Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

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Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby Owen » Sun Sep 24, 2017 11:48 pm

:W

I actually wanted to write a little foreword warning about the language and the fact that I am not an English native speaker, and also presenting the reasons for the choices et caetera, but I am too tired for this. I'll put it in an afterword instead. Now I just want to say that it is probably the first serious fanfiction of Naissance des pieuvres / Water Lilies (2007) in English, and maybe in other languages too, as I am aware only of some joke crossover with Fucking Amal on this forum and of a short Russian out-of-character one shot. I consider this work to be more than a fanfiction, because it roots back to my experiences too.

Mine is a translation from French too, so I am to aknowledge and warmly thank http://www.wordreference.com, http://www.oed.com (Oxford English Dictionary) and http://www.thesaurus.com for giving me colloquial phrasings (from which I chose or which I deliberately ignored), precise contemporary and historical meanings (often marked as obsolete or rare, things that I love), and lists of synonyms. It was long and difficult, but I can confess that I am somewhat proud of it (more of the original than the translation, but still).

It has four chapters and may be shorter than one could hope for. I will post a chapter per day. Feel free to criticize, positively or negatively (although staying courteous will be appreciated). Remember that I oblige no one to read it.

(Oh well, that foreword wrote itself while I was yawning :shock: :lol: )

Owen










Nans per aspera
(Swimming through roughness)



1

The colour was retreating.

The walls exposed their impersonnality geometric. Not anymore houses, trees, barriers, cars—incomprehensible blocks stood on the path. Fragments and fissures structured the deserted alleys. The palm would snuff the incandescence of a bulb as easily as the extreme glare of the zenith.

The world was unfolding tarnished.

She proceeded slowly. The breeze had dropped, leaving to immobility supremacy. The air seemed viscous. The faded clouds, above, stuck to the blazing firmament, never attaining the eye diurnal.

Yet she had understood their dance. Behind the fixity apparent, they formed a jealous cortege, vying in mutual crualty, and the star, hardly covered by their gauzes, basked in adoration, refused itself to each, proud of fascinating, unique.

She had been one of those clouds. She had believed that, nourished from that surface strangely, irresistibly gleaming, her proper tarnish would gleam. New feelings called to exist.

At first even, the impulsion favoured her quick promotion. From insignificant, from faceless one in the tamed mob, she thought to have suddenly obtained the main part, she whom the rays caressed. In reality, it was but balancing on the brink of the precipice. The surface of perfection was concealing a core of conceited solitude. Yet, paradoxically, with that bitter lesson she also saw that perfection, the ideal that had grabbed her, entailed indissociable from the essence an intuition of the accidents, and further even, that pertained to subjection the accidents more.

Fifteen then, twenty at present she was, and little had changed.

Experience, as oil with water, did not mix with feelings but floated above in greasy blots, constantly reminding of the errors, yet powerless to make wiser. Life repeated its petty cycles. Now she trod in the university the powder of methods, and in the decrepit lecture halls, leaning on tormented wood, gazed on another, without reciprocation. The year thus had flown, domestic weariness following the courses’ greyness, the courses’ greyness outbidding. And the sky, umperturbably, illustrated her states. Where was Anne now?..

Without regard for half-erased pedestrian lines a few meters farther, she crossed the narrow road. No cars; only enucleated street lamps between moribund trees and the houses’ raw concrete. In the few gardens visible behind fences, but vestiges. As if she constituted the last proof of movement persisting.

On the left, nothing better, except, a little farther, the shady shortcut.

The general indifference, the district stupor little by little were suffocating her. She raised more confortably the bag strap on her shoulder and tried to accelerate. Of course, thoughts ignored the altered pace.

The physical movement struggled last against nature and her mind allied. She stepped onto a well-known lane, where gravel quickly submerged the asphalt and tufts of straight away dry grass braved the uniformity of either. As much barren clusters above the anthracite opaque; as much useless actions undertaken in the constellation of miscarriages. A few bigger plants were only confirming the mediocrity of the remaining.

Finally. The almost invisible path among the wilderness surrounding the lane led, between palings and brambles, toward the shortcut.

She pushed the rusted door yore delimiting the private of a manor in ruins and descended the stairs to the stream puffing freshness.
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby fish » Mon Sep 25, 2017 4:46 am

Thanks for posting Owen,
I'll PM a critique for you once you've done the lot. 8)

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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby snaps » Mon Sep 25, 2017 7:51 pm

An intriguing start Owen :) This sounds like an atmospheric build-up to what comes next. I am looking forward to seeing the next scene. *:)*

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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby Owen » Tue Sep 26, 2017 3:41 am

Thanks! But I wouldn't quite say that it's a build-up... Rather, it sets the tone for the rest.



2

The color nourished the water, another rescapee from the torpid summery consensus, the earth, the vegetation. The amenity of the place greeted the guest dear, family member, almost; intimacy, soft, reassuring, swathed her... Just the time to perceive all the rest having been betrayed.

Lack.

The crowns above were dissolving. From sapless branches hung foliages’ tatters. The lacunae of the vault spread their blind stains. On the ground, in company of waste half-digested by the environment, anaemic grasses, the creeping carpet crammed with leaves, mosses aggregated into a slippery sludge were withering. Composts of themselves. When more closely examined, even of the stream the first impression, remanence from previous visits, did not hold up. It indeed flowed, but conveyed life no more. It stared opaque, and its murmur reached deaf.

Azure’s cruel dance burdened.

From the beginning, she was routinely taking this path when visiting or on holidays here. Yore, she came here to play with friends from whom nothing seemed to separate. These ruins within the opulence of nature, specific each season, were imprinted with an oneiric atmosphere, persistent and roborative. Then the ineluctable hatching of characters tore the umbilical cord, freeing her female companions of leisure, but with this building, its majestuous stones, its alleys claimed by plants, with this stream always lavish of solace and this calm trail towards the station, the link remained. No more. The markers everywhere else had yielded to anxiety over future, and here came, logically, the surrepticious perfidy of the last one.

Was it the ultimate step? Was she expected to stagger at present trying on, like clothes in malls, various inanities? Or simply the sun was hitting too hard this afternoon? No—she beheld others struggling thus in troubled waters; shouting at first their convictions, they next, as if unknowingly, abjured them, exited fashions to espouse immediately new ones, as much useless for radiating as for identifying oneself, masked by an ideal the inconsistency of relations, expectations being alternatively upset and rekindled by rethinking of oneself’s interests, fell in love without concerting themselves with the established, trampled their former aspirations, the very ones so sincerely craved, brandishing some new illusion... But the escape forth, the rebellion, as well as semblances of islets of ataraxia and meditations, were in fact feeding the same rule system and trod the same paths. Extended choice of accoutrements, indeed, but growing, whatever the social enamel, reduced all to one.

And herself, willing above all not to discontinue from facing waves and backwashes, felt in spite of the grip the inner alteration, inevitable, programmed. Neither her tendencies nor her tastes seemed to indicate rupture nor the tissue of values to cover gaplessly identity: on the contrary, the more she discovered, the more became evident the correctness of those traits. Here lied the trap—not the elements were changing, but their disposition, their connections, their lighting.

She was melting, original, into the mass. The mass of originals molten.

A singular vision robbed however of the descent toward a definitive aporia.

Drowned in the current, laces quivering in accordance to the flow, a shoe catched between pebbles mouldered, deprived of its twin. Retrospectively, aquatic metaphors had restructured until sublimating her nevertheless not very fecund relationship with Floriane, and therefore, the remainder. Before accepting a number of episodes of defeat, of shame, of illegitimacy, then and beyond, she tried to evacuate that element from her mental edifications. Notwithstanding, as spates, the images were resurfacing, and still now an adequate stimulus triggered the concatenation.

She stopped in a bright ring, holding back the strap swaying, non-renewal metronome of deleterious thoughts, like bacteria in an insulated environment reproducing only to devour each other. Thus, separated from the object of meditation by a dazzling screen, she perceived from it solely the relevant. The unnameable that grasped her in the stomach had carried toward the shimmering surface, toward Floriane’s reign, but under the stillness the rule of the strange environment demanded too heavy a toll.

