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snorlax891 · 3 years

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More Sapphic Yearning Namaari, and Oblivious Raya inspired by @moon-spirit-yue with a dash of their OC’s, Charanya, and Charanya’s Fang soldier girlfriend, Tien, thrown in for fun. ;) Seriously, go check them out, they’re wonderfully real and I love them. PLEASE DON’T SUE ME FOR USING THEM @moon-spirit-yue It’s out of love I swear XD

Raya: *casually washing her face in a stream after a long day* Can you believe it Tuk Tuk? A whole day with absolutely no sign of- Namaari: *pops up out of the stream* THERE YOU ARE DEP LA! SURRENDER! *manages to get control of Raya and ties her to a tree* Raya: AAAAAGGGHH!! WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU COME FROM?! WERE YOU HIDING UNDER WATER!? *low key impressed by Namaari’s lung strength* AND HOW IN THE HELL DO YOU KEEP FINDING ME?! Namaari: *grinning* Ah well I’m so glad you asked, because you see Raya... Raya: *looking all around as music starts to play and a stage rises from the water* Oh not this shit again...wait...is that the same stage as before? Namaari: *jumps on stage* All your questions will be answered momentarily. Just watch, Dep la. *starts singing* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOGaugKpzs Atitaya: *whispering to her during the song* Actually it is the same stage as before. Thanks for noticing. I’m not even going to BEGIN to get in to what it took to set all this up this time, and to get it underwater like that in the first place. Phew. Not easy. Raya: 0.o *totally creeped the fuck out* Namaari: *finishes her song and looks hopefully at Raya, as she slowly walks towards her* S-so...do you understand now? I’ll always find you, no matter how far you run, or how fast, or where you try to hide. The lowest valley, the deepest, darkest caves, the loneliest islands or the highest peaks. I. WILL. FIND. YOU. *staring at her unblinking* Raya: ...You know what...I think I get it now. Namaari: *lighting up like a Christmas tree with happiness* You do!? :D Raya: *smiling seductively as she drops her voice to alluring levels* Yes I do. In fact...why don’t you come over here- Atitaya: *sensing the usual Raya shenanigans danger vibe* Princess Namaari don’t- Namaari: *waves her off* Hush General. My future wife is speaking. :P Atitaya: Hmmph. *crosses her arms* Fine. Don’t blame me when she inevitably escapes somehow. Raya: *continuing as if she was never interrupted* So I can tell you exactly what I think in a far more...private... *leans in to nose against Namaari’s neck as she moves in to Raya’s space* intimate... *breaths lightly against Namaari’s ear* setting. *nibbles Namaari’s earlobe* Namaari: OOOOONNNNMMMNGGGGGGGGGHHHHH!! *biting her lip as she moans and shivers, legs turning to jelly* Raya: I...think... THAT YOU’LL NEVER MURDER ME ON MY WATCH, YOU STRANGELY ATTRACTIVE BINTURI!! *hauls back and headbutts her* Namaari: *lying on the ground smiling up at the sky like an idiot* Raya: *chews through her ropes like a gopher and sprints off* HA HA!! FREE AGAIN!! YOU’RE NOT GONNA KILL ME YOU CREEPY, THOUGH APPEALINGLY MUSCLED, STALKER!! TUK TUK, GO!! *rolls off* Atitiaya: Well I’m not gonna say I told you so...but I told you so. She got away again, Princess....Princess? Namaari: *giggling* She called me attractive...and she likes my muscles. Tee hee. We have such an unbreakable bond. *a giant lump is beginning to swell on her forehead where Raya headbutted her* Atitaya: Princess please, must you enter the Gay Yearning State every time Raya defeats you and gets away? We could be using this time to chase her down or plan our next move. Namaari: *still giggling* Our children are going to be so amazing. Hee hee. :3 Atitaya: ...*sighs* Why did I expect any different? I’ll set up camp then. Come on soldiers. Fang Soldiers: *busy debating who is the better performer from what they’ve seen so far, Raya or Namaari, and what they’d sound like if they performed together* Atitaya: *lowkey wondering that as well* Raya: *meeting up with Charanya back in Heart later* She did it again ‘Rayna! I swear she’s getting weirder and weirder every time we meet! But hey! That ear nibble thing you taught me really paid off! She basically turned in to goop! Thanks bestie! You saved me again! Charanya: *grinning like mad* Of course! Who else would I hang out with if you got captured? If nothing else, you keep things from getting boring! *punches her* Raya: *rubbing her shoulder but grinning* Oh, well I’m glad to be of service. *mock bows* Anyways, I gotta roll! Things to do, Dragons to find, statues to bring back to life ya know?! Later! *Waves as she rides off* Charanya: *grinning after her* One day she’ll realize that Namaari is totally in to her. One day. And when that day comes I’ll TOTALLY be all, ‘Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah! I knew before you! I totally called it!’ :P *rubs hands together* MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA!! Tien: *reaching out of the tent and grabbing the back of her tunic* Darling, what did we say about maniacal laughter? Charanya: *blushing hard* Uhh maniacal laughter later, kisses first? Tien: Bingo. ;) *yanks her in to the tent* Charanya: EEP! 0.0

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readtilyoudie · 2 years

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December 2021: The Seafarer's Kiss (The Seafarer's Kiss #1) by Julia Ember

Having long-wondered what lives beyond the ice shelf, nineteen-year-old mermaid Ersel learns of the life she wants when she rescues and befriends Ragna, a shield-maiden stranded on the mermen’s glacier. But when Ersel’s childhood friend and suitor catches them together, he gives Ersel a choice: say goodbye to Ragna or face justice at the hands of the glacier’s brutal king. Determined to forge a different fate, Ersel seeks help from Loki. But such deals are never as one expects, and the outcome sees her exiled from the only home and protection she’s known. To save herself from perishing in the barren, underwater wasteland and be reunited with the human she’s come to love, Ersel must try to outsmart the God of Lies.

A couple months ago, I asked @biandlesbianliterature (who I recommend following) for recs on a sapphic Little Mermaid. You see, I'm obsessed with the story and it's been something I've yearned for years now to read. And the blog recommended this book.

And I bought it in October, planning to read it, but I'm struggling through my Fable book. Inu and I came up with a rule that once a year, we can pick a book that we would have to buy. She had picked Justin Roberts' biography. I picked this one in hopes to actually read it. Plus it's winter themed.

#book of the month #december 2021 #book club #booklr #bookblr #queer #queer books #the seafarer's kiss #julia ember

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courtorderedcake · 3 years

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I had this dream last night where I had to move back in with my parents, but I had someone turn their house and my childhood bedroom into this Vaporwave high Victorian Sapphic Barbie dream house - so my room was had these three huge king beds in it with different soft faux fur and cloud shaped fuzzy pillows all over it, but the bulbs in all the lights were all pink, lavender and baby blue, and some how the windows looked out over the forest but they were tinted to make all the sunlight look like a sunset, and had water hooked up so it looked like it was constantly raining through it which created this amazing underwater sunset affect that I just wanted to live in forever.

There was also so many stuffies and a kotatsu, and built in bubblegum pink Roman column bookshelves.

I had a slumber party where it was me, two friends of mine from my youth group for some reason, and three others. We had a pillow fight and all of our cats were there. At the end, I revealed if you pushed the kotatsu aside there was a HOT TUB underneath it in the shape of a pink opalescent mother of pearl Clamshell. We all drank from high ball glasses with umbrellas in pink swimsuits with our hair in these cute shower caps, and the kitschy sunglasses.

