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Berlioz: "Symphonie Fantastique" : 4th Mvt.- Leonard Bernstein 

Won 3rd Place in Young Writers Awards, 2020

It was daunting. She’d never seen anything quite so formidable as the descent down into the throngs of moving people, bustling skirts and waving gloved hands. The chatter wafted up to her, as did the intoxicating smell of floral perfume. She felt dizzy. She didn’t even know if she was breathing, if she could, not with the corset slowly crushing her waist. With every measly breath she managed, it seemed to tighten like a boa constrictor wrapped around its prey. That's all I am, she thought, prey for men to catch. Though she knew many of her friends and maids called the audacious ordeal ‘courting’. She remembered scoffing at all of them, she definitely wasn’t laughing at them now. The world seemed to stretch as she focused back on the scene before her, her breath caught, then she began the descent. 

       She desperately hoped her feet wouldn’t catch on the thick, expensive carpet that adorned the staircase. That she wouldn’t slip or tumble. She could see it now, her feet disappearing beneath her, her body surging forwards, hair flying and pearls glittering like little stars. She would look like a falling angel, a mighty power and beauty, clad in pounds of silk and satin, arms outstretched like the wings of the holy as she plummeted to earth. Or hell, she supposed. She would look angelic, until she hit the bottom of the marble staircase and snapped her neck. She wouldn’t look so heavenly there, a pitiless heap of pale skin, fragile bones and millions of dollars worth of finery and fabric. 

 

“Céline,” a voice exclaimed and she looked up. That’s all it took, that one moment for her eyes to be captured by pale green ones, and then the world tipping forward. The staircase rushed up to meet her, like a person sprinting to embrace their long lost lover, and her stomach dropped to her toes. She made a wild grab at empty air. Not an angel at all, more of a flailing baby bird trying to fly, she realised. An image flashed in front of her eyes, crimson red leaking out from under her head, cracked open on the bottom step, seeping into the Savonnerie carpet, staining her father’s expenses. The gossip, the giggles, the disgrace. 

    Suddenly, the world wasn’t tipping anymore, no it was actually quite still. Céline gasped as she realised where she was, encased in strong arms that belonged to pale green eyes. Her mouth was parted slightly, heart thundering but she couldn’t look away from the long lashes and dilated pupils. Oh she certainly wasn’t laughing now. 

 

 

 

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THE SUBURBS

“I didn’t know you could drive.” It is a throwaway comment, a leaf in the wind. It is a knife to the gut, a veiled acknowledgment of my mother’s stolen keys, jangling softly behind the steering wheel. It is an invitation. A declaration of war. Orange light flickers across the dashboard, spilling into the car and filtering through the smoke from his dying cigarette. Here we are, ten past eleven, expansive nothingness stretches out before us. Swerving on a highway to nowhere. 

    I tilt my head towards him, “You were the one who said we should leave.”

   “You agreed,” he says, voice low. I feel his eyes on me, analysing my face in the brief snatches of light. It isn’t the heavy stares I received from various men at the gas station when I filled up the Skylark, earlier this afternoon. No, he doesn’t look at me like that. He looks at me as if I am a stranger. Unknown to him. Not something he is interested in but something of interest. Something to dissect, open up on a steel table, fingers digging into my open chest cavity. I can see his soft lips, illuminated in the light bouncing off the exit signs I’ve missed. 

 

“Where are we going, anyway?” I deflect, my eyes roaming over the never-ending horizon. The inky tarmac glistening with rain stretches on for miles. He worries the cigarette butt between his slender fingers, eyes unfocused and lost in thought. I’ve never seen him like this, so untethered. A boat left unmoored at the dock, at the mercy and will of the waves and wind. 

    “Hell, if I know.” 

I press down harder on the accelerator, my foot to the floor. The Skylark hums happily, a mechanical beast glad to be free. I too, am hungry for freedom. Running on a full tank, the Skylark eats up the empty stretches of the 405. 

