The Gift

By L. Timmel Duchamp

Florentine would flee the art planet Blue Downs with her gorgeous new lover, for a universe where Alain needn't pay a profound price to perform music--but obstacles to a happy union may prove more complex and subtle than Florentine can imagine...or oppose!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press Black Cat Weekly
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781479466641

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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

THE GIFT, by L. Timmel Duchamp

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2004 by L. Timmel Duchamp.

Originally published in Love’s Body, Dancing in Time.

Published by Wildside Press, LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

THE GIFT,

by L. Timmel Duchamp

1.

I don’t know what bug’s gotten up your ass, Stavros said when he saw the new piece. But your choice of words is bound to piss off all those tourists who might find the penitential ritual fascinating and gross out all the rest. GTI would bounce it if I sent it to them as is.

Florentine couldn’t remember the last time Stavros had asked her to make changes in a piece. But she knew he was right. The section in question featured a stand-up in the Plaza of Penitence, with her POV showing some poor down-in-the-mouth slob creeping on bleeding hands into the Plaza, his nose a virtual geyser of blood. Her voice-over ran:

Blue Downs is the kind of place where you’re likely to see people crawling on their hands and knees down the main drag a couple of days a week. Many tourists will, I’m sure, find this a fascinating, even thrilling sight. I found it irritating in the extreme, myself, to the point of being tempted to join those who take righteous civic pleasure in kicking the damned fools and otherwise jeering them on their way, but for my far more powerful urge to kick those doing the kicking. Blue Downs suffers a raging thirst for public humiliation of its truants, miscreants, and trespassers, a thirst no amount of sleazy quaffing can slake. For that reason alone, I’d rate the penitential ritual as one of the most significant characteristics of this city, however widely known Blue Downs is for the superior graphic arts displayed in its churches, market district, and more affluent homes.

Galactic Tours, Inc., made a bundle off Florentine’s travelogues and always paid her well in the expectation that every piece she produced would bring the big spenders running. But she knew that Stavros was probably right when he warned that they wouldn’t see the point of her presenting a darker view of a city known for its cultural brilliance. As he put it, That kind of thing is fine for pieces on places known for their sin and sleaze. But Blue Downs practically stands for purity of spirit in an atmosphere of high corporate profit.

Fixing the piece would be easy: splice in an old bit on the lack of beggars, pushers, and prostitutes in the street; remove all references to penitential exercises; and dig through her files for fully sunlit rather than shadowed shots, which she’d favored throughout. She wouldn’t, though, delete any of the material about the Blue Downs musical scene. Stavros agreed that all of that was interesting, if a bit disturbing. Absent any reference to the penitents, it shouldn’t have the sullying effect he apparently feared could dim the city’s lustrous reputation for purity.

That reputation now seriously galled Florentine. If she could, she’d let the rest of the galaxy in on the secret. The Custodian of Human Arts, Big Blue was usually called, and many people considered it simply one grand all-encompassing museum.

Oh Alain, my Alain. My heart, my love. My loss.

Florentine found her loss an unbearably lonely one. How could anyone who didn’t really know Blue Downs ever understand? And how could she burden even one of the few souls she could confidently call friend with the story of such a loss? Time-dilation was the mother of discretion. Florentine’s every friend traveled, too. A momentous change in their lives never failed to break apart old friendships, which, depending on an even, smooth semblance of continuity for their long-term maintenance, could not sustain major upheaval. Worse, she knew that the story of her loss would make sense to no one to whom what happened to her might matter. How could you have been so foolish? she could already hear any possible listener say. Merely telling the story—unless she told it lightly, ironically, as a little cautionary tale at her own expense—would have exposed her to the charge of whining.

Some day, no doubt, she would discover and appreciate the irony in her story. But that day lay so far in her subjective future that she found it difficult to believe in.

2.