The wrecks were strewn across the bottom, sad simulacra of attempts: the moves had to be learnt. So, no doubt, this one’s sibling had known how to win, or at least how to founder off horizon. Although fateful, the active lot honoured the fighters. As for wicker ones, another solution, charming, was offered... Drift from then on clasped those offsprings of anaesthetized tumult, arms dangling, bodies bereft, interactions languid, hairs algae scattered, in transe, without will as these laces, absurd. Tumult was anaesthetizing itself.

Here the metaphor was watering down; began to undo her the harmful rays. Inaction drained energy, avidly drunk by azure and the treachery surrounding. Almost blind because of the painful whiteness on the retina, she had to go on. The strap swayed anew.

All seemed sharp. The funnel of recollections, when she searched for milestones in their worn rags, swallowed, and the present put up but escarpments. She tended again toward a halt’s mirage, and again her trajectory drew the asymptote.





fish asked a that I add visuals. So here are:
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Stream puffing freshness...

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The crowns above were dissolving... (cropped and very slightly color-corrected)
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby Ian » Tue Sep 26, 2017 10:20 am

Moved this to the fan-fiction section (might as well get some use out of it, people! :wink: ). Continue posting and writing there, folks. :D
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby snaps » Tue Sep 26, 2017 9:22 pm

Ian wrote:Moved this to the fan-fiction section (might as well get some use out of it, people! :wink: ). Continue posting and writing there, folks. :D
.

Ahaha my dear Holmes, indeed I did anticipate your move when I looked for said piece and found it right there. Gone...


Owen draws us further into the woodland torpor and to fresh mystery :shock:
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby Owen » Wed Sep 27, 2017 3:21 am

Please, can you make this available to outside readers as well? This section seems only for us, registered users.

Third part, the longest one





3

Extinction, now independent of the palm, threatened the extreme glare of the zenith. Effulgence in its paroxysm was abolishing the quality of things, diluted in the primordial tarnish, achieving the cycle of despotism, knotted to void. Presumptuousness cost. Destitution imperceptibly crackled those bones of reality, without color, without reflection, in ankylosis. For around, in the petrified forms of indetermination, in the flattened, empty air, in the desertic muteness of streets converging toward evanescence, windows, bitumen cristals, lacquers of panels with aphasic signs, suspended smokes were divested matt.

Silence and the stream were uttering to the hearing lopped off.

Beyond, the brambles. Venimous interlacing, suspended between trunks and branches, rapacious plains, inextricable mounts imprinted on the near deliverance a topography of asperity.

Stoically, she bore, teeth gritting, their claws and fangs immature, that appeared to savour pearls of her blood. There at last, ballast no less rough holding the sleepers, four metallic lines were leading. Further away, erratically built shacks and wheatfields under the assimilating sun. The tarnish golden dulled the horizon.

The wear hoarsened under her steps crushed stones.

Nearby, austerity of the perron broke on the right the dark excrescences of blackberries yet frigid buds. Beyond the rails, its double was excrescence itself; degarnished and incomprehensible, the meadows forever uncultivated had annexed it to the countryside, while the citerior, reinforced by railway blades, as a last urban bastion was prevailing against weeds’ seasonal siege. Bag on the chipped edge, hauling herself on the platform, in her hands, polished, pebbles imbedded.

The slabs ancient were shining. At the far end, on the left of the stretched, manifestly neglected rectangle, at the stairs after which emerged the atonic monoliths of the city in dormition, the ticket booth curtains, as if left for a moment fixed to the weary blur, stayed invariably shut. Behind the glass of both counters, a vase, an account book dusty and fade. On the benches facing her, against a low wall, the pale paint was peeling; through the awning half-collapsed and holed light invaded the shelter, aborting any struggle.

None.

Nevertheless, slowly having approached, she put the bag on the seat, that grated already her shoulder. Her legs pulsated from the insidious cuts and scrapes, knees even under the jeans kept the print of the stones touched when climbing up. Nothing ceded of the elements: only she.

Water carried softly—soil and its children wounded.