    “There's going to be a war.” He tenses his shoulders before letting them fall, imitating a shrug, as if a physical weight has lifted.

 

“A suburban war?” I murmur. I don’t look at him, keeping my eyes on the road ahead. Pine trees rise like giants on either side of the highway, darkness dancing between their trunks. For a moment, cold air rushes into the car, tangling its fingers into my hair and nipping at my knuckles upon the steering wheel. Quickly, he flicks the cigarette butt out of the open window before closing it and lighting another. 

 

“I have to stay,” he says quietly, the cigarette hanging loosely from his lips. We have to go back, he means. The idea of tasting this sweet, little slice of heaven before returning to purgatory leaves a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. The hand of the speedometer doesn’t waver as I speed below the overpass.

 

“I don’t.”

 

In my rear-view mirror, I see the decayed carcass of the city, buildings jutting like bones, looming in the distance. Skylines reach to tear at the sky, letting bleed the torrents of toxic fumes that undulate within the industrial buildings, caked in rust and dirt. This desiccated, dystopian city that feeds on the people within. Chews and spits them back out. Teeth blackened with grime. At its feet, splays the tangled jungle of suburbia. Winding concrete streets stretching like the roots of an old tree, standing solitary in someone’s front yard.  

 

“Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo.” It is a throwaway comment, a leaf in the wind. It is a knife to the gut, a veiled acknowledgment of my stolen heart, beating softly inside my ribs. It is an invitation. A declaration of war. Out of the corner of my eye I see him pause, fingers clasped around the cigarette, hands frozen in his lap. His eyes swim with emotion, flooded in feeling, drowning me. Hopelessly, bitterly, pleadingly. Silence settles like smoke within the car, smothering.

   Before I can stop myself, I swing the wheel around. The Skylark’s tyred screech as the car spins, no doubt leaving dark marks on the bitumen. The Skylark careens back towards the filthy city.

 

“If it's a war you want…” 

 

Writer’s Statement

Inspired by Monica Birkenes’s song, The Suburbs, my prose follows two protagonists escaping the bleakness of their suburban life. The song depicts a dystopian suburban reality, foreshadowing an ominous future which offers little hope to the lover’s story, evoking sympathy and compassion from the listener. The singer keeps their gender and name unspecified, addressing a mysterious lover using second-person pronouns. By not identifying the song’s context, the lyrics are applicable to any listener who may relate to this suburban upbringing. Comparatively, I expand from the target audience of the original by considering current circumstances, such as COVID-19 and the lockdowns occurring within Australia. Like Birkenes, I mirror the melancholy tone within the original, utilising numerous techniques to create a hopeless and suffocating mood.  

 

Through literary devices, figurative language, and structural techniques, I established the overall atmosphere of the piece. Setting the transformative in a car reflects how the introduction to my prose is not the beginning of the narrative, but an excerpt from a longer text. This contrasts with the original, which begins during the protagonist’s childhood and ends with her “want[ing] a daughter.” Through dialogue, I institute the complication of the narrative, “a [suburban] war,” simultaneously incorporating lyrics from the original. I conclude the story with a cliff-hanger, combining resolution with climax. This leaves the remaining plot ambiguous, allowing readers to conjure their own interpretation about what comes next, further engaging the audience. Throughout my transformative, I incorporate sentence fragments, to build rising tension. This foreboding tone reimagines the hopeless future incorporated in the dystopian concept of the original and considers the present fear and confinement of the lockdowns, making the text more relatable. Through personification, I evoke the surreal feeling generated by the song, channelling elements of magical realism. Alliteration in the “darkness dancing” and in the simile “silence settl[ing] like smoke… smothering” personifies the ominous tone. Further, the alliteration in the description of the “desiccated, dystopian city,” creates gustatory imagery as it “chewed and spat [out]” “the people within it,” exemplifying the hopelessness in the setting. This lamenting mood throughout my transformative reflects the sombre tone of the original.