But for a few missing minor details (adjacent harem of my dream mens/femmes, etc), that is fully what I expect paradise to be like.

#Vaporwave #Pink #Clouds #Softcore #courtorderedcake #Honeycore #Pastel #sunset #retrowawe #pale pink aesthetic #pastel goth #pastel pink #Warmcore #Snuggle #Sapphic #sapphism #Love #Dream

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hoodoo12 · 4 years

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Beetlejuice Squared 2: You Asked for It (2/3)

Let’s just jump in, shall we? With the quick reminder that part(s) 3 are your personal choice. And still thanks beyond words for @beejiesbitch for helping out and encouraging me and suggesting things that made me cringe. Part 1

@beetlebitchywitch @beetlejuicebeadoll @sapphic-florals @turtlepated @realmonsterboyhours @monsterlovinghours @witchyrem-ains @beebeyjuice @imma-fucking-nerd @iambuggy

NSFW

It felt like the air had been sucked out of your lungs.

Instantly panic hit you, flooding you with a rush of adrenaline in preparation for fight or flight. Nipping closely on its heels was rage; you’d kicked him out, and he just had the audacity to saunter back in like the two of you hadn’t had a screaming match the last time he was here?! Then the thought that the Beetlejuice laying beside you was going to think this was a set up, that you’d asked him here and fucked him knowing that the original Beetlejuice was going to show up in some shitty plan to make him jealous ambushed you too, bringing up the rear of this train wreck. You looked over at Beetlejuice on the bed with you, hoping you could convince him this was a complete surprise to you too. You needn’t have worried. If his knee-jerk reaction was to think you’d organized this, the expression of abject fear on your face convinced him otherwise. Reading your terror at the situation unfolding made a snarl curl his lip and he pushed himself up off the mattress to go confront his counterpart. He wasn’t quick enough, though. The other Beetlejuice, the one you’d told to never come back, walked through your bedroom door. Whatever he was expecting to find, it wasn’t you sprawled out on the bed, your only clothing a black garter belt and stockings, looking thoroughly fucked, and a taller, naked version of himself getting to his feet.

“What in the fuck?!” he exploded.

His hair, which had been a neutral green, erupted into red. His scruff and eyebrows did too, as did his eyes. You’d never seen him so enraged.

Automatically you pushed yourself backwards, further up the mattress, away from him.

“You’re fucking behind my back?!” he bellowed. “With this guy?!”

Beetlejuice, who’d conjured himself back into trousers while you had been focused on the demon-shaped personification of rage that had entered your bedroom, stepped forward with anger etched in his face as well and red streaks beginning to show in his hair. But your fear fled in the face of Beetlejuice throwing the exact same complaint you’d had about him back at you. You started to get up, even as the Beetlejuice who’d just been beside you ordered, “Back off, asshole--”

Beetlejuice bristled at that and stepped up against his taller counterpart. “Fuck you--you pathetic, second rate knockoff--” Never mind their exchange of words; you were still fixated on the fact that the original Beetlejuice used the same argument you’d originally accused him of. “How dare you!” you shrieked. “You’re the one who fucked anything that looked in your general direction! You couldn’t keep your dick in your pants--you never tried to keep your dick in your pants--” “Shut up. Adults are talking,” he replied almost casually to you, flicking his fingers in your direction.

Immediately you found yourself pinned spread-eagle on your back, held by invisible hands. You struggled against them while the animosity passing between the two demons became palatable.

“You lost a good thing, asshole--” “You’d’ve done the same thing, dick! Just because you don’t get called as often, don’t pretend you wouldn’t have grabbed at every bit of pussy or cock that you were offered! Fucking hypocrite, you’d have begged for scraps--” “You cheated on me you fucker!” you yelled as you continued struggling against the restraints. “I never cheated on you, I told you to get the fuck out of my life! We were done!”

The taller of the two, the Beetlejuice you’d just laid, glanced over at you, a look of slight puzzlement on his face, and the Beetlejuice you’d tried to end things with took advantage of his distraction. He reached forward and grabbed a handful of flesh, the other’s pectoral muscle, and clenched his fist. The yowl would have been enough for you to realize that fingers had punctured skin; the immediate blood that erupted from the site told you that it was nails sharpened into talons that did it.

Beetlejuice continued to cry out, but the noise was quickly becoming less surprised pain and more rage. He grabbed the arm and wrist of the one causing the injury, but went to his knees.

“You didn’t say his name?!” the smooth voice of the Beetlejuice you’d spent the evening with admonished harshly in your ear. “You told him to get out, but you didn’t say his name!” You’d have slapped yourself in the face if you could have moved. You were so stupid! You hadn’t banished him, you’d been so upset you didn’t think of it! He’d left, and hadn’t shown up for weeks, so it was out of your mind! So now all you had to do was say it! You took a breath--

--a final invisible hand slapped over your mouth, before you could get an actual word out, pinching your skin so tightly it hurt and almost covering your nose as well. You struggled now to take a full breath. Unfortunately, Beetlejuice knew the tricks of throwing a voice and wasn’t risking you saying his name and banishing him for real.

“Told you to shut up, baby,” he told you in a sweet tone, with a wink.

Under the heavy hand, you shrieked again, using your throat.

Distraction seemed to be a good tool to use, because while his attention was making sure you couldn’t speak, Beetlejuice from the floor lashed out and knocked his counterpart backwards. It dislodged the grip on him, making blood flow more freely down his chest, but that was ignored. The two grappled for a moment, but from the floor he had a disadvantage and Beetlejuice who was standing managed to twist a hand into the other’s hair, yanking his head back.

A flash of pink rippled through the shorter of the two’s blood red hair, a sign of his enjoyment, and he didn’t hesitate to punch Beetlejuice solidly once, twice, three times in the face. Blood spurted from the mess of a crushed nose, and Beetlejuice’s head lolled a little from the punishment. His hands released the hold they’d taken on his twin and fell limp to his sides. His body followed suit, and for a moment, it looked like the only thing holding him up was the fist still in his hair. He was released and dropped to the floor dismissively, and the Beetlejuice you’d wanted out of your life crawled up the bed, between your legs. You tried to arch away from him, but your stocking-clad thighs were grabbed. Casually he wiped his knuckles on them, leaving bloody marks.

“You look good, baby,” he cooed. “Wish you’d worn something like this for me.”

You strained so hard against the restraints your limbs hurt. He chuckled, still slinking up on all fours. “I can’t say I’m super fond of smelling that fucker’s come in you, though--”

He never dropped his eyes from your enraged gaze, but did lower his head and snaked his tongue through your pussy. You bucked again, hating that it felt good, hating that he knew just how to lick you to make you moan and writhe in pleasure. He ducked down further and put his whole mouth on you, sucking lightly.

You couldn’t help but go lax for a moment, your body betraying you under his mouth.

“Asshole,” Beetlejuice snarled, his smoother voice deeper than you’d ever heard it, and much more similar to the one with his face in your pussy.

You lifted your head; he was still smeared with blood but you couldn’t see the broken nose or split lips that had been so evident before. His teeth were still coated red, however, as he pulled his lips back like a predator.

The Beetlejuice between your legs took one more second to lick you again, then he was yanked harshly off you by his jacket. As he was swung around to face his counterpart, he spit the wet and come he’d sucked out of your pussy into the other’s face.

That escalated it all.