At first, she brushed as in a rough crevasse rows of thorny stems, where Floriane’s image, remanence firm, circulated. Despite all the chlorine poured in, throve in pools chimaeras, and each attempted to hook. Hers had followed her outside. Yet, nonchalance being coupled with the new school term ominously materializing, Floriane’s physical absence famished love. The stems little by little were losing their leaves, sap drained, and the petals, sensual and full once, wrinckled then, prostrated, like a child so unconcerned, protectorless, sitting in a corner, decays, face hidden, evaporates; finally, fossilized, they detached listlessly. However her distantiation had already begun and, while suffering from the ineluctable ruin, she gazed herself with curiosity. The agonizing affection and depletion of desire—that very desire at least—instructed...

Because they inhabited close districts, she had crossed paths with her several times since. Neither approached the other, not even an expressive glance. Floriane appeared doleful. Rumor told that eventually she defeated herself, obtuse to that hits taken were those dealt. Condemned to might and to relationships transitory, she found herself trapped when she catched herself endeavouring to build, not adulterate. But nothing could be built.

Alike they are to some extent, thus; anyhow, all was programmed so that from collisions would escape solely losers: characters scarred, hearts dissonant, ordurous.
She understood later—Floriane had been but a receptacle for the majesty of the barren sun; triumphing with its providential aid, and bereft against her own power when she had to take initiative. The carnal hold’s ardour, renewed, cyclic, confirmed the illusion. Yesterday Floriane. Today Camille. Tomorrow who?..

Strolling with effort along the platform—sitting down meant surrender,—with the tip of her used tennis shoe, now heavy on the foot, she thrust a stone onto the ticket booth door. Produced vibration did modify neither atmosphere’s thickness nor deviated the train of thoughts this time.

She noticed Camille at the beginning of the year, in a bus where she did not reappear. In the simple outfit’s, laconic makeup’s refinement, she exhaled something severe, dense, reassuring also: as if she knew at any time her whereabouts, as if she integrated moral values a constant, able to measure them and reveal to whomever. The impression seemed fleeting—among the thousands other bittersweet flavours of chance,—but attenuating and inked out by routine, paradoxically, rooted in. She gained afterwards a recurring opportunity, a destiny’s invitation to more, again and again refused, to observe her at the university refectory conversing calmly, somewhat timidly, sternly, laughing with friends, brushing her companion with looks flame-brooding. But she did not acquaint.

Afterwards, syncopating the transition with the preparation for the exams, now numb and desperate, now febrile, with the anguish of beasts driven to slaughter, with the exams themselves, whelms of stress, came the second semester. She haunted her own house henceforth; winter carpeted with lead of its clouds the surfaces; snow at crepuscles fell cadaveric. By day, dreams lay frozen behind factories’ broken panes; smoke ceaselessly fed the dunes ashen. And when at last starred blue appeared through, it quickly veered to black, and snow started again. The sun then feigned benevolence. Although the heating in lecture halls malfunctioned, she had obtained a common class with Camille; and for some time the deception was.

As memories were slipping toward the present, so the perron was to end, compelling her to either confront anew the wilderness outside places ritualized, or continue her pacing back, subdued and enclosed in the model; and each branch of the alternative wanted a sacrifice. She slowed her gait already torpid; the rays were obfuscating her limbs.

But then, the well of human contact was inebriating her, in beholding iridescence in its depth, in sensing freshness rise. Zealously taking notes, with titles on the copybook underlined without a drip by the regulated succession of multicolour, stopping at intervals, checking time on the wrist-watch laid—the 3 on top—ahead, distracting the too grave on the high barred windows, musing then drawing floral motifs at the margins with her quadruple ballpoint pen with pastel dyes, weary, interested or preoccupied, all emotions were read on Camille—only without the causes. And in leaving she saw her feel her pockets mechanically, in search of a lighter, absent, and slightly lean towards groups of smokers, like a heliotrope; and no cigarette had touched her lips. Without the causes, Camille would remain forever changing, the figure kneaded by an amalgam of deductions, intuitions, memories, associations would certainly come animate, but oneiric, on the point of dissipating. Yet, she knew necessary that a double accompany each being and, one destroyed or obsolete, another forthwith replace it, hybrid between the emaciated shadow of the preceding one and the insights solid twisted, dismantled by the receiver’s perception; chimaera from a chimaera. Solid? Already imagining talking to her, discovering her in a thousand scenarios weaved on the routine slimmest disturbances, new attributes competed to incorporate Camille’s effigy... The situations themselves reactivated some while occulting others from the panoply of evanescences; they occulted mainly the referent.

