Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
a moveable trap
spcmnspff
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
this is the first chapter of something which, for the longest time, I thought was really good. Then for a long time I thought it was complete crap. Now i don't know what i think.
A moveable trap
one. Shadows
Always the other, I thought as we broke into Rafter’s black box of a studio. On the fire-escape, fifth floor, shabby part of town. Moonlight our only witness. His girl looked beautiful in it. Desert skin pressed against a filthy red brick wall, still moist from the rain, moist but not clean. Her back was up against it; tight jeans and a navy cotton shirt, certainly well stained by now. Rafter Sousa never allowed either of us near this hole. His artistic refuge, his muse asylum, his place to be important.
“Screwdriver,” I said.
“You’re good at this,” Maria whispered. “Break into apartments often?”
“Once a week into my own,” I admitted. “I always forget the key.”
Rundown, inimitable buildings all around; some covered in scaffolding, but there were no signs of renovation. Metallic power-lines engraved onto a dark sky. The noise of young boys laughing in the street, nothing to do with us; kicked cans, subway in the distance. Calm, beautiful night in another man’s part of town.
Maria looked exhilarated, youthful, innocent for a moment. I held her by the belt-noose in her jeans. Brushed the ink black hair from her eyes. Our mouths met with the frenzy of amateur criminals. Her lips were cold in the summer night; her back was dank. I took her again, by the waist this time, beneath the soft cotton cloth. I couldn’t tell which of us flinched first. Her, because she was kissing me outside Rafter’s studio. Or me, because I thought for an instant I saw him inside, waiting.
“This is wrong,” Maria said. “Right now it’s very wrong.”
This is how a penny on a golf-course feels, I thought.
“We should get inside before someone notices,” she said.
I got back to turning screws. Same repeating motions. Tried to ignore the memories of her skin. Couldn’t get ways to touch her out of my head.
Rafter Sousa was eccentric in subtle ways. He was an artist after things he couldn’t name. A miner of half-lit theories cut from the night. His faults seductive, themselves almost art.
Maria was a publicist; clever, audacious, always on the verge of tears or beauty. She would speak among strangers, give you a nickname and make it stick. Soft Moroccan skin with an American education.
I was a filler of empty spaces. Somewhere between her legs and his artistic expressions.
It was inevitable, this affair. Forever a step behind Rafter Sousa. I agreed with his aesthetic judgments, but only on the following day. If he’d found ways to love her it was only a matter of time before I would.
I could’ve been happy, under different circumstances. Penny in love, fucking some poor bastard’s girlfriend. But I respected Rafter too much, and feared him – the way boys feel about pirates and divorced men. A sense of rebellion tinged with indifference that seemed always distant and impractical. He smoked cigarettes but I would die of cancer.
The final screw slipped from her fingers and dropped like a pinball through the cracks. The money shot; the one that makes all the noise. Sudden screech of a window from above, like fingernails across the moon. A shadow peered down at us.
“That you, Sousa?”
I froze. Maria nudged my side, solicited me to be him.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I imitated. “Forgot my key.”
“At least it’s a nice night,” the shadow said.
“At least.”
“Night, Sousa. Try not to wake the whole fucking neighbourhood.”
I unhinged the window and we snuck inside. Couldn’t help but look back through the broken frame. We’d infiltrated Rafter’s most private space. Inside, dark and abandoned.
We still hadn’t called the police. It’d been three weeks, no word, not a trace. Rafter had disappeared before, often for days at a time. He’d wander back from some random town or mountain – unkempt, re-inspired, eager to draw, drink and make love.
“Artists have to vanish from the world to cherish it,” he once said.
But this felt different, ominous. It was the first time he’d disappeared since the beginning of my affair with Maria. I wasn’t sure if he knew just how far I had followed him.