The anger that both had been exhibiting before ratcheted up to a level that made the very air feel electrified. It was two forces of nature colliding, two storms of equal strength battering each other in the confines of your bedroom, while you were trapped, helpless, on a mattress.

You could only see flashes of the two of them; your mere mortal lightbulbs couldn’t handle the surge of power and they flickered, dimming and growing brighter randomly. You half wondered if, while seeing the nightmare visions of the two demons clashing in front of you, your own vision would do the same.

Beetlejuice, still only clad in trousers, must have thought along the same lines. “Close your eyes, babydoll,” he said in your ear. His voice, still smoother, was in stark contrast to the horror of shadowy tentacles that seemed to erupt around him.

“Keep your eyes open, baby!” the other ordered, in your other ear, and a new hand gripped your forehead. Instinctually you knew it’d force your eyelids open if need be. “I want you to watch me fucking destroy him.”

Torn between the two, you continued to buck against your invisible restraints. Your throat felt raw. Tears leaked out of your eyes. Your nose started running. You hated all of this.

With the exception of those words to you, the Beetlejuices focused solely on each other. No more human words came from them; in their place were hisses and guttural sounds of some demonic language that put pressure in your ears like you were too far underwater. It was seductive, however, and part of you thought that if you strained, if you concentrated, you could learn to understand it. A more rational part of your brain, the one more concerned with survival, warned you away, it wasn’t truly for human ears. The tentacles you’d first glimpsed were more solid when the light was low; when it flared it just looked like two dead guys beating the shit out of each other.

The taller of the two, the one you’d invited here tonight, had a slight advantage of less clothing to grab, but it also left his skin exposed to the other’s talons. He was a mess of gouges and lacerations, bleeding freely. His wounds knitted closed freakishly quickly, a nightmare in itself, but with so many he couldn’t concentrate on healing while still fighting.

Beetlejuice in his suit, who you didn’t banish properly, had some protection, but it gave his doppelganger something to grip with more force and land more punishing blows: a knee to the face, making the same gush of blood as you’d witnessed before; a twist of an arm into a inhuman position against the joint. His elbow snapped and Beetlejuice shrieked.

You’d have curled into a fetal position to protect yourself in fear if you’d been capable. As it were, you continued to watch in horror.

Beetlejuice struggled back and away, breaking the grip of his twin, cradling his crooked arm. Shirtless Beetlejuice stepped between him and you, hunched and watching him warily. Because of his stance, you didn’t see the repair Beetlejuice did to his arm, but heard the wet cracking and hiss of pain. You were able to see him shake his arm out to the side, no worse for wear, apparently.

He sidled to one side. Beetlejuice moved with him, keeping himself bodily between the two of you. The shorter one cocked his head enough to see over his shoulder and caught your eyes. “You sure are something, baby. You’ve got this prick of a duplicate snared--you sure you’re not some succubus, trapping saps by their dicks?”

You glared as best you could at him, although it was from no position of power.

“None of this had to happen, baby,” he continued, like this was a perfectly reasonable conversation during a perfectly reasonable situation. “This is all your fault. You said you were angry I was summoned by other people and I fucked them, but you refused the final step that would’ve set me free!”

Your glare became laser-sharp in intensity. Yes, you refused to fucking marry him. But he probably would’ve continued to fuck anything that moved even if you’d done that for him!

He must have read your mind, because he laughed. Laughed. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he agreed amicably.

If you’d have had the strength, you’d have gotten off the mattress and probably hit him yourself. As it was, you’d at least provided enough distraction--what a tool to use!-- that the taller Beetlejuice eased close enough to him to rush him, grab him by the waist, and slam him into the wall with a resounding crack that shook the house.

The infernal language returned as they screamed at each other. You winced. The lights waned, and waxed, and waned again, giving you strobe light effects of their true demonic forms, or the body horror they could twist themselves into: undulating tentacles; needle teeth in countless maws; some arms all grey and depraved, with fingernails rotting off its hand; all awash in the blood from injuries too horrific for any non-dead being to survive.

They were so evenly matched it seemed like this was going to be an eternal war. Each attack was countered, and both were wounded and bloody. Whatever they were saying to each other occasionally devolved into wordless growls and spits. You couldn’t stop sobbing, which made you feel like you were drowning. Although your anger was still burning, your strength against the spectral restraints was ebbing. You sagged and closed your eyes, unable to watch the carnage any longer.

Then, out of nowhere, there was a beat of silence. It’d been so loud in your bedroom the hush made you wonder if you’d suddenly gone deaf. You picked your head up as best you could to see what was happening. Beetlejuice had his counterpart in a hold that was inhumanly possible and inhumanely done: the umbral tentacles had solidified and impaled the other through his chest, then wrapped snugly around his torso, arms and legs so that he had no leverage to fight it. Two hands held his head in a crushing grip, while a third was on his throat, clutching so tightly the sharpened nails on the fingertips were buried in the meat of his neck.

Trussed and beaten, he was no longer pale; Beetlejuice had been painted in red ink with a heavy brush. He wasn’t pinned to the floor, either, the tentacles kept him suspended above it but his own weight pulled him downward against them, causing more grievous wounds. Thick, dark blood had splattered your floor, and continued to drip from him. You had no idea if a ghost or a demon could die from exsanguination, but he looked close to unconsciousness.

The Beetlejuice holding him didn’t let that happen, however. He leaned down and whispered something you couldn’t hear into his twin’s ear, then kissed his slack mouth. It was the final show of dominance; the loser didn't have the strength or fortitude to pull away or even bite. As he pulled away again, you saw the victor’s tongue lap along the inside of the other’s hard palate before he stood up completely.

Still holding his victim, Beetlejuice turned his gaze on you.

“Say his name,” he ordered.

tbc . . .

#beetlejuice #betelgeuse #writing #fanfiction #musical beetlejuice #Beetlejuice x reader #violence

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willandlyra · 7 years

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so don’t get me wrong, i love jasiper and i love percabeth even more. but imagine everything is the same but jercy and pipabeth are canon. imagine percy and annabeth slowly becoming best, best friends over the entire pjo series, who trust each other inconceivably.

imagine annabeth turning up in the lost hero. imagine ‘she’s looking for her best friend. a kid called percy jackson’, and she and piper are so drawn to each other. it’s more immediate for piper than for annabeth - she doesn’t have this history w/ jason, so she is obsessing over this moment. the way that she’s never really been alerted to a sapphic crush before, but how annabeth is really beautiful and really sparky, and piper’s heart is going thump thump thump.

how jason and percy obviously don’t meet for a while, and when they do, they’re both buzzing with expectation. they’ve heard things. hero. praetor. and it should be this huge contest where they both need to prove themselves, where one has to usurp the other - but it’s not. because percy can’t stop looking at jason and seeing this guy who does look like he should be flying away from all this shit. because jason looks at percy and sees a boy who could blow kisses underwater.

because annabeth sees a daughter of the goddess of love and thinks holy fucking shit. because piper wants to run a million miles away from her mother and her cliches and kiss this beautiful wise girl.

because it could be the same, same story. but a boy falls in love with a boy he could compete with any day. a boy above land when he hides under oceans. a boy who could teach him to fly while he offers swimming lessons.

and a beautiful girl who says things that shouldn’t make sense to annabeth but they do. because at first glance, the daughters of love and wisdom won’t make any sense together. but when wisdom and love fall in love with each other, it all makes sense, suddenly.

