'The Wizard's Wife' --- short story

So a friend of mine invited me to join a writer's group where, every month, one member of the group chooses an image and we all go off and write a story based around it. It seemed like a cool idea and, because I'm experimenting with writing screenplays at the moment, I thought it'd be good to keep my hand in by writing a bit of prose every now and then.

(The group calls itself 20 Melbourne Writers, which is apparently a jokey reference that I don't get, and there aren't nearly twenty of us anyway, so what the heck? Anyway, whatever.)

Last month's image came from a member of the group who's a doctor, who had a patient with gangreneous fingers ... or, as it was put to me: 'The man with the dying hands.' Here's what I came up with. Don't worry, it's really short.


The Wizard's Wife

Rosa watched from the shadows as Joff tottered towards the parapet and laid his rotting hands upon the stonework. Despite the tyrannies of time, she could still see hints of the laughing young man she had known all those years ago. His back, which had once been straight and proud, was now stooped. His shoulders, which had once been broad with the callow strength of youth, were now hunched weakly against the hot, reeking wind which tore down from the eastern mountains. But still, he was the same man.

Far below, at the tower’s base, the orcs spotted Joff and began to shriek and whoop, sending up their filthy, guttural curses. Joff glanced back at Rosa and rolled his eyes, the shadow of a grin tugging at one side of his mouth. At least, she thought he grinned: it may just have been the wind pulling at his beard. Then he bent back to the parapet and went to work.

His hands, splayed on the rough-cut stones, tensed as he muttered the incantation. Rosa could see the blackened, rotting tips of his fingers suddenly bloom with life, flakes of dead skin falling away to reveal fresh pink flesh underneath. For a few brief moments they were the hands that had hesitated to brush her cheek, in her father’s apple orchard, fifty years ago.

Beneath her feet, Rosa felt the tower’s stones grow warm.

Joff’s breathing became laboured. Despite the hot wind, he shivered beneath his thick robes. When the words were spoken, the spell of protection renewed, he collapsed to his knees.

Rosa rushed to his side, ignoring the taunts from below. Joff held up his hands: the magic done, his fingers were swiftly dying. Beginning at the tips, the skin dried and turned black. The new nails split and fell out, thin seams of blood emerging from the rotting cuticles. The knuckles grew swollen and gnarled, stiffening until they were useless. Watching the decay reach past the end of her husband’s fingers and for the first time spread onto his palms, tears welled in Rosa’s eyes, but she wouldn’t let them fall.

Re-using the previous day’s dirty bandages, she began to wrap Joff’s gangrenous, dying hands.

‘Rosa,’ Joff whispered. ‘Every day that spell grows harder, and the saying leaves me weaker. My magic is done. It’s leaving me. I’m so sorry.’

Rosa looked him square in the eye. ‘How long do we have?’

‘Five days. If that.’

Rosa nodded. ‘Long enough,’ she said.

She helped Joff to his feet and together they looked across the plain, past the horde of jeering orcs, past the eastern mountains, to the brilliant fire of the setting sun. The wind whipped at their long hair, twisting together his strands of white and hers of red. ‘We have been lucky, haven’t we?’ he asked. She answered by taking his feeble hands in hers and pressing them to her chest.

‘We are lucky still,’ she said.

***

When the spell finally broke and the orcs ransacked the tower, they found nobody.

But upon the balcony two curious statues faced each other. The elderly figures were brilliantly carved: the folds of their robes; the riven lines of their skin; the expressions in their eyes – all were captured with unearthly precision. Their hair was blown and tangled into impossibly fine tendrils of stone.

The two figures formed one single statue, really, joined for all eternity at their clasping hands, their hands which somehow didn’t match the rest of their withered bodies, their hands which appeared to still be in the first fresh flowering of youth.

THE END

 

See, I told you it was short. A few things about this story:

• This is the first story I've ever written with orcs in it, I swear.
• How much balls did I have to have to take a story with orcs in it and read it aloud in front of people I'd never met before? (side note: I am 99% certain I will not be invited back)
• My friend told me that the stories should be "five or six hundred words", which I followed to the letter. I think my story ended up at 598 words total, and I worked like a bitch to chop it down that far.
• When working with such a tight word limit, writing a genre story really helps. Instead of having to describe the bad guys, and try and come up with some reason why they're doing what they're doing, I can just call them 'orcs' and everybody gets it, straightaway. He's a wizard, right? So I figure everyone pretty much pictures Gandalf as soon as they hear that, so boom, no description necessary. GenreTown is like short-cut city.
• The problem with writing genre is that you do things without thinking about them, because it's the 'done thing.' For example, the writing style in this story is extreeeeemely heavy on the adjectives, compared to what I normally do. It also includes shit like this: 'Despite the tyrannies of time ...' - what the fuck was I thinking there? Rosa doesn't say "We're still lucky," she says "We are lucky still." Why? You know, Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon, so he actually had an understanding of archaic grammatical structures, and he selectively employed them to make his ancient characters seem ... well, ancient, I guess. But since then, everybody (including me, apparently) has just been ripping him off unthinkingly: 'Hey, I'm writing fantasy, how can I make it sound old-timey? I know, I'll have my characters speak in convoluted ways! Woo!'
• Which is probably the trouble with any genre writing, there's always that tension between obeying the existing rules of your genre, and trying to do something original (I'm too fucking lazy to look it up, but I bet the words 'genre' and 'generic' have the same Greek or Latin root). You need to please genre fans by giving them what they expect, but you don't want to piss them off by giving them stuff they've read before. Tough gig. 

I'll stop now, before my bullet points are longer than the story itself! I'll probably have a crack at re-drafting this (and maybe stretching it out a bit) at some point, so any and all feedback would be appreciated.

Cheers, JC


currently reading: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
books to go: 123