, or writing, or both, but to say that she had been a bit distant is not giving credit to her true absent-mindedness. Dreamy is a word that springs to mind. As does scatterbrained. So much so, I had quit referring to her as Mom when I was fourteen, and then just called her Anna; although not usually while in her presence. Not that she would have probably noticed. Her pen name had been Fortuna Wells, which about said it all.
But I had loved her to pieces, though I know I neglected to tell her that enough. We had been more alike than I knew – or cared to admit.
The one who’d had the difficult and often thankless task of being married to her was Stephan Wells. He had been the exact opposite of Anna, which made for an interesting marriage. The jury will probably forever be out in the case of opposites attracting (and I have no more discovered the answers to such of life’s philosophical quandaries since my own ended), but you can count on opposites arguing. They had some blazing rows. He was salt of the earth – a pragmatist and an adherent of reason – and, in that, very much like myself. Though he might not have been my father, he had been as similar to me as Anna hadn’t, and if not for his grounding presence in my life I might have flipped far sooner than I inevitably did. He worked in the nearby sawmill, several miles to the south of our town and its life-spring.
My older brother, Daniel Flynn, had already made his escape out of here before this story starts, having followed a well worn path etched into the one road leading out of this two star town. He’d turned nineteen, and not looked back. You could practically see the tire tracks left behind. I hadn’t blamed him for a second, but I had missed him, bitterly. Ever since I was little, he had single-handedly taught me everything I had been most proud to say I knew. How to swim, the best way to climb a tree, how to tie knots. How to skip stones, pitch a tent, handle a rifle. He had once tried to show me how to change a tyre, but I lacked the arm strength to be of much use. He bestowed upon me some his encyclopaedic knowledge of cars too; the best education I can say I ever received. But then he had moved away, to study mechanical engineering at college, and I had been alone.
My father had been a lecturer at the same college – Dr Leon Flynn, astronomer. His full name was Leonardo, also a gift from his mother, but if you ever called him that, he wouldn’t answer. He was half Italian, which meant the ubiquitous Italian family. There had been mafia connections, but – along with the Catholicism – no one talked about it. But it did mean that I formally had approximately one point five quarts of Italian blood running in my veins. I could cook pasta like an mf-ing riot.
Actually, if you called him an astronomer he wouldn’t answer either. He was an astrophysicist, who specialised in High Energy Astronomy (that’s black holes to you and me). Do I still need to explain why it hadn’t worked out between him and Anna? They had both been as distant as each other, but one had lived in a world of supernovae and galactic nuclei; the other, satin boudoirs and laced corsets. In other words – ill fated from the beginning. They had met while at college, and married soon after. Daniel had been the planned one; I the illegitimate child, from after the divorce. Ask me not if this had had psychologically damaging effects and I will tell you no lies. My mother, in case you haven’t twigged yet, had been hopeless when it came to men and decisions.
That had left me alone as the ungracious heir of Anna’s maiden name, le Fey, rather than my father’s; owing to her having been particularly furious with him during my birth registration process. But he hadn’t ever minded, or cared enough, to want it changed.
Somewhere on Anna’s side there had also been a French connection, though, not a very proud one – other than one grandmother and two great-aunts, all long dead, no one else in the family retained the name le Fey. In a way, by lumping me with it, she had saved it. I had probably been the one of the only ones left in the whole world landed with that surname, and now even I am gone. But it is hardly surprising, considering what it means – it’s clearly cursed. Everyone has made it their life’s goal to be rid of it, and the inevitable comparisons to Morgan le Fay. A witch may have been a more accurate description for me than a princess, but I can say with all honesty that I never belonged to a coven. Or – for that matter – a church (because we all know how hard they can be to tell apart in the dark). Names had always caused me trouble.
Anna had been the only one who liked the name – she’d thought it literary; though only in her quixotic world of fair maidens and dashing knights. But she had still dropped it in favour of Wells when she married Stephan. Anna had been just the type of dead beat non-feminist that women from the seventies gave everything to liberate, but now probably shake their heads and wonder why they bothered. Which is to be expected from girls of my generation, but not when you come from the seventies too. She had thought it a woman’s job to surrender everything to her husband – including her name. Though, of course, she had expected great things from that husband in return. Miracles, in fact. When she thought of marriage, she saw twelve dozen roses and moonlit walks, Venetian canals and perpetual bliss. Pity no one had ever told Stephan that.
The second thing you should know is that I hadn’t been at all wistful like Anna. Rational, logical and an incurable realist – that was me. I hadn’t been a crier. I had often been told that I was about as capable of emotion as a log of wood.
But, though I had been adamant that we shared nothing else, I always knew I had gotten my looks from my mother. In particular, I had acquired her extraordinary hair. Hers, actually, had been far, far more beautiful than mine; a stunning light auburn – the colour of redwood – and it had sort of flowed in soft waves, like, I imagine, one of the heroines in her books. I don’t know if it was a case of one set of good genes that never made the leap to me or just a truly excellent conditioning treatment that I hadn’t known about, but one thing my hair didn’t do was flow. It had hung, in great long ropes, straight down my back; always seeming inclined to clump together and curl at the ends. It perpetually made me look like I had been swimming in the sea and let it dry naturally. I had put it down to all the salt in the air, but it can’t have helped that I rarely brushed it. It had also been darker than Anna’s; more a deep brown than auburn, but had still shone bronze in the light, like the colour of wet autumn leaves. Her skin had been paler than mine too, and I remember it as having been smooth and as yet unlined. But – there I go again. Highlighting our differences, when it was what we had in common that remained at the end.