anyway, i’m crying

#jercy #pipabeth #hoo

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amererk · 7 years

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Twilight is behind her and now she is a European arthouse darling and a hit on Saturday Night Live, says Jonathan Dean

‘Kristen Stewart is perhaps the best film actress under 30.” I wrote that last year, after an interview with her Twilight co-star and former boyfriend, Robert Pattinson — and this year, I am totally convinced I am right. But it turns out the vampire saga’s fans remain faithful, and some devotees of Pattinson, after the couple’s split, aren’t exactly fond of his ex. My social-media mentions were full of fury for a month. “Because they disagreed with you?” Stewart laughs, when I tell her all this. “Because they were, like, ‘F*** her?’” Exactly. If you have only seen the actress mope adolescently through the Twilight saga, you may think the above claim quite mad. Move on to her most recent work, though, and you will discover a 26-year-old who has evolved into a presence so self-assured, she is now an arthouse star, especially in Europe: the first American woman to have won a César, the French equivalent of the Oscars. Another preconception is that she is all surly hunch and millennial cynicism, hostile to press inquiries after they zeroed in on her relationship with a married director. Her image is kohl-eyed, cool, aloof, and it’s so entrenched that one review of her recent hosting of the satirical American television series Saturday Night Live called her “surprisingly charming”. Does she understand why? “One hundred per cent.” (That’s a chatty affirmation she uses a lot.) In truth, though, Stewart is as engaging to talk to as Tom Hanks, the actor everyone says is the best to interview in the business. On her right arm is a tattoo of the light at the top of Picasso’s Guernica, inked on to remind her that we can overcome darkness if we flip the switch. She seems to be all glow herself these days, and it’s mostly thanks to her professional achievements. “I feel so sturdy on my feet right now,” she says, at her usual fast clip, proud of a run of indie roles that has put her back where she began, and belongs

First came 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria, in which Stewart more than held her own against the Oscar winner Juliette Binoche, in a more or less two-hander about a young woman’s challenging relationship with her older boss, a sensitive actress. That same year, with moody tenderness, she played Julianne Moore’s daughter in the Alzheimer’s drama Still Alice. Next, there was a small role as an ambitious young lawyer struggling towards greater things in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (just released), one of those films that starts with sad sex and never cheers up.

Best of all is Personal Shopper, the second film she has made with the French director Olivier Assayas, after Clouds of Sils Maria, and her first lead in years. It is difficult to describe. At its most basic, Personal Shopper is a darkly lit adult ghost story about a woman who borrows a lot of high-end fashion for her celebrity boss — The Others meets The Devil Wears Prada. Stewart stands in a haunted house saying “Lewis” a lot. Lewis is her recently dead twin brother, and she is waiting for his spirit to manifest itself in Paris. Both are mediums. To cope with the tension of this binary life, Stewart’s improbably named Maureen smokes lots and rides around town on a moped, looking cool. She receives anonymous texts that say things like “I know you”, which is unsettling enough, especially when you’re looking for a dead sibling. How, I ask, can the film be pitched in one-line Hollywood style? Stewart laughs and, totally believably, says she’s not one for brevity. She barely stops talking during the interview. “It’s about a girl who finds she is suddenly a foreigner, in every sense of the word, not just geographically, but in life. She’s gone through this traumatic event, and it starts an existential crisis, where she questions everything that’s real. She feels completely alone.”

Hold on. Is she still talking about Personal Shopper, or Twilight? Especially her personal experience of making that juggernaut, which brought in nearly $3.4bn at the box office worldwide and took over her life for five films. No, she says, she is not talking about the latter. “I really never felt bogged down by Twilight,” she starts and, rather than leave it at that, continues chewing it over, piling sentence upon sentence

Every step turns you into the person you are, and yeah, [Twilight] shaped me enormously. Not just those movies, but the subsequent effect. It made my involvement in Sils Maria more interesting, for sure — ironic and meta.” You mean the line when your character says, “It’s celebrity news. It’s fun”? Or when she mocks a blockbuster for having werewolves in it, as Twilight did? “One hundred per cent,” she replies. “Those lines in someone else’s mouth would have been interesting, but not, like, ‘Whoa. She really knows what she’s talking about!’” Some of the film’s backers were surprised, Assayas says, when he first chose to work with this Californian tween idol. But he emphasises her courage, shooting in the Dolomites, where it is “not exciting after sunset”, far from home, surrounded by a foreign crew.

European arthouse could be seen as Stewart’s very own panic room, the title of the breakthrough film she made when she was 11, with Jodie Foster. It provides a refuge for her. Assayas agrees that she did seem relieved to be on a film like his; he then goes on to bracket her with the greats. “I’d compare Kristen to Harriet Andersson,” he says of one of Ingmar Bergman’s favourite (and coolest) leads. “There’s no greater compliment.” The best opportunities for me are whenever I feel a little bit scared

On screen, she has perfected a bold yet vulnerable style, all tilted head and low-key murmuring. In Personal Shopper, it is employed to such a captivating extent that, when she says the mad line “She vomited this ectoplasm”, you nod along, rather than cackle. She is, simply, not a showy actress. Foster nailed it when she said: “Kristen isn’t interested in blurting her emotions in front of her.” So this career renaissance in the subtler territory of European art cinema makes total sense

“I’m used to people getting awards for extreme performances,” she says of her surprise César win for Sils Maria. “In the States, it’s rare for people to get critical attention for things that are so quiet. Sometimes, you don’t show how you’re feeling, and that actually speaks louder than shoving it down someone’s throat.” Her next project, though, is not obviously arthouse: Underwater, a film talked up as an oceanic take on Michael Bay’s Armageddon. It’s an odd fit for her, perhaps, but she compares the depth of the story to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and insists it won’t be a blockbuster that “stops with the concept, so you think, ‘Cool, that was a great concept’”. Maybe something of this scale is the only logical next step for her. This is an actress, after all, who went to the middle of nowhere up a mountain with a pack of foreigners, straight from being mollycoddled in one of the biggest franchises of all time. She wants to surprise. “I want to push myself,” she says. “In my life, when I’m emotional about something, I’m an extreme person. Subtlety is not my go-to. I just don’t want to fake anything, but the best opportunities for me are whenever I feel a little bit scared.”

