Prompt Post No. 18
Welcome to Round 18 of the Inception Kink Meme.
Prompting System
Prompting System
- Prompt post will temporarily close to new prompts at 2000 comments.
- Forty-eight hours later, post will reopen to new prompts and temporarily close again when 4000 comments are reached.
- Forty-eight hours later, post will reopen to new prompts and permanently close to all new prompts ( Read more... )
Dom, mon loup, the first line reads, Mal's elegant script sprawled generously all over the paper. Cobb smiles a little at the nickname as he holds the letter. Mal's handwriting was achingly lovely, cursive and unbridled but calm. He'd always noticed that the way people wrote showed what kind of person they were. For example, Arthur gripped his pen tightly and pressed it down onto the paper. It was not an ideal writing style for a fountain pen enthusiast. Arthur had a stash of spare nibs for his fountain pens and had switched to ballpoint sometime after the fifth broken Parker Duofold (the red-and-black marbled one). And there was Eames, who liked pencils with proper erasers. Cobb can remember evenings on the Fischer job when Ariadne and Eames swapped stories about encounters with erasers of crap quality- stories that ended with lurid descriptions of abraded papers and ArtGum erasers and frank discussions of electric erasers. Cobb supposes that any forger with nothing solid about his identity would strive to maintain the same capriciousness with his written words.
I hope this letter finds you in good health. I miss you dearly, but I know you will be back soon. We were at a club yesterday- my friends and I celebrating Papa's promotion in the University- and there were all sorts of shady interesting characters there that wouldn't look out of place at a dreamshare convention if there should be one in future. There was one figure that caught my attention in the crowd. Someone of your height and build but slimmer, streamlined, with skin as pale as smoke.
Cobb tries remember what he was doing as Mal encountered the stranger. Probably knocking out the belligerent projections of a particularly unscrupulous businessman. He'd left France that month to take on a job in San Buenaventura.
Do you remember last year when we were at the summer house near the Coteaux du Lyonnais? It was late August. Papa said the wine-makers had a gift for us: a small basket of pêche de vigne. You were unimpressed by its exterior, but pleasantly surprised by the deep red flesh inside. Sweet yet tart with a whisper of cinnamon. It was so delicious that you ended up having three when you usually have an aversion to ordinary fruits. That was what the person smelled like. A gentle whiff of summer peaches. I followed the person through the crowd and all the while, I was reminded of you. Eyes all over the place were drawn to that person as he or she moved, hungry eyes that devoured and caressed over the person's form.
Reply
And the person turned around for the most fleeting moment and caught my gaze, then vanished into the crowd. The eyes, his or her eyes, were tawny in the dark of the club, sharp and cunning and sly. I went back to Papa's side after that, and he said 'where've you been, chérie?' and I could not say a word.
It happened the same way in the dream. Cobb can remember- almost taste the air of the dream-city as he and Mal charged down the street after the person, laughing. The person had glanced backward and with a hint of a smile, disappeared up a staircase or into the doorway of a shop. Cobb remembers eyes as sharp and sly as yellow wine, glinting in the gloom.
We have a word for it. L'esprit d'escalier. Thinking of the things we could have said when it is too late to say it. To that person in the club, I still do not know what I could have or would have said had they turned around and stopped to say hi. But to you, mon cœur, who is so far apart from where I am right now, I know exactly what to say.
I love you.
Yours always,
Mallorie Miles.
The letter was never delivered to him. She had kept it in her diary for years, and only after her death did he unearth it amongst her possessions. Cobb folds the letter back into the same creases it came in. The letter was dated a month before he had the dream of the both of them growing old together, spending the rest of their lives in love. The forgotten towel has soaked a damp patch onto his bed and he sighs, pushing it off onto the floor. He puts the letter back into the box and places it gently under the bed and climbs under the covers.
It's been a long time since he's dreamed, and even longer since he's wanted something like he wants Mal now.
Reply
This is amazing. I didn't envisage this kind of structure, but it's perfect. And your writing is lovely, so evocative. I will be waiting for part five.
Reply
Reply
There is a cassette deck on top of his chest of drawers, and he switches it on and puts on the tape. Cassettes are a hassle, true, but they're worth the hassle. Arthur believes that the analog nature of the deck is worth everything, especially when it can play this single tape. A tape with just one recording on it. The tape starts and faint crackles are heard, and Arthur gets into bed. A voice starts up, a beautiful voice. A voice that brought a lover nearly back to life.
The voice of Orpheus.
Arthur does not know for sure that this is really Orpheus' voice. He remembers being in Greece as a child with his parents, shy and darting behind his mother's skirts whenever strangers stopped to say hello to the American tourists. They smiled and him and spoke in their strange tongue, majestic and full of curious words. He remembers when he was good and his mother had given him some money at the marketplace one hot afternoon as she went hunting for the freshest figs around. He carried the coin around smartly, jingling it about in his pocket with the other coins- a hundred drachma coin he had swiped from the table in the hotel, and a fifty drachma coin he'd found in the gutter. There was a man hawking his goods on the steps of a ruin- Greece was always full of old ruins, as much as Arthur could remember- and he gave Arthur a brief flash of a smirk, a cold twist of lips.
"Come here, boy," the man had said in English, words heavy with his thick Greek accent. Arthur had moved forward, transfixed, and watched as the man opened his basket of goods. There were curious things inside- cherries, redder than anything he'd ever seen, small chips of marble flecked with gold, and something silver swirling in a glass container. He'd reached for the silver, but the man snapped the basket shut.
Reply
"Fifty drachma for such a valuable item?" Arthur gave him the rest of his money quickly, and the man's hand closed around the coins, greedy and grasping.
"How do you listen to music in your home, boy?" Arthur scrunched up his face, wondering what the question had to do with the sale of the item.
"Cassette tapes, of course. Like everyone else." The man pulled out the silver jar and held it with two hands, then closed his fingers around it and opened them a second later. A shiny new casstee tape sat in his palms, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. Arthur took it gingerly- he knew how to handle them, because Father got mad when Arthur wasn't careful- and inspected it.
"How did you do that?" Arthur asked, wide-eyed. The man smiled.
"Magic. Now, it contains one song. The song of Orpheus. One of his many songs."
"Orpheus, like Orpheus and Eurydice?" The man nodded.
"The one and only. Guard it well, boy. My father would kill me if he knew-" the man appeared to go off into his own thoughts, the coins in his palm rubbing against each other.
"-but we are short of money at the temple now..." Arthur heard his mother calling for him in the distance, and bobbed his head shyly, remembering his manners. He pocketed the tape and looked at the man.
"Thank you, sir," he said quickly, and turned and dashed into the crowd. He bumped into someone that smelled familiar, of cloves and apples.
"There you are, Arthur. Where have you been?"
"Nothing, Ma. Just looking around." His mother was wilting in the heat, browl curls losing their bounce. There was a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead, and even the hat seemed listless. She sighed, smiling indulgently at him. Her hand was cool and light on his shoulder, a gentle mother's touch.
"Let's go back now, Arthur. It's too hot to do any proper shopping." Arthur tried to look back at the man through the crowd, but the sea of people separated them, ebbing and swelling and pushing until Arthur and his mother were at the fringes of the market. The next day, when his parents were out, Arthur played the tape on his father's expensive portable cassette deck.
It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
Reply
HERE FOR THE CLEANED-UP VERSION
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment