Elizabethan Theatre

For the first time in months, Sheila could breathe easy.  The physically inexplicable knot of nerves and emotions that caused the ever-present ache in the pit of her stomach was gone.  She touched the little box inside her pocket and smiled.

She’d thought it would be bigger.  How could something capable of causing so much joy and so much pain fit into something no bigger than a thimble?  Her brain couldn’t begin to fathom it, but she knew if the pharmaceutical industry ever got ahold of such technology, they’d have to redefine what it meant to be “filthy rich.”

As it was, she’d stumbled onto the purveyor of her cure quite by accident.  Walking the dirty city streets home from work, still fighting back the tears she’d been guarding against all day, she finally lost the battle when a gust of wind upended her umbrella.

She’d slipped into a little alley and finally surrendered, letting the rain cover up the evidence of her grief.  She was rather caught up in the drama of it all when she felt a tap on her shoulder.  She looked up, startled, to see a hunched old woman there, holding an unmangled umbrella above her head.  There was something about her eyes and the curve of her mouth that was almost a smile that made Sheila wonder vaguely if she had once been beautiful.

“Come inside, dear,” the old woman had said.

Sheila was not usually the sort to run off with random strangers in alleys, but in that moment, she was of the opinion that she really had nothing else to lose.  And so she followed the old woman through a door, hidden to all but the most observant by a façade of brick that matched the wall quite perfectly.

Her memories of what happened next were murky.  She could glimpse the old woman handing her a cup of something warm that might have been tea.  She could hear the story of her latest heartache spilling from her mouth.  She could feel of the old woman’s hand as it held hers — her skin had been smooth and soft, but thin, like it would bruise easily.

When she stepped back out into the alley, it was as if she’d awoken from a very long nap.  The sun was shining, the air was warm, and if it had not been for the verification from her phone that it was in fact the same day, she might have believed she’d slept through the entire winter.  In her hand there had been a piece of paper, which she hadn’t noticed until a warm breeze tried to carry it away from her.

Contained Heart™ Instructions and Recovery

You have just undergone a very delicate procedure to remove your heart.  It’s possible you may experience slight memory problems for a few hours following the procedure.  This is entirely normal and not cause for alarm; however, if symptoms persists beyond seven days, please return for observation.

As discussed prior to your informed consent (please see attached), your heart has been preserved in a uniquely manufactured container, where it will remain safe and functional should you choose to have it reinserted some day.  It is imperative that you keep it on your person at all times.  Failing to adhere to this recommendation can have severe adverse side effects, as discussed prior to your consent.  Please remember that the container also serves as your receipt for the procedure should you encounter any problems.

Your records will be kept on file in the event you choose to return to have your procedure reversed.  Good luck, and we hope you enjoy your newly Contained Heart™.

She flipped to the attached page, which bore a photocopied list of benefits and warnings, punctuated by her signature.  At the bottom, it said, “You will find your new Contained Heart™ waiting for you in: __________________”  Scrawled above the line were the handwritten words “your right-hand skirt pocket.”  And sure enough, that is where she’d found it.  It was silver and cubic, with carvings that could have been simply decorative or perhaps instructive in some language or code she could never hope to decipher.  It was both heavier and warmer than it should have been.

Weeks went by with nothing but good results.  Her friends were surprised and relieved to see her smiling so easily again.  With the heaviness of her heart in her pocket instead of her chest, she felt light and free — perhaps even invincible.

If she’d been able to recall more of the procedure and the conversation that preceded it, she would have been more careful.  The old woman had warned her that hearts have a way of refusing to be contained.  But Sheila did not remember this, and she had never been particular adept at protecting her heart.

After a particularly enjoyable evening out, during which she’d laughed and danced and charmed more than her fair share, she began to feel her mood slip, just the tiniest bit, as she stepped out of the cab that had carried her home.  She chalked it up to one too many drinks, one too many dances, one too many hours in her impressively high-heeled shoes, and thought nothing more of it.

Until morning.  When the light streaming through her window finally woke her, her limbs felt so heavy she could barely gather the will power to move them even an inch.  And that’s when it hit her.  She forced herself out of bed and onto the floor where her skirt lay discarded from the night before.  She reached into its pocket, and her finger, horrifyingly, slipped through the bottom of it.  She flipped it inside out and stared at her finger.  Her pocket, it seemed, had come apart at the seams.

She scoured the floor for the little silver box.  She searched the sidewalk outside her apartment.  She called every cab company in the city.  She begged the manager of the club until he let her search every booth, every crack in the dance floor, every bag of trash collected from the night before.  Her heart was nowhere to be found.

She rushed to the alley in a panic, informed consent and instructions in hand.  She walked up and down, banging all along the brick wall until the old woman finally stepped out.

“Please help me,” Sheila begged.