 

To hyperbolise the tragic tone of my narrative, I use various stylistic features exemplified through the concept of star-crossed lovers, alluding to works of Shakespeare and singer-songwriter, Halsey. Throughout the original, Birkenes implies the idea of forbidden love separated by fate, as her elusive lover is “standing on the opposite shore” while his “part of town” is against hers. Alluding to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the archetype of this trope, I establish this concept in, “Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo.” Like the ‘Prologue’ in the play, I allude to “a declaration of war,” foreshadowing the future complication of the narrative. Alluding to Halsey’s song Drive in my text when, “[his] soft lips [were] illuminated in the light bouncing off the exit signs I missed,” I further characterise the hopeless romantic nature of the protagonists, referencing both the original and the car setting. Following these allusions, the forbidden romance is solidified through repetition of the first lines of my prose. The “my mother’s stolen keys,” (a reference to the original lyrics), becomes “my stolen heart.” The first-person perspective of the woman, allows the reader to understand her range of emotions, mirroring the song. Through descriptive imagery, I illustrate the protagonist’s alternating perspectives on their escape. I depict how the idea of freedom and being with his lover, leaves the man “untethered” exemplified in the metaphor, “a boat left unmoored at the dock,” while it leaves the woman “drowning.” This is further portrayed in my lexical choices of “swam” and “flooded,” linking to the original lyrics, “standing on the opposite shore.” Although the narrative is written from the woman’s perspective, I communicate the man’s reluctance to leave the suburbs when the two lovers are driving away, his ‘dying’ cigarette symbolising his uncertainty of the adventure. Once he claims he feels like he “has to stay” he lights another cigarette, reflecting the life he gives to his resolution. This contrasts the woman, who is “smothered” by the smoke, symbolic of the man’s decision, as she is “hungry for freedom” and “glad to be free.” The woman’s inner monologue compares the protagonist’s home to purgatory and freedom to heaven through the metaphor “a sweet, little slice of heaven before returning to purgatory”. Furthering this, I juxtapose the visual imagery of the “inky tarmac glistening with rain” to the “toxic fumes” and “dirt and rust.” The beauty of this budding romance, although doomed, accentuates the ominous atmosphere of my prose, mimicking the original.

 

The aim of my transformative, The Suburbs, was to link current affairs throughout the narrative, allowing the audience to consider their own setting and future. The ambiguous ending leads the audience to compose their own thoughts on what may follow and what might come next in their own lives.

 

 

 

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BONES

The sun clawed at Walter’s eyes and hooked it's fingers into the skeleton of branches snaking above him. It set fire to the sky and seared itself into the earth, scorching the land and people alike. Just like it had scorched him. The skin on the back of his hands dark and worn like the leather of his boots. The sun, in some ways, is the most alive thing out here, Walter thought despairingly. He had collapsed at the roots of the solitary Mulga tree only minutes before, or had it been hours? He didn’t know. Walter rested the back of his head against the rough bark of the trunk, eyes squinted against the glare of the sun.

 

Carefully he ran his tongue over his cracked lips, hoping to soothe the stinging cuts. He’d tried to help this land, to find where they could grow crops to feed families. Instead, this land had fed on him. Hissing still filled his ears, remnants of the slithering snakes and shifting sands who tried to swallow him. The land had eaten him and spat him back out and now he couldn’t keep his eyes from fluttering shut. Beneath his eyelids, his vision glowed red. 

 

Walter only realised the utter wrongness of the figure approaching when it was too late. He’d been too lost in Joseph’s words of the vast and anomalous outback, lulled by the familiarity of his accent, that he hadn’t even noticed the strange man until Joseph had gone still. 

“Don’t look it in the eyes.” Walter ducked his gaze and surveyed the dark figure’s shoes, a matted mess of feathers and gore. Beside him Joseph hacked, his lips twitching in an ugly way as he spat into the man’s face.

“Damn -slur-,” he snarled, stalking forward with contempt and disgust dripping into every movement, every step. 

“C’mon Walter, we’re headin’ out soon and we don’t want -slur- stench on us when we do,” Joseph called. 