Contemporary to vernal flowers, the well of human contact was inebriating.

Thus they were living, one observing the other, manufacturing the other, without reciprocation and without challenge to order. Ominously, at a distance, the end loomed. Insinuated themselves again obsession with the exams, cyclothymia, the evenings—the perjurous evenings that lingered. The brilliance increased, and the malaise: onto wide panes battered the splendour by which flustered the desks a long while exhaled the embers; alleys, parks, esplanades made their mysteries recoil, offering but rebirth’s sardonic triumph. To stay among the haughty initiates’ cohort, to squat the antechamber of life became painful; the balance avowed itself unnatural. Yawned, voracious, the immense chasm of the summer.

The perron ended there. She passed her hand over her face. For lack of anything better, wiped it on her jeans.

Where were her sisters of unconcern now? Where was Anne, the galliard, the joyful, the generous, frankness and fidelity, Anne? How was she managing these seas of fossil brambles? Here, habitual advisers professed only from the height of their own mistakes, expired, whence circumstances had drained any education. Consciousnesses remained staunch.

Nothing answered, except—echoes of the tension between the self in patchwork and the ether ignite—din in her ears and a migrain’s caress.

That were objectified. She turned around.

The train was arriving.

Longer than the platform, although not differently empty, it had, at least, a color and a speed that promised to breach desorientation. However, dark green, as should have been the rigid leaves on the brambles, and advancing as a glass little by little from water frozen crackles, it seemed also of roughness, seemed the mecanic jurisdiction of the same domain, carceral, and not anyhow a saviour.

Resigned, she went to pick up her things, while the carriage was parking with a clashing rumble. Another quality of which the bleak surrounding had been dispossessed.

The polyester flank burned her hip through the jeans, the strap her shoulder. Burden—of clothes, of the bag, of herself, of past and future compressed into cycles infecund in her head—was bringing her back to the ground, to lie sipped by air and freted by their abrasives. The field of view catched but the opening ahead, regularly defocalized by eardrums painful pulsation. She moved barely.

Nonetheless, the station turned out to be shorter than appeared. She passed exhaling.

Stopped for a moment on the vehicle threshold, aware vaguely of having overcome a milestone, were it even nowhence elsewhither, or only between compartments of nowhere, she turned around, to celebrate her little victory with a posture of defiance to deliquescent reality, hanging onto the bar near the door for fear of swooning, towards the culprit.

Now, near the maleficent disk’s centre a black smudge absorbed a part of the rays, deforming the halo. The sun, as predicted, necrosed, engulfing with itself its world of thorns.

Doors screeched in closing.




Some visuals (none color-corrected, I was able to obtain it only by placement):

Image
Image
Tarnish

Image
There at last, ballast no less rough holding the sleepers, a dozen metallic lines were leading. Further away, erratically built shacks and wheatfields under the assimilating sun. The tarnish golden dulled the horizon.

Image
Beyond the rails, its double was excrescence itself; degarnished and incomprehensible, the meadows forever uncultivated had annexed it to the countryside, while the citerior, reinforced by railway blades, as a last urban bastion was prevailing against weeds’ seasonal siege.

Image
Effulgence in its paroxysm was abolishing the quality of things, diluted in the primordial tarnish, achieving the cycle of despotism, knotted to void. The sun, as predicted, necrosed, engulfing with itself its world of thorns.
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby fish » Wed Sep 27, 2017 4:06 am

Owen wrote:Please, can you make this available to outside readers as well?

I have to agree with Owen here. :shock: :P
Can't see any benefit in keeping it to members only when we have such a large unregistered readership.

Ian???????
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby Ian » Wed Sep 27, 2017 10:21 am

Done. :D

I've no idea why it was like that to begin with, to be honest, when no other section was. :? :?:


I blame snapsie. :P :mrgreen:
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby snaps » Wed Sep 27, 2017 9:22 pm

Ian wrote:I blame snapsie.
O-) .

