my heart, bared.

my heart, bared. by Sophia de Augustine

Tense, bejeweled prose muzzleloads the heartbeat: "Blooms too heavy to hold their own heads aloft nod gently, swaying on shorn stems, angled to sit just so. They sprawl languidly across every available surface, petals fluttering down to carpet with any movement in the house. Every sighing tumble sets your teeth on edge, eyes skittering to the doorway. He stands silent sentinel, one hand resting against the threshold, not yet bidden entry." So my eyes beamglew and I logged online. Some sentences threaten to flutter a little too gossamer, but they're anchored down with sudden raw bashes, as this pinkish wave of overexposure crashing over a craggy clause: "His hands are just as bitten into, bearing the marks of experiments gone wrong, faces broken against the crush of knucklebone, and gun powder burns from where he's held rifles with the same surety as a long cherished lover."

This batting eyelashes alternation between phantomy fleetness and fear spikes superimposes into a holographic cutesy queasy lacy danger: "The paintbrush's handle is burnished smooth from your cradling fingers, fitting into a phantom's touch. It's difficult, to focus on sketching, even with the luxury of the smooth, buttery glide of pencil over paper. His gaze holds a physical heft, like butterfly pins skewering you into place. He remains quiet, holding his tongue, hands folded politely in his lap. / He fiddles around with his cufflink, pearls cradled close by gold. Eventually, it grows intolerable." While sustaining this mode into a mounting anxiety, the story sparkles with purpose and poise.

The swerve, because surely we were all awaiting the swerve, that this is your husband, separated from you by a supernatural somewhat, life and death and laboratories and profaned rosaries and all that, springs the trap prematurely, trying to pump in a bunch more exposition whilst still pacing the bravado of a grand reveal. The result is confusing, hinting at twenty flavors of katabasis: wait, I'm dead, or he's dead, or we're both dead, or maybe I'm an iteration of a dead archetype that he keeps incarnating? I gather that the story is based on a Fallen London quest, so perhaps it is relying on a preexisting knowledge base, but then it would have the luxury of dispensing with all the exposition it profuses, so that doesn't quite cohere either. Our final choice isn't so much a choice as a tagline, so it doesn't supply us an answer.

Thus, my heart, bared. teases with wondrous aplumb, but when it invites us to dance, it trips, flails forward, seesaws over our legs, smashes through the glass table, fumblerolls into a waste of shattered teacups, then looks up bloodied and cravat crumpled, grins still seductively, as if maybe that was mysterious or dramatically masculine or threateningly romantic or?