Strange forms of disclosure haunted my dreams. I imagined Rafter confronting me in alleyways. I imagined Maria whispering, “it’s over.” Guilt and desire were a slip of the tongue for weeks. Maria and I spent anxious nights together, entangled. Our love-making had been reckless and imperfect. Addicted to the taste of weakness and remorse on each other’s lips.
We’d made love in their apartment, but tonight, in his studio, she was pushing me away.
“I should hate this place,” Maria said. “But it’s him. It’s cluttered and beautiful like him.”
Beautiful, in some heartbreaking way. Intense, self-indulgent, self-destructive. Altogether too dark, too fucking desperate. Abstract obsessions in art. Flesh coming a little too close to the candle-light. The drip and slow drying patterns of red wax. Beautiful maybe, but not essential. Not like shelter and security. Not like love.
“It’s not worth what it cost,” I said.
Her eyes had a way of turning, quick and decisive, like a moveable trap. She glanced sharply through built-up layers of the past. With Maria I could never tell the difference between reproach and invitation.
The funny part was that Rafter Sousa was never very good. He was brilliant, maybe, but never very good. He garnered an audience. His strange comics sold well enough to do it for a living. That should’ve been enough for someone who could barely draw. He wasn’t good enough to support a home and a separate studio. Maria was furious that he just went ahead and signed the lease. Unpaid bills and missed vacations.
“Art comes from brooding,” I remember him telling her in front of me. “I can’t brood properly with you around. I need a place to myself, something empty, no distractions.”
“You can’t buy brooding!” Maria said. “Besides, we have bills, love. We have a relationship, I think. You can’t keep ignoring these things and hiding behind art.”
Sound arguments, I thought. And yet he kept winning. She put up with wandering nights and neurotic behaviour. She put up with a studio they couldn’t afford and that she couldn’t touch because Rafter was convinced that he needed a dark, secluded place to accomplish his ideas. The artist in him would’ve withered without it, and in the end it was the artist she loved. She argued scathingly, convincingly, knowing full well it was only to concede.
I relished and resented that they felt able to bicker so openly in front of me. Manifestations of their difference broke like sudden thunder and I’d find myself caught in the fascinations of their storm. They were a couple that infuriated each other to the point of nudity and forgiveness. I’d stand there, awkward and intrusive, silently sipping tea while pondering things I’d say in his place.
Eventually Maria became his duty and the tiny studio became his home. At first she was convinced that he was cheating on her, using the studio as some excuse and cheap motel. But after enough weeks it didn’t matter. She’d lost him to something else, maybe another woman, probably just art. That’s when I kissed her. The day she realized she’d become someone’s obligation. She looked wretched with all that running mascara. I could taste it when I kissed her, and I remember it was perfect.
We glanced around the studio. Bookshelves, pencil-shavings, empty power-bar wrappers. A warm mini-fridge with Chinese take-out boxes and bottles of wine. The apartment reeked of him. The stench of soy-sauce and marijuana clinging to the carpet. Hints of masochism on the sheets. Sharp knives and an odd number of chopsticks in the drawer. There was a faint sense of hope in the scattering of things. A well lit table in the corner;the only light-bulb in the room. Everything else was darkness. Even the fridge remained black when you opened it.
On the glowing table was a manuscript for Rafter’s new graphic novel. Neither of us had seen it yet. His great project, his fixation of the last few months.
“His fucking mistress,” Maria said.
It looked clean, finished. Over three hundred pages of intricately crafted panels. Except, no words. No scribbled dialogue, no titles, nothing that remotely resembled language.
The graphic novels were Rafter’s creations – his ideas, his pictures, his story. In early drafts he’d include basic dialogue, just so I knew what he was after. But for the most part he left the writing to me, like he trusted me, or like it didn’t matter. It was always my name in small print below his.
You could see it in Rafter’s eyes and in the trembling of his lips. Wild but vague. Leaning there on the precipice of his unformed thoughts, that one perfect thing. I imagined a forgotten word on the tip of Rafter’s tongue. For weeks he didn’t dare kiss her for fear of swallowing and pushing it further away.