And once again, the old woman said, “Come inside, dear.”

Again she was handed a cup of something that might have been tea, but Sheila could not take comfort in it this time.  She once again spilled the details of her sad story to the old woman’s patient ears.  When she was done, the old woman took her hand again and squeezed it, but her eyes were sad.

“I’m so sorry, my darling,” she said, “but our specifications were clear.  There is little to be done for those who are careless with their hearts.”

There was more pleading and more tears, but eventually she had to accept there was nothing the old woman could do for her.  She let the old woman lead her out into the alley, and she did not protest when she closed the door.  The sun had gone under the clouds.  All Sheila could feel in that moment was the cold.

But there was something the old woman had not revealed.  In her many years of research, she had learned many things about the heart.  One thing was that absence makes the heart grow fonder.  Another was that home is where the heart is.  And so, the old woman could not guarantee it, but over the years she had seen many cases in which these two factors worked together quite well to work things out.  But you cannot simply tell a woman who has lost her heart to take heart.

Across the city, a businessman late for a meeting hurried to the curb as he simultaneously signaled for a cab.  Just as he reached for the handle, a glint of silver in a mound of grimy slush caught his eye.  He squinted at it, but he couldn’t quite fathom what it could be.

“You in or out?”

He looked at the driver, impatience permanently etched onto his face.  He looked at his watch.  He was already so late.  He took his hand off the handle.  The cabbie yelled something rather rude and drove off.  The businessman walked over to the pile of what had once been pristine snow and picked up the tiny box.  It was heavy and warm.  He put it in his breast pocket and signaled for a cab.

© 2011 Elizabeth Ditty

I know autumn is coming when my thoughts turn gleefully toward the macabre.  I was given an impromptu writing prompt by a friend, which on the surface seemed wildly out of my wheelhouse due to its seemingly comedic bent.  Well, my brain somehow managed to turn it into the story that follows.  To my friend, I apologize in advance for totally cheating on the last sentence.  To everyone else, I hope you enjoy.

FIRE

My mother always told me not to play with fire.

Perhaps it was a warning I should have heeded more carefully, but her caution only served to provoke my interest.  If she’d never said anything, I’d probably have been one of those lucky children who burn their hands on the stove and subsequently learn their lesson with no more suffering than some raw skin under a bandage for a few days.

But no, that was not to be my fate.  As I stand here, shivering, struggling to fight against the elements with no defense, I can think of nothing beyond how I arrived here.  Perhaps if I impart my tale now to the frigid winds, the words will float back in time, to my young mind as a proper warning, or forward into the second thoughts of mothers who first think to instill temptation into their children.

What no one ever tells you is that there are many different kinds of fire, and they all burn in their own special ways.  There is a very specific name for the species of fire that would be my downfall.  Its name was Woman.  I never knew her given name.

I’d seen men watching her, but it wasn’t until she looked into my eyes for the first time that I understood why.

She’d come to my master’s shop while he’d been out.  I was apprenticed to a blacksmith, much to my mother’s chagrin.  The skies were threatening snow that day.  People pulled their clothes tight around them, as if doing so would somehow protect against the biting cold.  But she did not cower.  She walked as if it were a spring day, and the wind rewarded her, playing with her hair, which was black as night, perfectly disheveling it like a lover would, obscuring her face but hiding none of her beauty.

She entered and closed the door behind her.  With one toss of her head, her hair parted, and her eyes locked onto mine.  They were blacker than her hair, and I could not look away.  And then she smiled, and something in them flashed, and I felt as if my very bones were on fire.  My vocation had given me a tolerance for heat, but this was like nothing I’d ever felt.  To this day I cannot remember if she spoke a word, but I understood her perfectly.  Her cauldron had rusted through, and she needed a new one, a stronger one.  I told her I’d see to it personally, as if this would impress her.  She smiled at me again, and then left.

After that, I was always looking for her, every moment of every day, and even worse at night.  Always burning.  As the years passed, the height of my obsession grew with the height of my body.  Everyone watched her, but I watched her best.  Sometimes at night, I would see her through my window, leading a man down an alley.  And she would see me.  I would not look away — I don’t even know if I could have — and she would hold my gaze, smiling as if she knew my most secret thoughts, until she disappeared into the dark with her conquest.  Some nights I was convinced I’d wake up nothing more than a pile of ash.  Some nights I would have welcomed such a destiny.  Anything for relief from the fire.

Finally, I could take no more.  I would either consume the source of these flames or I would be consumed by them entirely.  As soon as night fell, I ventured out.  It was the dead of winter, and the ground was white, but I felt nothing but heat.