Her recent SNL performance featured one sketch, inspired by the sapphic French film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, in which she romped in a kitchen with another woman. Earlier in the show, she had beamed as she told the watching millions that she was “so gay”. She came out in public last summer, and the young star who quivered through half a decade of the Twilight vampire saga, increasingly withdrawn, seemed a completely new woman — a finished painting instead of a work-in-progress. “I wasn’t hiding anything,” she says, when asked why she is now open about her love life whereas before, dating Pattinson, she stayed silent. “I didn’t talk about my first relationships that went public because I wanted things that are mine to be mine. I hated it that details of my life were being turned into a commodity and peddled around the world. But considering I had so many eyes on me, I suddenly realised [my private life] affects a greater number of people than just me. It was an opportunity to surrender a bit of what was mine, to make even one other person feel good about themselves. “If it didn’t seem like a relevant topic,” she continues, her tone both poised and passionate, keeping up a melodic flow, “like something that needed help, I would have kept my life private for ever. But then I can’t walk outside holding somebody’s hand, as I’m followed everywhere. When I was dating Rob, the public were the enemy — and that is no way to live. It wasn’t this grand statement, ‘I was so confused! Now I’ve realised who I am!’ I have not been struggling.” She laughs. “It just seemed important, and topical.” I would be hard pushed to name a more confident interviewee. In January, she screened her directorial debut, Come Swim, a 17-minute oddity that arrived with a research paper entitled Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer. You just didn’t get that with Twilight. While her future will be on both sides of the camera, she also wants to go on stage one day. It was the “human energy” from the Saturday Night Live crowd that persuaded her she may be cut out for live performance. Another appeal is that theatre is the ultimate challenge for a Los Angeles native born to entertainment-industry parents and raised on that city’s business: the next big test. She has been reading Sam Shepard and loves the way that setting can be implied in his work, rather than having to be there for everyone to see. Which, in fact, rather neatly describes her acting. Imagine her in a Pinter play. She is nothing like I expected, which was that there would be periods of silence and questions unanswered. She is friends with Patti Smith and has been called the female James Dean by the actress/rocker Juliette Lewis. That sort of support and acquaintance is intimidating. Yet she is friendly, honest, humble and, perhaps most impressive, unflappably polite, especially about Twilight, despite the continued bile spat at her by fans who think, in various ways, she has wronged them. “I don’t view the whole Twilight blow-up as being generally traumatic,” she says, delicately. “It would take someone with a really unhealthy amount of ego to be upset that everyone doesn’t love them. It would be silly to say I don’t care what people think of my work and who I am, but stuff is polarising, period.” Back to that line about her being “surprisingly charming”. Does she know why people thought she was distant? “I’d definitely lost my nerve,” she replies. “I used to try too hard, because I was nervous. I felt so uncomfortable addressing the public. I’ve just grown out of it.”

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ladyquinzy · 7 years

Photo

Kristen Stewart is back from the undead

Twilight is behind her and now she is a European arthouse darling and a hit on Saturday Night Live, says Jonathan Dean

If you have only seen the actress mope adolescently through the Twilight saga, you may think the above claim quite mad. Move on to her most recent work, though, and you will discover a 26-year-old who has evolved into a presence so self-assured, she is now an arthouse star, especially in Europe: the first American woman to have won a César, the French equivalent of the Oscars. Another preconception is that she is all surly hunch and millennial cynicism, hostile to press inquiries after they zeroed in on her relationship with a married director. Her image is kohl-eyed, cool, aloof, and it’s so entrenched that one review of her recent hosting of the satirical American television series Saturday Night Live called her “surprisingly charming”.

Does she understand why? “One hundred per cent.” (That’s a chatty affirmation she uses a lot.) In truth, though, Stewart is as engaging to talk to as Tom Hanks, the actor everyone says is the best to interview in the business. On her right arm is a tattoo of the light at the top of Picasso’s Guernica, inked on to remind her that we can overcome darkness if we flip the switch. She seems to be all glow herself these days, and it’s mostly thanks to her professional achievements.

“I feel so sturdy on my feet right now,” she says, at her usual fast clip, proud of a run of indie roles that has put her back where she began, and belongs.

How, I ask, can the film be pitched in one-line Hollywood style? Stewart laughs and, totally believably, says she’s not one for brevity. She barely stops talking during the interview. “It’s about a girl who finds she is suddenly a foreigner, in every sense of the word, not just geographically, but in life. She’s gone through this traumatic event, and it starts an existential crisis, where she questions everything that’s real. She feels completely alone.”

“Every step turns you into the person you are, and yeah, [Twilight] shaped me enormously. Not just those movies, but the subsequent effect. It made my involvement in Sils Maria more interesting, for sure — ironic and meta.” You mean the line when your character says, “It’s celebrity news. It’s fun”? Or when she mocks a blockbuster for having werewolves in it, as Twilight did? “One hundred per cent,” she replies. “Those lines in someone else’s mouth would have been interesting, but not, like, ‘Whoa. She really knows what she’s talking about!’”

Some of the film’s backers were surprised, Assayas says, when he first chose to work with this Californian tween idol. But he emphasises her courage, shooting in the Dolomites, where it is “not exciting after sunset”, far from home, surrounded by a foreign crew.

The best opportunities for me are whenever I feel a little bit scared

Her next project, though, is not obviously arthouse: Underwater, a film talked up as an oceanic take on Michael Bay’s Armageddon. It’s an odd fit for her, perhaps, but she compares the depth of the story to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and insists it won’t be a blockbuster that “stops with the concept, so you think, ‘Cool, that was a great concept’”. Maybe something of this scale is the only logical next step for her. This is an actress, after all, who went to the middle of nowhere up a mountain with a pack of foreigners, straight from being mollycoddled in one of the biggest franchises of all time. She wants to surprise.

“I want to push myself,” she says. “In my life, when I’m emotional about something, I’m an extreme person. Subtlety is not my go-to. I just don’t want to fake anything, but the best opportunities for me are whenever I feel a little bit scared.”

“I wasn’t hiding anything,” she says, when asked why she is now open about her love life whereas before, dating Pattinson, she stayed silent. “I didn’t talk about my first relationships that went public because I wanted things that are mine to be mine. I hated it that details of my life were being turned into a commodity and peddled around the world. But considering I had so many eyes on me, I suddenly realised [my private life] affects a greater number of people than just me. It was an opportunity to surrender a bit of what was mine, to make even one other person feel good about themselves.

“If it didn’t seem like a relevant topic,” she continues, her tone both poised and passionate, keeping up a melodic flow, “like something that needed help, I would have kept my life private for ever. But then I can’t walk outside holding somebody’s hand, as I’m followed everywhere. When I was dating Rob, the public were the enemy — and that is no way to live. It wasn’t this grand statement, ‘I was so confused! Now I’ve realised who I am!’ I have not been struggling.”

She laughs. “It just seemed important, and topical.” I would be hard pushed to name a more confident interviewee.

In January, she screened her directorial debut, Come Swim, a 17-minute oddity that arrived with a research paper entitled Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer. You just didn’t get that with Twilight. While her future will be on both sides of the camera, she also wants to go on stage one day.

It was the “human energy” from the Saturday Night Live crowd that persuaded her she may be cut out for live performance. Another appeal is that theatre is the ultimate challenge for a Los Angeles native born to entertainment-industry parents and raised on that city’s business: the next big test. She has been reading Sam Shepard and loves the way that setting can be implied in his work, rather than having to be there for everyone to see. Which, in fact, rather neatly describes her acting. Imagine her in a Pinter play.

She is nothing like I expected, which was that there would be periods of silence and questions unanswered. She is friends with Patti Smith and has been called the female James Dean by the actress/rocker Juliette Lewis. That sort of support and acquaintance is intimidating. Yet she is friendly, honest, humble and, perhaps most impressive, unflappably polite, especially about Twilight, despite the continued bile spat at her by fans who think, in various ways, she has wronged them.

“I don’t view the whole Twilight blow-up as being generally traumatic,” she says, delicately. “It would take someone with a really unhealthy amount of ego to be upset that everyone doesn’t love them. It would be silly to say I don’t care what people think of my work and who I am, but stuff is polarising, period.”

Back to that line about her being “surprisingly charming”. Does she know why people thought she was distant? “I’d definitely lost my nerve,” she replies. “I used to try too hard, because I was nervous. I felt so uncomfortable addressing the public. I’ve just grown out of it.”

Other SNL favourites

Tina Fey: Sarah Palin Who could forget her killer bloopers, looking the spit of the candidate alongside Amy Poehler’s Hillary? Clinton has guested, too — as a bartender.

