Elise Hurst

Hello all. I just had to share this story with you, written by the very talented Suzanne J. Willis who I had the pleasure to meet a couple of years ago at RMIT. I opened my email this monday and there it was, written after she came across the Mondoodle image I posted last week. I was just blown away. I absolutely love this kind of story – where worlds are opened before us, but spied through the crack of a door – so much hinted at, so much more to be imagined. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Resplendis
By Suzanne J. Willis

He slipped, shadowy, through the cobbled streets, the world around him a dull grey. One end of the string was tied about his wrist; the other around the abdomen of an enormous dragonfly. Its wings beat with a soft buzz – not the mechanical sound of the clockwork insects that filled the city, messengers and spies for the wealthy. His dragonfly was real.

He hastened. The dragonfly’s wings refracted the light, the colours vivid in the gloom. The clockworks, with their cogs and brass, could never replicate this. He had to get it back to her before anyone noticed. An old man with downturned mouth and too-smooth skin passed him, trailing a clockwork on copper wire and giving him a strange look as the dragonfly failed to whirr and click the greeting clockworks gave one another.

He thought of her again. She would be sleeping as the pale light crept across their apartment. She refused to ever shut the blinds. She had never said anything about the clockworks, either. But he saw something in her when she looked at them, that went unnoticed by everyone else. It was longing and sorrow and pity. He knew she tried to hide it.

Stars had pinned the darkness through the window last night. Silently he crept out and rode his rusting bicycle out of the city to the borderlands that were forbidden to ordinary men like him. There, the grey of the cobbles and slate gave way to the golden she-oaks that were home to the giant dragonflies.

Furtively, he took half a fat pomegranate from his pocket, scattering its seeds across the ground like ruby-hued rain. With a soft, plucking noise, the dragonfly crept down the trunk and began to munch softly on each seed. When it reached him, it gnawed at the fleshy pulp of the fruit as he gently tied the string around it.
Now, as dawn began to bleach the sky, it followed him through the city streets and lanes, the scent of the second half of the fruit luring it.

He leaned the bike against the wall and crept through the gate and up the stairs. As he entered the apartment she stirred, sat up, white sheets tangled around her body. He untied the string and watched as the dragonfly settled at her feet.

She smiled at her lover: the one who understood every part of her and would risk the borderlands for her happiness. Then she stretched and flared her own delicate wings, emerald and cobalt against the ruby light of the rising sun.