The story is getting deeply, darkly delicious now. I can tell as my mind is generating hypotheses about the denouement. ... I am also thinking in terms of what music might be incidental to this scene :?
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby Owen » Thu Sep 28, 2017 12:01 am

Thank you. Though I wasn't expecting to generate suspense :o . As for the music, I began to write this with "Sunless" from the NdP soundtrack in mind (https://youtu.be/li6d4ZZjeRc?t=7m34s).
Fourth and final part. I apologize for an overdense obscure paragraph in the middle. It was that way already in my original.





4

Latening no more, the train, tardy, stirred with a typical jerk. Something, under, creaked.

She had not been mistaken. Even from behind the greasy windows, the grain gorged upon the sun, shredding unhastingly the pulp with its quivering fangs. She turned away.

Strength thus seemed to ebb in: she succeeded in ridding herself from the handle and proceeding into the wagon almost without staggering. But despite the speed and the 2 or 3 open fan-lights supposed to ensure airflow, the muggy heat limed the interior, spumescent. Through the wide window rows, with curtains long abolished, battered the greyness dazzling, in its paroxysms consuming colour anew. The atony, foreseeable, burst the sheath that she felt herself becoming but could not destitute the absence of hope more. As of all the rest, this cycle was not deceiving anymore. She leant against the metallic side on the right, of perverse—and expected—tepidity. Such a harbour evoked a padded room, where all revolt—of the movement, of slumber, of insipid reveries—was cushioned in fright.

She sat in the nearest spot, on the right, completely effete and stupent. The air fed her lungs as if reticent; she was panting. Having swept salty drops off her face, she glid towards the window.

A bottle and an apple were waiting in the bag. She had not thought of filling since her arrival in town: only a remainder of liquid stagnated there. One mouthful.

The apple, receptacle ripe and prism for rays, deterred by exactly that, symbolizing too much, too much at ease with the environment. Brought to light, she put it on the table between the opposite seats.

Obstinate in fasting, she risked drooping: water had not chased away the thirst. However, the weariness hemmed. The tumor, almost sated, had trepaned with a network of veins the shrivelled orb, hazed by shrouds of its adorers of not long ago. The dance veered to a threne. Without a leader to revere, without an adversary to begrudge, the clouds writhed themselves before the end. What to do, if not by imitating resurrect the idol, while believing in their growing thanks to a disarticulated simulacrum? And growing indeed, whatever the outcome, internalized the cold crualty, calculated empirically cause and effect, masked the ethics inopportune. For elsewhere, consciousnesses remained staunch. Advisers professed only from the syrtes of their own neuroses.

The chasm separating from boys and from adults did not resorb. Worse, came the feeling of its total intraversability, of its immanence, that spread, that inhibited the achievements. To interest oneself in the boys’ way of life, in their reasonings, in their basenesses unacknowledged was clearing path to the swamp only. And at present she suspected that even among girls, whose rites she still assumed understanding, segregation raged. On her reverse, in her very flesh all communication had the dark space, like paper sourness insidiously dissolving the message.

She had to rebuff two suitors, one this very year. Moments doubly displeasing, where the expressed, in minimizing falsely the impact, contrasted peculiarly with the audacity often of the look, the desire brooding in the posture, the heart’s tempest rushing furiously, and after, at the verdict cleaver, the backwash of the muted emotion, knotted on itself, the attempt—always ridiculous—to retake a shaky footing on convention ground. They offered themselves as puppets and collapsed when she cut the strings...

Then, despite herself and with a certain disgust admittedly—clumsily feigned—beyond the reasons of the denial to commerce of which the aposiopesis instilled as a coup de grâce a protocol of defeat reproducible and reproduced at—and chiefly against—will, the might inebriated her evenly with Floriane; the cycle was renewed. The victim played executioner and after a few indignant repugnances will come accustomance—or even pleasure.

What was Floriane doing now? What lives was she eroding, whose hopes frustrating? Besides herself, besides her supposed engagements, henceforth, impasses; in impasses, mirrors all too true. Or the rumor lied and, very proudly, was she dragging another one through the emotion crusher... Was she still fascinating differently gifted ones? Was she frequenting the municipal pool cloakrooms, still?