Alec Baldwin: Donald Trump Will his Trump appear at the irreverent White House Correspondents’ dinner next month if the prez boycotts it? Rude. Not to be confused with the real Trump, who hosted a November 2016 show.

Melissa McCarthy: Sean Spicer SNL’s new star guest, as the pugnacious press secretary who explains his briefings with visual aids, especially Moana dolls.

Al Gore: Al Gore In 2006, Gore gave a TV address from a parallel universe in which he was the 43rd president, fixed global warming and solved the oil crisis (there was too much of it).

Will Ferrell: George W Bush His Dubya appeared in the 2000 presidential debates with Gore (Darrell Hammond), answering “Pass” to tough questions. Asked to describe his campaign in one word, Bush comes up with “strategery”. Gore chooses “lockbox”.

Personal Shopper opens on Mar 17; Certain Women is reviewed in this section

@JonathanDean_

#Source:#http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kristen-stewart-film-personal-shopper-twilight-robert-pattinson-rgfwrc76r?_=_

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glittership · 5 years

Text

Episode #76 — "Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons" by Jennifer Lee Rossman

Direct download here.

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 76 is part of the Autumn 2018 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons

By Jennifer Lee Rossman

They weren’t real, but they still took my breath away.

The model dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasties lived on and swam in the waters around three islands in Hyde Park. Enormous things, so big that I’d heard their designer had hosted a dinner party inside one, and so lifelike! If I stared long enough, I was sure I’d see one blink.

I turned to Samira and found her twirling her parasol, an act purposely designed to bely the rage burning in her eyes. She would never let it show, her pleasant smile practically painted on, but I’d spent enough time with her to recognize that fury boiling just beneath the surface.

Befuddled, I looked back at the dinosaurs, this time flipping down my telescopic goggles. The craftsmanship was immaculate, the color consistent all along the plesiosaur’s corkscrew neck, and the pudgy, horned iguanodons looked structurally sound, what with their bellies dragging on the ground.

Dinosaurs were Samira’s everything; how could seeing them practically coming to life not give her joy?

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 76 for June 24, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, which is available in the Autumn 2018 issue that you can pick up at GlitterShip.com/buy, on Gumroad at gum.co/gship08, or on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and other ebook retailers.

If you’ve been waiting to pick up your copy of the Tiptree Award Honor Listed book, GlitterShip Year Two, there’s a great deal going on for Pride over at StoryBundle. GlitterShip Year Two is part of a Pride month LGBTQ fantasy fiction bundle. StoryBundle is a pay-what-you-want bundle site. For $5 or more, you can get four great books, and for $15 or more, you’ll get an additional five books, including GlitterShip Year Two, and a story game. That comes to as little as $1.50 per book or game. The StoryBundle also offers an option to give 10% of your purchase amount to charity. The charity for this bundle is Rainbow Railroad, a charity that helps queer folks get to a safe place if their country is no longer safe for them.

This is a great deal, so if you want to take advantage of it, go to Storybundle.com/pride soon! The deal only runs through June 27th, depending on your time zone.

Today’s story is “Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons” by Jennfer Lee Rossman, but first our poem, “Shortcake” by Jade Homa.

Jade Homa is an intersectional feminist, sapphic poet, lgbtq sensitivity reader, member of The Rainbow Alliance, and editor-in-chief of Blue Literary Magazine. Her poetry has been published in over 7 literary magazines, including BlazeVOX, A Tired Heroine, The Ocotillo Review, and Sinister Wisdom (in print). Jade’s work will be featured in an exhibit via Pen and Brush, a New York City based non profit that showcases emerging female artists, later this year, along with being featured in a special edition of Rattle which highlights dynamic Instagram poets. In her free time, Jade loves petting dogs, eating pasta, and daydreaming about girls.

Shortcake by Jade Homa

you called me your strawberry girl / and I wondered if it was / the wolf inside my jaw / or the red stained across my cheeks / or the way I said fuck / or that time I yanked your / hair / or every moment / you swallowed me whole

And now “Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons” by Jennifer Lee Rossman, read by April Grant.

Jennifer Lee Rossman is that autistic nerd who complains about inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs. Along with Jaylee James, she is the co-editor of Love & Bubbles, a queer anthology of underwater romance. Her debut novel, Jack Jetstark’s Intergalactic Freakshow, was published by World Weaver Press in 2018. She tweets about dinosaurs @JenLRossman

April Grant lives in the greater Boston area. Her backstory includes time as a sidewalk musician, real estate agent, public historian, dishwasher, and librarian. Among her hobbies are biking and singing.

Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons

By Jennifer Lee Rossman

They weren’t real, but they still took my breath away.

Dinosaurs were Samira’s everything; how could seeing them practically coming to life not give her joy?

“What’s wrong?” I asked quietly, so as not to disturb the crowds around us. Well, any more than our mere presence disturbed them by default.

(It wasn’t every day they saw a girl in a mechanical chair and her butch Indian crush who wore trousers with her best jewelry, and they did not particularly care for us. We didn’t particularly care what they thought, which really didn’t engender ourselves to them, but luckily polite society frowned on yelling at people for being gay, disabled, and/or nonwhite, so hooray for us.)

“It’s wrong.”

“What is?”

She gestured emphatically at the islands, growing visibly distressed. “It! Them! Everything! Everything is wrong!”

If Samira’s frustration had a pressure valve, the needle would have been edging toward the red. She needed to get out of the situation before she burst a pipe.

I knew better than to take her hand, as she didn’t always appreciate physical touch the way I did, so I gently tugged at the corner of her vest as I engaged my chair. The miniature steam engine behind me activated the pistons that turned my chrome wheels, and Samira held onto my velvet-padded armrest as we left the main viewing area and took refuge by one of the fountains in the Crystal Palace.

She sat on the marble edge, letting a hand trail in the shimmery water until she felt calm enough to speak.

“They did it all wrong, Tilly. They didn’t take any of my advice.” She rummaged through her many pockets, finally producing a scrap of paper with a dinosaur sketched on it. “This is what iguanodon looked like.”

Her drawing showed an entirely different creature than the park’s statue. While theirs looked sluggish and fat, kind of like a doofy dragon, Samira’s interpretation was nimble and intelligent, standing on four legs with a solid but agile tail held horizontally behind it. And its nose horn was completely absent, though it did have a large thumb spike, giving it the impression of perpetually congratulating someone on a job well done.

It certainly looked like a more realistic representation of a living creature, but these things lived, what, millions of years ago? Even someone as brilliant as Samira couldn’t possibly have known what they were really like.

But I couldn’t tell her that. Girlfriends are supposed to be supportive, and I needed to do everything I could to gain prospective girlfriend points before I asked her out.

“What evidence did you give them for your hypothesis?” I asked instead. “All we really have are fossils, right?”

Her face lit up at the invitation to delve into her favorite subject. “Right, and we don’t even have full skeletons yet of most of them. But we have limbs. Joints. And if we compare them to skeletons of things that exist now, they don’t resemble big, fat lizards that could hardly move around. That makes no biological sense, because predators could just waltz up and eat them. They had to be faster, more agile. They wouldn’t have survived otherwise.”

“So why wouldn’t they have listened to you?” I asked, perplexed.

“Because they don’t understand evolution,” she said, though she didn’t sound convinced. “Or they don’t want to be shown up by a girl. A lesbian girl with nonconforming hair and wardrobe who dares to be from a country they pretend to own.” She crossed her arms and stared at her boots. “Or both. But there’s no excuse for the plesiosaurs. No creature’s neck can bend like that.”