I hurried toward the alley where I’d seen her take so many men.  It never occurred to me to consider whether or not those men had ever returned.  My mind could only think of her.  I turned the corner into it and stopped in my tracks.  There at the end, she waited.  She smiled, and her eyes flashed.  The fever was unbearable.  She put a finger to her lips, and then it was outstretched to me, beckoning me toward her.  I stepped forward, and she stepped back.  She said nothing, and yet I understood.  I followed without any thought at all.

We wound our way through the darkest streets, her eyes always alight, my soul threatening to incinerate me from the inside out.  No matter how fast my pace, I could never catch her.  I never hesitated once, not even at the edge of the forest.  While mothers warned of fire, fathers warned of this place — always dark and full of spirits, they said.  A picture from a storybook flickered in my mind — a fairylight leading a man toward an unseen cliff — but it was quickly snuffed out by my blazing heart, so bent on catching its only desire.

She was so far ahead of me now.  I was broke into a sprint, terrified of losing sight of her.  I had only the now-constant glow of her eyes as my compass.  Suddenly, I found myself in a clearing.  In my surprise, I stopped.  The moon illuminated the land, all I saw was her.  Standing mere paces away, she waited.

I took a step toward her, but this time she did not move.  Another, and still she remained.  I continued until I could have reached out and touched her, but I was too afraid.  She smiled, and her eyes blazed orange.  She embraced me, and her lips found mine.  The heat up until now had been nothing.  Her fire engulfed me, scorched my very being.  Never had I imagined such torment and such ecstasy.

And then, at the brink of what I was sure would be my complete incineration, everything suddenly, inexplicably, went cold.  I opened my eyes.  She was gone.

The wind cut through me, and I reached to pull my shirt up around my neck, but my hands found nothing.  I looked at my arms and saw bare, blistered skin.  My eyes travelled down my torso and to where my shoes had been.  There I saw my bare feet, and under them nothing but ash-covered ice.

I searched the landscape for her but found nothing.  Not even my own tracks remained.  I realized I was standing in the dead center of a frozen lake, surrounded by snow-covered trees in every direction, with no indication of the one from which I’d come.

And here I remain.  How I long for that excruciating fire now, the fire that brought me here, to the middle of nowhere, naked and slowly freezing to death.  I try to recall her embrace, to draw some of the warmth from my memory, but I feel nothing but pain.  My only comfort is in knowing that soon, very soon, I shall feel nothing at all.

© 2011 Elizabeth Ditty

THE KNIGHT AND THE DRAGON

Once upon a time, in the sort of land now remembered only in fairytales, there lived a dragon.

She was a curious creature, both in nature and temperament, and she was the only one of her kind.  From the moment her snout cracked through the shell and the light first glinted in her eye, she was on her own.  But she was not sad, because she knew no other way to exist.

She grew up prancing with butterflies and dancing with birds until one day a new creature came upon her.  It was the sound of the metal covering his boots against the rock that caught her attention.  What held it was the spear he carried in his right hand, the staff ornately carved and its tip polished to a brilliant shine; she thought it beautiful.  Not knowing any better, she approached.  She did not understand his expression — eyes wide, mouth slightly agape — and so she did not anticipate his action.  He jabbed the spear into her shoulder.  She cried out, and the combination of the pain in her body and the pain in her heart sent flames shooting from her nostrils and throat.

She curled herself into as small a mountain as she could, nursing her bleeding wound, while the cruel creature burned.  She had not known she could do that.  She had not known she would need to.  The trees around her burned as well.  She turned away in shame and closed her eyes, knowing the companions of her youth would visit her no more.  Her tears fell to the ground and turned hard.

She did not open them again until that sound that had brought such destruction returned and jolted her to alert.  Another creature wore that strange expression as its eyes took in the remains of its brethren.  Its face twisted into something new — and ugly.  The dragon twisted her own face to match it, and she felt the smoke escape her nostrils.  The creature raised its arm and with it another spear.  The dragon raised her head.  She breathed out.  The creature was dead.

Next time she would be better prepared.  She stole the ashen metal from the creatures’ bodies and channeled her fear and hate into the heat necessary to mold the pieces to her body.  Every time a new creature came — and they always did — she added to her armor.  Only one place remained uncovered and unprotected, though it was not for lack of materials.  The clearing was littered with extraneous sheets of metal, and on days when the creatures did not accost her, she fashioned it into wondrous approximations of nature.  Surrounded by blackened bark and trees of iron, their limbs inhabited by strange winged creatures who never moved but always stared, the armor-clothed dragon was a fearsome and beautiful sight to behold.

The creatures who approached rarely took the time to look at what she’d created.  No, they saw her only as a force of destruction, and so they were too bent on destroying her in return to see her true nature.  They saw only her teeth, and her fire, and the hatred in her eyes, and the memories of their lost ancestors clouded their own.  They could not see her beauty, and, quite ironically, they could not see the one tiny area where she was was still vulnerable.  High on her back, a small collection of brilliant, iridescent green scales, strong enough to protect her from the elements of nature but not of humanity, gleamed when the sun hit them.  She hated them, despised them for being a reminder of the tender creature she had been, but she could not reach or twist or bend enough to cover them, no matter how hard she tried.