     

Walter pushed past the strange man, shoulder knocking hard enough against him to send him staggering back. He was close enough he could smell something not unlike rusted copper, old blood perhaps.

     

Up the road, Joseph didn’t so much as turn his head to look back at either Walter or the gnarled set of bony limbs behind him. He was escaping out into the endless nothingness. Despite his frail frame, the witch man hadn’t been knocked to the ground like Walter expected and instead knelt only on one knee with his head bowed. Eerily the man lifted his gaze to meet Walter’s backward glance in a stare that seemed to devour each beat of Walter’s heart, the whites of his eyes swallowed by the darkness of his pupils. Shaking slightly, the man raised his hand and in it, was a sharp, grey needle pointed directly at Walter’s chest. No, not a needle, he realised, a bone. 

      

Frantically Walter drew in a sharp breath and the moment was broken. He was released from the intense gaze of the man as his eyes fell away. He spun on his heel, recoiling from the still kneeling figure as quickly as he could to follow Joseph’s retreating back. The sun seemed to burn right through the rim of his hat and blind him anyway as he strode out into the unknown. 

 

The mumbling didn’t sound like English. No, the mumbling didn’t even sound human. Walter forced his eyes open to find a dark figure hunched over him. He peered out at the man, who in all his strangeness seemed mysteriously familiar. Hesitantly Walter attempted to move but his body didn’t respond, limbs so numb he could hardly tell where he ended and the roots of the tree began. Not a single sound escaped his parched mouth when he tried to beg for help.

Help me. The man looked up, Walter hadn’t thought he’d spoken. Dark eyes like pools of ink flickered over Walter and slowly the man reached down. He was going to save Walter, going to clasp his hand and haul him to his feet. 

 

Yes, God, please help me, Walter rasped silently. The man’s arm drew back and clutched in his slender fingers was a bleached bone. Something twisted sickly inside Walter as he watched the man lean back, studying the bone. Walter’s bone. In one languid movement, the man spun it towards Walter, pointed at his chest, and after a moment his jaw fell open. A revolting keen of a laugh tumbled from his lips, the sound grating grotesquely against the inside of Walter’s skull, raking its talons down his spine while he tried miserably to move. To get away. Walter realised as the man stood that he was leaving Walter to burn under the gaze of the sun, nestled in the roots of the tree, forever. Realised that even after the man’s shadow was consumed by the horizon that his laugh still stayed trapped in Walter’s ribs, like a bird pecking at the inside of its cage. Forever.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Fates

“I truly can’t believe this is still going on” Clotho exclaimed. The voluptuous woman of an indeterminate age reclined on a beige couch in the centre of an Olympian courtyard. Red curls fell across creamy shoulders, framing freckled cheekbones and shining like fire under the wayward rays of the morning sun. She surveyed her two sisters leisurely as she spun a singular golden thread around her index finger. 

     Atropos, the eldest, sighed heavily, “You’d think that they would have revolted by now, those mortal women.” She was hunched over a small slab of stone, one wrinkled finger trailing lightly across the inscribed markings. Her presence muted, buried beneath the burden of time, pale skin pulled tightly over fragile bones.

     Clotho flicked her eyes over to her youngest sister, who was hidden behind the white and black print of a modern-day newspaper. A plump, angry looking man on the front page stared back, his lips curled in an ugly manner. ‘Donald Trump’ printed in large letters above the image. On the back page, the same man stood surrounded by other mortals, large scissors in hand, poised to cut a silken ribbon.

    “Lachesis?” She prompted. The faint rustle of Lachesis’s newspaper being set down upon the table caused Atropos to pause her reading. Lachesis sat with her back straight, accentuating the severe sharpness of her bone structure and grey gaze. “They may very well, with the way things are going. Times are changing.” 

 

Unwinding the string from around her finger, Clotho added, “But it’s no different from the old ages. The men are the same. Disguised differently. No longer in their Grecian armour, brandishing swords and spears. No, now they are dressed in suits and wield words that cut these women deeper than blades.”