I wasn’t sure exactly how I was supposed to respond to that. Samira never complained about something just to commiserate; she expected answers, a solution. But I couldn’t very well make them redesign the statues, no matter how happy that would have made her.

So we just sat together quietly by the fountain, fuming at the ignorant men in charge of the park, and I schemed for a way to fix things for the girl that made my eyes light up the way dinosaurs lit hers.

Every problem had a solution, if you tinkered hard enough.

After my accident, I took a steam engine and wheels from a horseless wagon and stuck them on a chair. My mum hadn’t been amused to lose part of her dinette set, but it got me around town until I could build a proper wheelchair. (Around the flat parts of town, anyway. My latest blueprints involved extending legs that could climb stairs.)

And when Londoners complained about the airship mooring towers were ruining the skyline, who figured out a way to make them retractable? That would be me. The airship commissioner hadn’t responded to my proposal yet, but it totally worked in small scale on my dollhouse.

It was just a matter of finding the solution to Samira’s dinosaur problem.

I spent all night in my workshop, referring to her sketches and comparing them to promotional drawings of the park’s beasts. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider breaking in and altering the statues somehow, but the sheer amount that they had gotten wrong precluded that as a possibility. This wasn’t a mere paintjob or moving an iguanodon horn; they needed a complete overhaul.

I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration.

The day they announced that they were building realistic, life sized dinosaurs in Crystal Park was the day I fell for Samira.

I’d always thought she was pretty—tall, brilliant smile, didn’t conform to society’s expectations for women—but the pure joy radiating from her… It was like she’d turned on a giant electromagnet inside her, and the clockwork the doctors had installed to keep my heart beating was powerless against her magnetic field.

So I listened to her gush about the park, about how the statues would make everyone else see the amazing lost world she saw when she looked at a fossil. I didn’t understand a lot of it, but I understood her passion.

The grand opening was supposed to be the day I finally asked her out, but now it would have to be when I presented her with my grand gesture of grandness…

Whatever it was.

I woke abruptly to the chimes of my upcycled church organ doorbell and found a sprocket embedded in my face.

Groaning, I pushed myself off my worktable and into a sitting position. “Did you let me sleep out here all night?” I said into the mouthpiece of the two-way vibration communicator prototype that fed through the wall and into the kitchen.

A moment later, my mum picked up her end. “‘Mum,'” she said, imitating my voice, “‘I’m a professional tinkerer and nearly an adult. I can’t be having a bedtime!'”

“Point taken. Have I missed breakfast?”

The door in the wall opened to reveal a plate of pancakes.

“Thanks!” I tore a bite out of one as I wheeled over to the door. My crooked spine ached from sitting up all night.

Activating the pneumatic door opener, I found George about to ring the bell again.

George, my former boyfriend and current best friend. Chubby, handsome, super gay. We’d tried the whole hetero thing for two whole days before we realized it wasn’t for us, then pretended for another six months to keep his father from trying to matchmake him with one of the Clearwater sisters.

I wouldn’t have minded being with a man, necessarily, but ladies really sent my heart a-ticking, so it was no great loss when George told me he was a horticultural lad.

(You know, a pansy. A daisy. A… erm. Bougainvillea? I must confess, flowers didn’t excite me unless they were made of scrap metal.)

George raised an eyebrow. “I take it the declaration of love went well, then?” When I only frowned in confusion, he pointed to my face. “The sprocket-shaped dent in your cheek would suggest you spent the night with a woman.”

“Samira isn’t an automaton, George.”

“No, but she’s got the…” He mimed having a large chest. “And the, um… Scaffolding.”

“Do you think women’s undergarments are made of clockwork?” I asked, amused. I mean, mine were, but that was just so I could tighten the laces behind my back without assistance when I wore a corset.

Which wasn’t often. My favorite dresses were the color of grease stains and had a lot of pockets, so it should come as no surprise that I didn’t go anywhere fancy on a regular basis.

George blushed. “So… it did not go well, then?”

He came in and tinkered with me over pancakes while I told him about my predicament, making sympathetic noises at the appropriate times.

When I was done with my story, he sat quietly for a moment, thinking while he adjusted the spring mechanism in an old cuckoo clock. “And you can’t just go over with flowers and say, ‘Hey, gorgeous, wanna gay together?’ because…?”

“Have you met me? I don’t do romance. I make things for romantic people.” I gestured to the wind-up music boxes, mechanical roses that opened to reveal a love note, and clockwork pendants scattered about my workshop. All commissions from people who were better at love than I was.

“Then pretend you’re a clueless client like Reverend Paul. Remember what you did for him?”

The reverend had come in wanting to woo Widow Trefauny but didn’t know a thing about her except that she liked dogs and made his heart smile. I thought my solution was ingenious.

“I built a steam-powered puppy.”

George held his hands out, prompting. “So…”

Suddenly, it all clicked into place, like the last cog in a clock mechanism that makes everything tick.

“I need to build a steam-powered dinosaur for Samira.”

Dinosaurs, as it turned out, were huge. I mean, they looked big on the islands, sure, but that was so far away that I only truly got a sense of scale when I started measuring in my workshop.

Samira’s notes put iguanodon, my dino of choice, at around ten meters in length. Since a measuring tape required more free hands than I had, I tied a string around one of the spokes of my chair’s wheels, which had a one-point-eight meter circumference, and measured five and a half revolutions…

Which took me out of my cramped shop and into the street, forcing horses and their mechanical counterparts to divert around me.

“Don’t suppose it would do to detour traffic for a couple weeks, eh?” I asked a tophatted hansom cabbie, who had stopped his horseless machine to watch me in amusement.

“Reckon not, Miss Tilly,” he said with a laugh, stepping down from his perch at the front of the carriage. He pulled a lever, and the cab door opened with a hiss to reveal a pile of gleaming metal parts.

“Ooh!” I clapped my hands. “Are those for me?”

He nodded and began unloading them. My iguanodon was going to be much taller than me, and even though George had promised his assistance, I needed to make extendy arms to hold the heavy parts. “Is there somewhere else you could build him?”

I supposed this wouldn’t exactly be stealthy. I could stop Samira from going in my shop, but it would have been substantially more difficult to stop her from going down an entire street.

But where?

I got my answer a few days later, when the twice weekly zeppelin to Devon lifted off without Samira on board. She was usually the first in line, going not for the luxury holiday destinations that drew in an upper-class clientele, but for the fossils.

The coast of Devon was absolutely lousy with fossils. The concept of extinction had been proven there, Mary Anning herself found her first ichthyosaur there, and all the best scientists fought for the right to have their automata scan the coast with ground-penetrating radar.

Samira’s life revolved around trips to Devon and the buckets of new specimens she brought home every week.

“Why aren’t you on that zeppelin?” I asked as we sat in her room, sorting her fossilized ammonites. She’d originally had the little spiral-shelled mollusks organized by size, but now thought it more logical to sort by age. Me, I thought size was a fine method, but I didn’t know a thing about fossils and was happy to do it however she wanted.

She didn’t answer me, just kind of shrugged and ran her thumb over the spiral impression in the rock.

“Is it because you’re upset that they didn’t take your advice on the dinosaurs?” I knew it was, but I had to hear her say it.

“I don’t see the point of it if no one will care about what I find.” She sounded so utterly despondent. Joyless. The one thing that gave her life purpose had been taken away by careless men.