For years and years, the creatures came, always with stronger metals and sharper weapons.  The sound of their armor always gave them away, so thick was the silence on the days they did not come.  She had grown so tired of the sights that greeted her: the cold metal shards that had become her companions, the vicious visitors with hate in their eyes meant for her and her alone.  The smoke and heat from her own fire stung her eyes, and the ground was covered in tiny, hard orbs — the evidence of her pain.  And so there came a day when she closed her eyes from it all, letting the sounds alert her to the ever-impending dangers but rejecting the images that came with them.  And for many years, this was enough to keep her safe.  Until the day a creature approached whom she did not see coming.

This knight, if he could be called that, having weathered so few years on the earth, was different in many ways.  But he had spent most of those years watching the dragon, and he had seen many of his kind burn under her flames.  But he had also seen many other things that no one else had, for he had come to the land as a boy, a wandering child who had meant to find a village where he could settle and find work and make a life for himself, since none had been bestowed to him at birth.  But it just so happened that, on the way to a village that would have granted him all these things, he stumbled across a clearing of silver trees gleaming in the moonlight, and within them he saw a sleeping dragon.  His cloth-covered feet had made no sound, and so she slept, not peacefully, but soundly.  And because the boy was a stranger and knew no stories of the atrocities she had committed, he watched her with curiosity instead of hatred, awe instead of wrath.  And he knew that it would be a very long time, at the very least, before he would move on from this place.

He stayed alive by pilfering the supplies left by the knights who had come before him.  They always had the finest rations, a last meal fit for kings — a promise of the riches they would receive upon returning to the kingdom with the dragon’s hide.  He was certain he could have stolen into the dragon’s clearing while she slept if he’d wanted one of their discarded spears, but, smart lad that he was, he figured he stood as much of a chance with his as-yet-untested wooden bow and arrow than with the weapons of the dead.

On days when the knights came, he watched the battles, taking copious notes in his mind whilst never doubting the outcome.  On days when they didn’t, he gathered supplies, ate his meals, and practiced with his bow and arrow out of earshot.  His nights were spent watching: the rise and fall of her breath, the dark vapor from her nostrils, the occasional clink of a tear to the ground — and, most curiously, the patch of iridescent green in the sea of armor on her back.  And so it was that the boy grew tall and grew strong and grew into a man.

An age had passed since the dragon’s birth, and the knights of the land, having grown tired of death, had begun to choose other ways to test their bravery.  Finally a day came when it had been so long since a knight had tried his luck that the boy would soon have to move on without their abandoned rations.  He thought of the knights and their hopes for their quests here, and he knew what he had to do.  As the sun fell beneath the horizon, he tiptoed toward the dragon.  She did not hear, did not move, did not see, did not suspect.  It was not until she felt the prick of metal against her back that she knew someone was there.  It had been so long since anything had touched her that her eyes flew open involuntarily at the shock of it.  There this peculiar knight stood, his bow drawn, and the arrow poised to pierce her flesh, to end it all  — her work, her anger, her suffering.  She was so tired.  Her fire had gone out.  She lay her head down on the ground and closed her eyes for what she was certain would be the last time.

When the point of the arrow was withdrawn, she thought for a moment it was done.  She chanced a peek.  The knight — was that what he should be called?  His armor was barely more than rags, and his weapon would burn so easily.  Whatever he was, he stood now with his back to her unarmored spot, his weapon not drawn but ready, pointed not at her but out.  He looked to her, and for the first time she looked into the eyes of one of these creatures and saw something other than fear or hate.  This emotion was just as fierce, and in some ways just as terrifying.  She did not know what to call it or how to feel.

Before she had decided, he reached out a hand, bare-skinned, and placed it on the smooth scales of her true body.  She flinched, but his hand remained, resting firmly on her back.  His expression intensified, and, though she couldn’t understand it, she gave way to it.

Others still came from time to time, having heard the legend and hoping to reap the promised rewards.  What they found was not what they had expected.  The silver forest was there, but it was surrounded by green.  The armored dragon was there, but she did not spit flames in their direction.  And next to her, always, stood a man, his bow and arrow ever ready, offering them a meal given by the forest and cooked on a fire created by his companion, before sending them on their way.

They left with no guarantee of riches, but instead with the notion of having taken away something much more valuable, though few were ever able to figure out exactly what it was, let alone how to explain it.  And so the legend faded into the mists of time, existing for a while in the memories of old men as they warmed their withered hands by dying fires, and finally only in the dreams of curious children, cocooned in warm blankets against the coldest of nights.

© 2011 Elizabeth Ditty