The Diva

   The cacophony in his head was the deafening opposite of the stillness around him. Her voice, loud en clear, overruled everything. Something he wanted to avoid at all costs.

   He sat at the red comfortable chair with the soft lining which was designed for his needs. And this indeed, was very expensive. Each chair on it's own was £ 1500. Ridiculous amount of money, fortunately it were only 6 and not a whole theatre. But even then he had been more than willing to pay for them.

    While leaning backwards, he modified the chair to his own comfort and allowed his thoughts to wander off, hoping that thinking about her might also reduce the noise that swirled round and round with false tones.

    He recalled her face and hoped this time it would be calm although he knew the main feature of it was her mouth and that was never calm. How stupid to have fallen in love with that same mouth which was at the time her attraction, particularly to him being a bachelor who lived on his own for too long.

    He met her at the birthday party of his best friend. He never meant to go but this was friend's 40^th birthday and a 'Bal Masqué'. He liked that, he did not often appear in public and definitely not at parties but this way he was going to be slightly incognito. Not that he was easily recognized because he was famous (which he wasn't) but he just did not like large crowds.

And one other thing was that he was extremely rich and women, particularly single women, had a nose for money. They smelled it and immediately behaved like cats in heat, something he hated! It made him immune for the female species. But with a masque he would be fairly safe.

    Blame the masque that he fell for her mouth. Of course it was the most visible part of her face apart from her chin which revealed a determined character but that is not what he noticed. No, it was her mouth as beautiful as a rose in full bloom. He wasn't a poet but the phrase 'a rose in the morning dew' crossed his mind. He watched it from a distance and could not take his eyes of it.

    Her lips were so fascinating that the world around him disappeared. He stood in the middle of a universe without sounds and people. The space was empty and in this emptiness floated her mouth with the moving lips like wings as if they weren't attached to her.

    The thin air around him wasn't cold but warm and comfortable. He couldn't remember if her mouth made his blood boil or the warm thin air. Or both, he did remember he fell in love, deeply in love, without being introduced to her.

    The mist dissolved and very slowly the sounds of tinkling champagne glasses laughter and conversations returned.

A male voice next to him asked him if he was alright and without turning round to the man he said he was fine and added: “thank you for asking.”

    He shook his head an realized he must look like a fool although the beautiful mouth smiled and moved towards him. It was then when he noticed it belonged to a woman almost as tall as he was. He looked into green eyes behind a very simple but expensive masque. A warm voice said: “I don't think we met before”. When he agreed, they exchanged names and started a conversation. He needed all his willpower to listen to her words (which were many) and not to fix his eyes on her lips. Although he had relationships before with women he went to bed with, he never had the desire to kiss them the very first moments of their first meetings but now he only wanted one thing: kissing her. And not a social kiss, or a kiss between two friends no, he wanted to press his lips against hers until she opened her mouth to welcome him. He wanted his tongue to dance with hers in an erotic rhythm and he did not care he was at the birthday party!

    With these memories he moved in his chair, a little restless because his emotions balanced between relief and grief and he did not feel comfortable with both. Why did he marry her so soon? He surprised family, friends and society. Even the newspapers that never wrote about him before, headlined “Most desired bachelor found his Eva” (why on earth did his parents name him Adam...)

    She did not only have a beautiful mouth but also brains and organisation talents. In no time she organized their wedding and sent out numerous invitations to people he had never heard of before and who she called 'colleagues' or friends. If he had not been so very much in love at the time, inviting these people who were mainly in the showbizz, must have set off numerous alarm bells. But the bells kept quiet and only rang when it was far too late.

    It did not take her long after the marriage to convince him of her many talents like performing, singing and being an actress of high level. Well, not discovered yet but with his help (read; money and status, after all he did not only have a double barrelled name, no, he had three names and a long forgotten title) she was finally going to break through.

    Strangely enough he never heard her singing (not even in the shower but this might have been because the always showered together), nor seen her performing. And when it finally happened, in full public in the music room in his Manor, he was shocked. Not just a little bit but deeply shocked. At first he could not believe how a beautiful mouth and a warm sensual voice like hers, produced a noise that could only be described as an old unmaintained unidentifiable agricultural machine that tried to plough it's way through sticky clay.