They probably only cared about whether the park was profitable, not if it was accurate.

I couldn’t make them change their statues, and I couldn’t make the public care that they were wrong. But I had to fix it for my best girl, because there was nothing sadder than seeing her like that.

“Can I hold your hand for a second?” I asked quietly. She gave the slightest of nods and I took her hand gently in mine, my clockwork heart ticking at double speed. “You’ve got a gift, Samira. Scientists have to study these bones for months just to make bad guesses about the animals they came from, but you can look at an ankle joint and figure that it was a quadruped or a biped, if it ate meat or plants, and what color its skin was.”

She gave me a look.

“Okay, I’m exaggerating, but only a little. I don’t agree with the way they’re portrayed, but this world is going to love dinosaurs because of the ones at Crystal Palace. People are going to dig for fossils even more, and they’re going to need someone amazing like you to teach them about the new things they unearth.” I tried to refrain from intertwining our fingers; just touching was a big enough step. “I need you to promise me something.”

Samira pulled away, and I had to remind myself that this didn’t necessarily mean anything more than her just being done holding hands. “What is it?”

“A week from today, be on the zeppelin to the coast.” The coast, with its ample space and no chance of Samira discovering my project before it was ready.

She made a face. “I don’t know.”

“Please?” I begged. “For me?”

After a long moment’s consideration, she nodded. “For you.”

George and I caught the midweek zeppelin. Lucky for us, most tourists went down for the weekend, so all of our metal parts didn’t weigh us down too much. We did share the cabin with a few fancy ladies, who stared in wordless shock at Iggy’s scrapmetal skull sitting on the chair beside us.

I’d named him Iggy. His head was almost a meter long. Mostly bronze and copper, but I’d done a few tin accents around the eyes to really make ’em pop.

When we arrived at the shore, we had to fight a couple paleontologists for space on the rocky coastline. Not physically fight, fun as that might have been. Once they realized we weren’t trying to steal their dig sites, they happily moved their little chugging machines to give us a flat stretch of beach.

Which just left us with three days to assemble Iggy, whose hundreds of parts I had not thought to label beforehand.

Another thing I neglected to do: inform George of the scope of this project.

“Matilda, I adore you and will always help you with anything you need,” he said, dragging a tail segment across the rocks with a horrific scraping. “But for future reference, the next time you invite me to Devon to build a life-sized steam-powered iguanodon? You might mention how abysmally enormous iguanodon were.”

“That sounds like a you problem,” I teased, my voice echoing metallically as I welded the neck together from the inside. I’d actually gotten out of my chair and lay down in the metal shell, figuring it would be easier to attach all the pneumatics and hydraulics that way.

I should have brought a pillow.

At night, because we were too poor to afford one of the fancy hotels in town, we slept on the beach beneath a blanket of stars, Iggy’s half-finished shape silhouetted against the sky.

“Samira’s a fancy lady,” I said to George as we lay in the sand. “She doesn’t wear them, but she has expensive dresses. All lacy and no stains. Her family has a lot of money. Could she ever really want to be with someone like me?”

He rolled over to face me. “What do you mean, someone like you?”

“Poor mechanic who can’t go up stairs, whose heart is being kept alive with the insides of a pocket watch that could stop at any time.”

I didn’t try to think about it a lot, but the fact was that the doctors had never done an operation like mine before. It ticked all right for now, but no one knew if my body would keep it wound or if I would just… stop one day.

The fear tried to stop me from doing things, tried to take away what little life I might have had left, but I couldn’t let it. I had to grab on as hard as I could and never let go. In an ideal world, Samira would be part of that.

But the world wasn’t ideal. Far from it.

Was I too much to put up with? Would she rather date someone who didn’t have to take the long way around because the back door didn’t have steps? Someone who could give her jewels and… fine cheeses and pet monkeys and whatever else rich people gave their girlfriends?

Someone she knew would be around to grow old with her?

Maybe that’s why I’d put off asking her to be my gal, because even though we got along better than the Queen’s guards and ridiculous hats, even though we both fancied ladies and wanted to marry one someday, I couldn’t stand to know she didn’t see me that way. I cherished her as a friend and didn’t see romance as being somehow more than friendship, but she smelled like cookies and I just really wanted to be in love with her.

“Hey,” George said softly, pulling me closer to him. “She loves you. You realize that, don’t you?”

“I guess,” I said into his shoulder. He smelled like grease. A nice, comforting smell, but too much like my own. At the end of the day, I wanted to curl up with someone like Samira.

“You guess. You’ve held her hand, Tilly. She’s made eye contact with you. That’s big for her. You don’t need a big gesture like this, but I know she’s going to love it because she loves you.”

I hoped he was right.

I saw the weekend zeppelin from London come in, lowering over the city where it was scheduled to moor. Samira would be here soon.

And Iggy wasn’t finished.

He towered over the beach, his metal skin gleaming in the sun, but something was wrong on the inside. The steam engine in his belly, which was supposed to puff steam out of his nose and make him turn his head, wouldn’t start up.

George saw me check my pocket watch for the umpteenth time and removed the wrench from my hand. “I’ll look into it. Go.”

I didn’t need to be told twice.

My wheels skidded on the sand and rocks, but I reached the mooring station just as the passengers were disembarking. The sight of Samira standing there in her trademark trousers and parasol combo made my clockwork heart tick audibly. She came. I didn’t really doubt that she would, but still.

She flashed me a quick smile. “I don’t want to fossil hunt,” she said in lieu of a greeting.

“That’s not why we’re here,” I promised. “But I do want to show you something on the beach, if that’s okay.”

She slipped a hand around my armrest and walked with me. When Iggy’s head poked up over the rocks, she broke into a run, forcing me to go full speed to keep up.

Laughing, she went right up to Iggy and ran her hands over his massive legs. “He’s so biologically accurate!”

But did he work? I looked to George, who gave his head a quick shake.

Blast.

Samira didn’t seem to mind, though, marveling at every detail of the dinosaur’s posture and shape. “And the thumb spikes that aren’t horns!” she exclaimed, her hands flapping in excitement.

And she wasn’t the only one who appreciated our work. A small group of pith-helmeted paleontologists had abandoned their digging and scanning in order to come and admire Iggy.

“It really is magnificent,” one scientist said. “The anatomy is nothing like what we’ve been assuming they looked like, and yet…”

“It’s so logical,” his colleague agreed. “Why should they be fat and slow? Look at elephants—heavy, but sturdy and not so sluggish as their size would suggest. There’s no reason these terrible lizards couldn’t have been similar.”

A third paleontologist turned to George. “My good man, might we pick your brain on the neck of the plesiosaur?”

George held up his hands. “I just did some riveting—the real geniuses are Matilda and her girlfriend Samira.”

“Mostly Samira,” I added, glancing at her. “And I’m not sure if she’s my girlfriend or not, but I’d like her to be.”

She beamed at me. “I would also like that.” To the men, she said, “I have a lot of thoughts on plesiosaur neck anatomy. I can show you my sketches, and I saw a layer of strata that could bear fossils over here…”

She led them away, chattering about prehistoric life with that pure joy that made her so amazing.

That girl took my breath away.

END

“Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons” is copyright Jennifer Lee Rossman 2019.

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Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “The Quiet Realm of the Dark Queen” by Jenny Blackford.

Episode #76 — “Of Clockwork Hearts and Metal Iguanodons” by Jennifer Lee Rossman was originally published on GlitterShip

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