I had never known who to blame for the perpetual dark shadows under my eyes though – like painted purple smudges. Very likely they had been all my fault, from a lifetime of not getting enough sleep.
That’s the third thing you should know about me. I had been an eternal night person, who never felt more alive than in the depths of night. We people of the night are terribly discriminated against. It’s not our fault we only animate after midnight. But the world still starts at eight o’clock sharp, regardless – though not for me, to any further extent. Morning people get bright eyes and sunrises; night people get sleep deprivation and darkness. Caffeine had been my drug of choice. Well, one of them anyway.
But the shadows never left from under my eyes, and I never did solve to mystery of them. Anna had thought them excellent; she used to say they made me look dramatic and moody (but then – she would). Thankfully I’d had pale green eyes, like new leaves, which had lightened the whole effect considerably.
My mother had always worn prettier and more feminine clothes than me; she was all floaty, floral skirts and loose tops. There was a lot of ribbons and lace involved. I had rarely been seen outside of a pair of jeans. I was tall too – which was good for handling motorcycles; but not so much for boys, where any vertical height difference suddenly became problematic.
Not that any of my descriptive attempts matter. You never got past Morgan le Fay, did you?
I’ll tell you what I was – what that girl had been, in the pre-Christian era.
She had been the inexorable result when an astronomer and a romance novelist have a momentary error of judgement. A coffee mainlining unashamed blasphemer, with a thing for fairy lights and a morbid fear of staircases. A girl who had never managed to get through a single Austen or Bronte (Shakespeare could go swing too – she had no time for tragic heroines), who often felt like she lived on a different world from everyone else, never on the same page. A girl who rode her motorcycle way too fast and with reckless disregard, because she preferred to feel pain than nothing at all.
What can I say? That girl was a fricking rebel.
The fourth thing you should know about me – and this is important to point out – is that I was not often taken over by sudden, impulsive notions of any kind. That is – not until bloody prescience came along.
The fifth thing is that I was as equally disinclined toward having suicidal thoughts. No matter what anyone else tries to tell you, I was not suicidal. Thought, admittedly, I had been pretty messed up, battling daily with the deep disillusionment that had been sunk over me almost my whole life. And it had induced a certain recklessness in me, regarding my own safety. But falling isn’t the same as jumping, and I should know the difference. Please keep this these things in your mind when you proceed to judge my actions and their consequences, as I know you will.
I had a cat too; Astra was her name and she had taken her name seriously. She had been every bit a lofty and haughty as cats are apt to be, and had looked down upon us all like she had indeed been celestial. She had been pure black from head to tail – Anna had picked her because she had always wanted a witches cat. It went with the cemetery next door. I’m introducing her here because she had her own part to play in this story, although not necessarily a happy one.
So. What can I say that I have learned from my life? Now that it is finally over?
Firstly: that it not wise to go running around outside during electrical storms. That’s practically asking to be hit by a thunderbolt.
Secondly: faith, like love, will always let you down. But you can’t have love without faith, and a life without love is no life at all.
Thirdly: fatalism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and good for a quick death if ever you are in need of one. Works like a charm. Or just piss off fate. That works too.
There; I have done it. Just as I should have. I have introduced everyone, even the cat. Just as is polite. Just as he would have wanted me to. I even did a fairly good job of introducing myself, and I always used to forget to introduce myself.
Those were the people that made up my life. My past life, that is. There were more, of course. Corinne and George. Kimberley and Alex. Jamie.
And then there were the…others.
But they made up my death.
For my whole life I was a mere character in a story, just following my script. It was a strange story, penned by a cold, unfeeling hand. Written by that dark authoress of our world; that shadowy female who looks down upon us all and who you sometimes glimpse in dreams.
It is a black fairytale she writes, dwelling in that midnight world of in-betweens and curious meetings. A world where fortune’s fool met her terrible fate. Where action met his consequence. Where faith was found and hope abandoned. Where holding on inevitably meant letting go. It is a story of falling, sinking and jumping, and knowing the difference. Of love and desire, and trying not to get lost in the difference. But be warned. It deals with death and gods and supercars in a way that might challenge your previously held notions.
But, I was also a black swan; who broke away from the script, flapped my wings and caused a hurricane.
Finally, here at the end of the story, I pick up the pen, in my cold, unfeeling hand. I take back my fate. A shame it’s too late.
Still, at least the world will get to here things from my perspective. It is a small revenge, but it will have to do.
And I know this story starts strangely, like I’ve mixed it all up, or got the chapters out of order. It begins with an ending and ends with a beginning. One day it will all make sense – maybe even to me. Because, despite all appearances to the contrary, this story is not about my death, which you will have to wait for the end for. It is actually about my life.
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This 190 word review has not been unlocked.
It is good writing but I find it a bit difficult to handle all that exposition. The death scene was ok but I wasn’t sure what I was getting into-was it Sunset Boulevarde? You need to be a bit more vivid in your language. Maybe not have continual references to yourself as dead. It drags on the story. Could you not tell this with a bit more action? It does have the selfish preoccupation that young adults have with themselves so it is realistic in that sense. You usually tell the death at the beginning because the mystery of finding out why you die is what drives the story. You haven’t quite given me enough to want to know why you died. You know her but I don’t. It’s a bit like the film Titanic. Why would you want to go see a 3 hour film about a boat you know is going to sink? Because of Lenny and Kate and their love story. I need a bit more of that in the first chapter.
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