She tried to imagine, patching from one of the possibles the current Floriane. Only vague impressions wriggled in her mind, hung without context, without subject. For her face... what was her face? Surely, the athletic shape appeared immediately, the clothes, the gait; the most important refused to. Iconic, these lineaments austere in evidence of feminity, stings of the pupils, these lips—and their print—full, the fierce expression, this aura of coldness... but what was her face?

The instant eschewed. She reopened her eyes: ahead remained but the apple, symbolizing invariably too much.

The thirst raging, she yielded.

It was done. Thinking that she finally wanted it, she had slept out once, pierced the concrete screed allegedly dispensable. And the liberation, obviously oversold, resolved itself into a formality appalling with insignificance. A weariness redoubled held her, from then on. For the body of the other, at the closest of her, in her, was not violating less—for lack of merging it could but push her out of herself, dispossess her, replace. Heavy vapours of the other’s scent, of the skin, of the life ill-mended, the subdued light of the room in disorder, the rancid of sheets embalmed her as accomplice of her own estrangement. Only months later was she able to recover tarnish such as she loved for herself.

Looking distractedly at the sun’s replica caulking the tear left by the previous, savouring the apple’s juice quenching her, she delayed no more.

Perspective emotional none among her university contacts. Although, sometimes suffering or missing some part of class, she asked her comrades, the barter and the courtesy distanced off them. While their social gropings bogged, nugatory, she on the contrary passed through lunches and breaks invulnerable, never enticed into the pitch of their conversations. Which did not preclude the impudent one from approaching her at one evening in the library; the pathetic one did not either reason based on facts but on the kaleidoscope of chimaeras. He was, in a way, like her, and, like her, tarnished.

Remote because of her studies, Anne had anyway become different herself, subtly, irremediably. They met but furtively anymore, sealed though things that should have paved durable the agreement, the connivence. Yet they shared but reminiscences dead, musty, that they churned ceaselessly, as if fetishes. She durst not solicit Anne anymore for talking about intimate matters, lest the last seams undo themselves, and a stranger sprout. Missed opportunities for disclosing themselves again to each other piled up, on both sides. The will to act had blunted. And now, despite the holidays, her best friend of yore was impervious, having preferred personal development to the company of an impasse.

She knew consequently both the proceeding and the epilogue of her affection for Camille. The proceeding—syncopated, the epilogue—aphonous. Camille sailed already well; why interfere?

Insensibly, fantasies gained to repose under the lids. Whereas the heat was cradling her thoughts untied, consenting she succumbed to lassitude.



* * *

When Marie awoke, senescence had drawn back. Tatters of impressions, a dream forgotten floated behind her eyes. Outside, a curtain of clouds greyish had momentarily etiolated the matt ardour; in the wagon, fresh air circulated. And the blunted friendship with Anne and the situation with Camille did no more appear quite so definitive; she herself felt refreshed and reinvigorated. Life, like the train, went.

Fields, summers, berries...

Brambles.



Owen F.
07.20.2015/09.29.2016

Translated into English by Owen F.
July-September 2017
09.17.2017





Sorry, no images for this one, as I don't really have the time to search for adequate ones this evening.
I think that tomorrow or the next days, I will write an afterword, with some reasons and justifications for the choices of the story/style.
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby Owen » Sun Oct 01, 2017 11:16 pm

Not any comments? :o

As for the afterword, I still have no time for now.
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby fish » Mon Oct 02, 2017 3:10 am

Owen wrote:Not any comments? :o

I have it all printed, just waiting for your afterword.

If you're pressed for time right now I'll start drafting what I hope is a constructive and worthy comment. 8)
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby Owen » Tue Oct 03, 2017 1:32 am

No, I'm not pressed, just wondered.
If I hadn't lost my mail which I've been typing for 3 hours tonight, I might have had the time to write the afterword :evil: :x :evil: :x .
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Re: Nans per aspera (a Naissance des pieuvres fanfiction)

Postby fish » Tue Oct 03, 2017 8:24 am

Owen wrote:...If I hadn't lost my mail...

Computers are our friends, they're here to help us.
Computers are our friends, they're here to help us.
Computers are our friends, they're here to help us.
Keep saying the mantra. :T :lol:
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