But that’s not right; I knew it wasn’t a word. Language is unredeemable, he said. Rafter was after something else. Remnants of our sunken ship.
“I’ll get it out,” he kept repeating, “I’ll tell it to jump, I’ll shove the fucker if I have to.”
I was drawn by his obsession, desperate to play a part. But Rafter had created his masterpeice without me. Death of a comic book writer. I continued to flip through the burnt sienna pages:
Film-noire atmosphere.
Confrontation of styles and figures in alleyways.
Conversations without words.
Cryptic self-portraits.
Moments of oil-based abstraction.
Furious bodies raging against claustrophobic quarters.
Human limbs trapped in paranoid pencil strokes.
The art was decent, but nothing that others couldn’t do better.
Maria and I sat down together at the table. We finally rested on page 88, centrepiece in this museum of misplaced shadows. I poured two glasses of wine.
“To the webs we weave,” I suggested.
She responded with a look of reproach or invitation. Tonight she’ll bite her lip in the room he denied us. Our glasses touched timidly. Exaggerated faltering in everything we did. The wine was strong. Warm, like the night.
spcmnspff on
Posts
Publish this.
It feels pretty solid until right toward the end when you introduce the narrator as Rafter's writer. I think the relationship between Rafter and N works better through Maria than through Rafter's comics, and I suspect the story would work better without any dialogue from Rafter at all. Also: the lack of dialogue in his comics would feel more poignant if we knew it was Rafter's decision to keep it silent. It's implied by his disappearance, but given the potential importance of that decision I think you could play with it a lot more.
That said, your writing style is awesome, and that piece is fairly incredible.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
You may want to consider how long you want to go on in sentance fragments for. It works really well in the first paragraph, but by the fourth paragraph I was getting a little tired of it. (i.e. it started to distract me from the story and notice that device specifically) You started to mix and match a lot more evenly about a third of the way into the piece (from" The final screw slipped...) and that seemed to read more naturally and keep the same style. It seems the intention is to use them in tension, plucking the sentence with short little snaps; it's effective. The reason why the technique works so well is because it provides contrast; if too much of it is held in staccato, that contrast is no longer present and the usefulness of the tool is diminished.
You use a lot of it, so to keep it sharp I'd say no more than a paragraph or two to start with (of full-on fragmentation), and then head into that same mix we see later on in the bit, with more or less depending on desired effect. Sentence fragments. Good device. Will be used later. Making sure the mind can rest every few beats helps maintain a reader's attention, gathering momentum for the next section. Bits that jump. Bits that skip. Sharp details that cut with swift strokes. Pounding images that come on screaming, hard and fast. Sudden stops.
Silence.
Just suggesting; its really very good, you wouldn't have to change a thing.
Those sentences really had a lot of staying power. I like the rhythm, I like it a lot. Especially because those fragments give your full sentences just that much staying power.
I also like how it reminds me of The Great Gatsby in that your narrator is the third person, being witness to this whole thing.
I feel that some people will be turned off by the fragment experiment. Some people will love it. It's your decision as to whether you want to reach a middle ground. I can see this way of writing working in a short piece. A longer piece I don't know.
I think maybe is that writing fragments is like flying a kite. The piece soars for a while, but eventually, the wind goes out and then it just falls. Perhaps if you found a way to pull it back just when it is ready, so that it doesn't crash so much as glide back?
Oh wow, that was a crappy metaphor.
In all, I think it it one of your better pieces. You nailed characterization and setting very well, also you effectively used literary devices and writing styles.
But your a writer, and writers write better when they're depressed so I'll just say it's passable, but you can do better.
(I don't mean it though <3)
I totally agree. The piece has moved beyond the point of correct/incorrect usage, and entered into preference territory.