    It was awful, terrible, shocking and above all embarrassing because she did not stop! She went on and on, looking over the heads of the poor spectators that were too polite to cover their ears wit their hands.

He wanted to crawl under his chair, fly to the ceiling, dissolve in thin air (maybe not a wise thing to do), everything to move away from her singing as far as possible. And by the look of their guests, every body had the same idea. And even so more the so called 'colleagues and friends' from their wedding party.

    Even after all those years his cheeks turned red in embarrassment. And what ever he tried to stop her, to convince her to search for other talents (she must have at least one he hoped), she kept believing she was The Star the world was waiting for. He sighed and was the producer that organized her first official concert, still thankful. Agreed, they planned it together to make her see that the large audience wasn't at all polite enough to let her go on. People who paid for her performance were most likely going to shout and whistle.

    Fortunately for her, it never happened. Yes, she was going to perform, people were waiting for her to enter the stage but when she did, her high healed shoe got strangled in her enormous dress of which the skirt was made of numerous layers of lace. Before someone could offer help, she fell off the platform in between the people of the orchestra and indeed, broke her neck.

Her audience still wanted their money back but not before the next day because they thought it was part of her act and applauded and laughed.......

Photo: @marshallubx (Instagram)

   

   In the old abandoned and forgotten Manor his now fading and decaying private theatre with the red chairs and curtains (the colour of her mouth) the blue walls and the large mirror instead of a scene decoration is the only witnesses of his desire to stare at the reflections of an empty stage, empty chairs and to absorb the valuable and admirable stillness.

Word of thanks: the photo of @marshallubx (Instagram)) inspired me to write this story and I was given permission to use the photo as an illustration for which I am very grateful. Thank you Marshall!

Links: please visit the beautiful Instagram account of @marshallubx

Note: the story is pure fiction! A figment of my imagination!

Helen

Wired (short story)

    She was good at it. Very, very good!! Not just one of the best but THE best in her county. Of course her employer did not want to let her go and paid her more and more each year until his bookkeeper told him to stop raising her salary because it would bankrupt the company.

And then he married her. With her agreement her income remained the same for the rest of her life which was a very clever thing to do of him.

    Let's go deeper into this: he saved the company and if he was going to die first, she would have her own savings that no one else could touch. Plus she inherited her part of his money which was almost all apart from a donation to the Local Bug Protection Trust.

    You might never have heard of the LBPT but for the small city it was quite important. Let me explain: in medieval times there was a plague of a very rare type of bug. They were quite large and beautiful coloured. The shields, or rather wings, were golden yellow with purple stripes. Their bodies dark brown with long yellow legs.

    They used their wings to fly and to hop, rather silly thing to watch but they arrived where they wanted to be. They did not eat plants or wood (fortunately with only wooden houses in town), no, they ate – please skip this when you are a bit picky – all manure they could lay their legs on, even that of humans.

    I don't know how much you read about medieval times but at the time they did not have a loo. They used buckets and chamberpots (the latter only for the wealthy) and the content was just thrown out of the window or in the rivers.

With this in mind you understand how happy everyone was with the bugs.
    Goldsmiths tried to copy them as broaches and they were sold well. People even kept them as pets but this was forbidden as soon as the Pope declared the bug holy. You must surely have heard of Saint Bug. The disturbing problems in computers are named after them, you did not know that do you?

    To protect the bug, the LBPT was founded in 1530 and is now known as the one and only eldest Trust throughout the whole empire. And her employer (now husband) was the chairman of the Trust and therefore it was only reasonable he mentioned it in his will.

    But, if she was going to die first, he knew that the money he invested in her, was coming back into his account. You see how clever he was. Not even the bookkeeper thought of that, let alone suggested it. No, it was all his own idea, brilliant!!!

    Although he used to be in love with her voice and not herself (like numerous other people) his feelings changed during the marriage. And when he closed his eyes when she talked, he imagined a beautiful sexy woman. That is why he also kept his eyes closed when they made love. Of course he wanted her to whisper sexy words in his ears which she did. It worked both ways; he loved her voice and she loved the way he made love to her. Sounds complicated but it wasn't.

