Back to the fiction mines (Chapter 2)
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Hello all, and thanks for sticking with me as I do this crossposting dance. Since I’m working on keeping up the pace on releasing the novel excerpts each week, there’s been a lot of that here lately. I should have another edition of the attachment series out to you soon, for those of you who are mainly here for the non-fictional trauma. :) For now, here’s the latest novel teaser; you know the drill. Please go to Patreon if you’d like to see the whole thing and help me keep doing all the artistic things I get up to.
This week we’re getting into Chapter 2, or In Which Eden, Terrah, and Cid start to tell their stories in earnest. While the interview sections are in present tense, the narrative parts go into past, though a character might occasionally wink out and remind us that they’re talking to an audience besides the reader.
First up is Eden. This week we get a sense of what her life was like near the end of her pop star heydey, just before things really started to come apart for her.
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Chapter 2: PARTIAL RECALL
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
-Emily Dickinson
ONE
Eden
I read somewhere that the soul only travels the speed of a camel. That’s why air travel is so hard — it’s like your body is suddenly in a new place, and your soul is still a thousand miles back, trying to catch up. Seems legit, in theory. I don’t think I have a soul, but then I’ve never seen a camel, either, so. Do what you want with that.
The venue that night was a big curved building with the name of some pharmaceutical company on the front. The Aratech Amniotics Arena or something. Cleo drove me around the back like usual, and Ty and Mona flanked me through the stage door and dropped me in the dressing room alone.
The dressing room was as nondescript as everything else, except in the sense that it was, as always, exactly to my specifications. There were flowers – the blue rose morphs I had specially made. They weren’t dyed but grafted and gene-altered, so they would express a deep, “natural” blue. They were designed for me a few years ago, when I asked for them and someone here at the label put a botanist on it, because back then it was all about what I wanted. Because I was going to be a huge star.
I liked there to be a mirror with globe lights all around the outside, like in old 20th century dressing rooms. I liked a soft chair, one with arms, where I could sit and do my makeup. I liked to do my own makeup.
I liked calming music. I liked soft lighting. I liked there to be a bottle of cold champagne waiting, or at least, something like champagne. The real stuff is hard to find these days. I liked to take my pre-shows, come up, and be left the hell alone until showtime.
But you know all this. And your people always did their best.
I appreciated that. I know I didn’t express that very often. But I did. It meant a lot, having things the way I wanted them before I went on. Whatever you’re planning to do to me. I wanted you to know that.
By the time I got out on stage that night the drugs were blocking out almost everything, and what the drugs couldn’t block the bright lights did. I don’t know why you would’ve built this flaw into my design but I’ve always had stage fright. The more famous I got the better it was, because the bigger the arena, the brighter the lights, and the more they shine right in your face. At that point I was so far away from the crowd under the halogen glare I couldn’t see a single face. The roar of that many people might as well be the white noise generator I used to go to sleep. The music, my monitor, the feel of the bass in my body. It all shook the rest of the fear away. As soon as I walked onto the stage that night I was blind and flying.