My biggest problem is the title. Moveable is a terrible word! It sounds yucky. Something about the e and the a not doing what they should next to each other, maybe. Anyway, I'd suggest rethinking the phrase - a shifting trap? a moving trap, even? "Moveable trap" doesn't really work where it pops up in the story anyway because it kind of suggest Maria's seduction and power is under the control of someone else - if it's moveable, it needs someone to move it, but if it's moving, it's its own entity. Does that make sense?
The only other thing is to get a few more concrete scenes in there, even if it's only in reminiscence. At one stage (I think around "Eventually Maria became his duty and the tiny studio became his home.") it feels like the situations you've described have all been too brief and were sacrificed for a lot of generic exposition about Rafter's situation. It's nice exposition, you certainly do it well, but I'd love to dwell quietly on a specific scene once or twice more.
It wouldn't be hard - the 'coming down from the mountain' bit could be turned from 'this is how it generally happened when it happened' to 'this is exactly how it happened one time that it did happen.' It's really hard to avoid describing things in general terms - we all have to do it from time to time - but it's never really that satisfying, and you can do an anecdote like that a lot more justice and make it a lot more believable by actually getting right into the specifics.
It is really good work so far, but I'd love to see a revision or two!
I felt that the scene of opening the door is broken up by too much other business. Did they just start making out while he was in the middle of unscrewing the lock, or was that a flashback? Also, dropping the screw and waking the neighbor. Do you need that scene? If so, there must be a better way to justify him being seen and pretending to be the artist. The hero breaking in to his own apartment once a week seems like way too artificial an explanation for the hero having a skill that needs no explanation at all.
A few word usages sounded a bit off. "Inimitable" buildings, "solicited me to be him". Desert skin and Moroccan skin may be redundant.
At the beginning I was a bit confused, thinking there might be two women, one outside breaking in and another already inside. The confusion came from referring to his girlfriend as in "it" which I took to be the apartment (when you hadn't yet said that the girl outside was the girlfriend).
This hero must have a tough job if he has to write the plot and dialogue to tie together a bunch of images the artist has already created. I wonder if you were thinking of the golem comic in Kavalier and Clay when you wrote this.
I really, really liked "penny on a golf course". I can't exactly put my finger on it, but based on this story you seem to have command of a good range of effects in your writing.
i've never read kavalier and clay. chabon right? i didn't love the final solution, but i heard kavalier and clay was worth checking out.
the original premise of this piece was: what if cages by dave mckean had been completely devoid of language, the way that bloodsong by eric drooker was?
anyway, thanks for all the feedback and encouragement. i've been away from this piece for about 15 months. now that i read it again i find the fragmented style jarring and set to some kind of torturous overkill, though i think it can be effective if pulled back in the right places. i've never been away from a piece that i'm still interested in for this long. i feel so detached from it emotionally that, hopefully, i can now revise it in a very clinical (and therefore effective?) fashion.
i resisted this at first, but i think now that you're right. he still needs to be a writer, but he doesn't need to be rafter's writer. rafter's character should be a great mystery to him, not an old colleague.
hehe, see i always liked the title "a moveable feast". this thing has had about a dozen titles. a moveable trap was a recent decision, and a friend of mine used it in reference to a chess game (he was playing against someone better, and it felt like he was up against a "moveable trap")
it's also been called:
strange forms of disclosure. strange forms. casualties of forgiveness. untitled. rafter. icketysmickety and the bastard train.
i'm sure i'll figure out something better.
I don't even feel like I should criticize this piece, but here is my two cents. Take 'em or leave 'em.
At this point, right after they had kissed, would he be trying to ignore the memory? Maybe, but it sounds a bit thought out for the moment. I would believe it more if you hadn't just said "same repeated motions." Seems like he wants to think about her, not the other way around. It made me question his emotion. Maybe that is what you wanted? Just a nitpick, nothing monumental. Regardless, the sentences flowed well, so if you want internal conflict, leave them in.