    The company thrived well, so did their income and lifestyle but instead of spending money they saved it fanatically. New employees were added and the very old ones replaced. And although the phones rang more and more, they never added a second, third or fourth telephonist. Not that they could not find one with a correct and pleasant voice but she did not want it and told him she could handle it all on her own.

    Another excuse was that she was too busy to teach a new telephonist the ins and outs of the company. No, she knew every customer, all their needs, all their voices; never could she leave this to someone else.

    She arrived at the company when she was 18 and just left school; a shy young girl who never travelled any further than the bus stop near the school and the one near the company. Wrong, she once went to a caravan park near the coast but at the time she was too young to remember it and therefore never asked her parents why they never went there again.

    When she applied for the job, she never believed that someone wanted her to work for them and was almost disappointed when they told her she could start the same day.

    She still remembered the day; sitting on a plastic chair (bright orange it was) with her bag on her lap, knees decently pressed against one an other, the feet with the flat shoes firmly on the beige tiles of the corridor.

    As soon as the director laid an eye on her, she saw the same expression on his face she noticed by many people before him: shock and empathy. But he asked her in, shook hands and asked the first questions.

    Though when he heard her voice, the look in his eyes changed and without references, he told her she was their new telephonist. She stared at him in disbelieve but he was very serious. He took her coat, let her ring her parents and together with his manager, he explained her how her job was going to be. And she was clever, very clever. In no time she could not be missed any more. The only downside the first couple of weeks was that people rang more often, just to hear her voice.

    Not long after they celebrated her 45 years with the company and 35 years of marriage, the bookkeeper noticed a slightly odd behaviour with her but blamed the overload of work for it. Still he spoke to his boss about an assistant for his wife. At the age of 63, she should not do it all on her own. But the boss, still content with her in all ways, said that the bookkeeper worried too much and all was fine.

Instead of identifying the problem and trying to talk to her, he bought a few extra telephones; after all it was and remained important that customers could reach them and too often the existing lines were engaged.

   

   Understanding very well that this was the way to stay the one and only telephonist, she accepted the extra phones as if he gave her a platinum ring with the largest diamond in the world. She worked harder and harder, afraid of being replaced by someone with a more beautiful voice and therefore afraid for the end of her marriage. To her he was still the very handsome man she married: tall, blond slim and muscular. She did not see how he changed over the years. She did not see his round belly, the bags under his eyes, the hair that turned grey and thin and his feet becoming more and more flat. Of course he knew it and also knew that how beautiful a new voice was going to be, they were all too young to fall in love with him. Now you understand why he bought the extra telephones.

    And more telephones were added; so many that she also worked during the evenings. And not just phones but also large wooden cable rolls to keep all the wires separated. All he could do in return was cooking her meals and make sure she was comfortable tucked in on the sofa for the so much needed rest.

    But one evening she did not come home at all. He rang her but all the lines were engaged which slightly worried him. He waited an extra hour and rang the bookkeeper at home, knowing he was always the last one leaving the office.

The bookkeeper assured him she was fine when he left but indeed very very busy!

    Although he believed the bookkeeper, he got more and more worried and at 10 PM left home to hurry his car to the company where all the lights were still on.

He entered the hallway and called her name. The silence that followed was most alarming. It gave him very unpleasant feelings; the hair in his neck stood straight up, his heart beat changed dramatically and although he was scared to death, he ran upstairs........

    The Local Bug Protection Trust survived, even without the man that was their chairman for so long. All members thought it was best for him to take his rest and not to return for a while. He never returned, his whole life was upside down after the gruesome find. Within a few minutes he turned into a very old man that lost interest in everything. Not just the LBPT but also his company which is left abandoned for many years now.

Photo: @acfotografie92 (Instagram)

   The company lost too many clients after the beautiful voice was gone and closed within a year. And he blamed himself for everything: the unemployment of all those hard working people, the loss of clients but above all the purchase of so many telephones. How on earth could he know that she, his very ugly wife but with the voice of a Siren, got strangled by all those different wires.....

Word of thanks: the photo of @acfotografie92 (Instagram) inspired me to write this story and I was given permission to use the photo as an illustration for which I am very grateful. Thank you Adrian!

Links: please visit the beautiful Instagram account of Adrian Chaventre and his impressive website.

Note: the story is pure fiction! A figment of my imagination!

Helen