    “You don’t say!” Atropos crowed. “What’s written there on your paper? Grab her by the……... I never!” Lachesis’s nose scrunched in distaste. “This mortal man is truly horrendous. You should hear some of the things he says about women. His daughter too!”

     “Inklings of that nasty situation with King Cinyras of Cyprus and his daughter, Myrrha?” Atropos leaned forward conspiratorially. “Nasty, nasty stuff.”

     “How disturbing. Anyhow, the number of women that have spoken out against that mortal is just horrific.” Lachesis said heatedly. 

 

Atropos shook her head, “That ugly man could not have had more conquests than Zeus, the cretin. I’ve told him once and I’ll tell him again, if girls are running and crying, NO, they do not want to sleep with him!” 

   “Olympian men are a world of trouble and these mortals are not much better.” Clotho muttered and Lachesis agreed. They were incredulous at how little men had changed. Lachesis’s blood boiled. She understood now why the Olympians had often interfered with mortal affairs. Despite how trivial it all seemed at the time, she wanted nothing more than to march down to the mortal realm and wrap her elegant little hands around the throats of any man that dared stand in her way. 

   “This leader, the one in the paper, has even made attempts at a woman while her partner was there. Oh, the disrespect!” A sudden gust of wind whipped Lachesis’s dark hair around her face, accentuating her fury. 

   “That reminds me of when Zeus invited Ixion to Olympus. Do you remember?” Clotho said.

    “Oh yes!” Atropos screeched excitedly, always one for a good Olympian scandal. “He noticed Ixion making eyes at Hera and created a cloud that looked just like her! Of course, the imbecile Ixion, fell for it. You should have seen the look on his face when he realised. Caught with his pants around his ankles. It was so funny!”  

 

Lachesis jumped up, her chair screeching on the cobblestones. “They’re all the same! I can’t stand for it anymore.” 

Clotho peered up at Lachesis, “Well what do you propose we do, hmm?” 

    “I don’t know, anything!” 

    Clotho’s thoughts churned like Poseidon’s waves during a storm. “Well… the morning is getting rather late and this string,” she pulled the ends of the golden string taught, watching as it reverberated in response, “is getting rather aggravating.”

Atropos let out a cackle worthy of a witch and clapped her hands together. A man with tousled dark hair and furry legs appeared in the courtyard beside the elderly woman.  

    “Satyr, go fetch us a bottle of Dionysus’s finest wine!” She said, “And don’t let him grovel at you either. The bastard owes me.” With a bow and the soft clicking of hooves on the cobblestones, the satyr scampered off to locate the drunken God.   

    “You shouldn’t drink, Atropos.” Clotho chastised, “Do you remember what happened that time with Apollo?”

Atropos threw her hands in the air, “Ah men and their cunning ways! We should have never let him convince us to save his little hero.”

    “But he has such a beautiful voice,” Lachesis lamented. 

 

The satyr soon reappeared with a bottle of wine and three silver goblets. It did not take long for the quiet meeting of three to dissolve into a raucous affair. Their ageless laughter and insults filled the courtyard, as wine filled their chalices, the atmosphere brimming with anticipation. 

   “Who did you say this one belongs to, dear?” Atropos asked Lachesis, who was clumsily measuring the string against the wooden ruler. 

    “A man from the twentieth century, he’s the current presid— my it’s awfully short!” 

Atropos snorted so violently that crimson wine flew from her nose, leaving her gasping for breath between wracking coughs that shook her frail frame. “I’m not surprised.” Atropos rasped. 

    Clotho laughed, “Neither am I!” She rose unsteadily from her couch, plucking a pair of golden shears from the table and passing them to Atropos, in exchange for a drink.

All three women gathered around the golden thread; heads bowed. Atropos with her shears, Lachesis with her ruler, and Clotho with her chalice of wine. The air was heavy with their silence, rich wine and the floral scent of the garden. Past, present and future.

 

“Shall we?”