Muffin's Emporium

The Client in Brown

bytch — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:01:42 +0000

The old woman made the letter disappear into the dun folds of her rough robe with a speed and economy of misdirection to make her the envy of every showman’s shill. Like an actor, too, she recognized his admiration, even though he would have said that his expression had not changed from the blank he affected while listening to his client’s words. For the first time since she strode to his corner, long gliding steps parting the market crowd as smoothly as if a wind before her blew them gently from her path, she smiled. Gold-toothed and savage as a pirate’s, her silent laugh erased all trace of the subservient ancient from the backwoods.
In a voice pitched to be unheard by anyone beyond their radius, she spoke to him in fluent and unaccented __________ known also as the Secret Tongue. “You make a good citizen for this shadow place, boy of (cap city). The hand that put you here with that small curse I do not recognize, but my sister did you a favor of sorts to put you here, though that might not seem so to you. Such a clever and subtle work would not have been some reflex spiteful move, but intention. She used bits of your essence in the ties that hold that spell, or I’d have repaid your courtesy and let you slip its bonds. But she is good that one, and I hate to admit, better than I am.”
She leaned closer, and he caught from the folds of her robe or the deep dry crevasses of her skin the sharp smell of cracked green _____seed. Looking into his eyes, she reached forward as if to give a tired grandmother’s caress to his cheek. And stabbed into the joint of ear and jaw with a cats claw blade thin as a thorn.
The instant ice and numb paralysis that stole the right side of his face staggered him like a like the glance of a loose boom. He stumbled.
A thin hand on his shoulder caught him, and pressed him to sit before he fell. The woman knelt along with him, still holding him in upright.
He tried to ask. Something. It did not matter that his mind was too muddled to form a thought because his mouth would not form a word, would not open or entirely close, and his leaden tongue seemed to fill the entire cavity.
The old woman whispered, a cupped hand’s worth of brief syllables. She settled back on her heels. When she spoke again, she might have been any concerned and aged customer. “Are you all right now?” she asked. “You northerners forget that heat here is not like other heat. You should be sure to drink in the afternoon when the winds are born in deserts and cross the islands in search of human blood to dry. So my old husband’s people would say. I say you should sit until the dizziness goes away. You should rest in the shade until you are steady and then go to your home and sleep. A little nap. A wineskin of water. You will be fine.”
Cayfall’s eyes were functioning no better than his mouth. They refused to focus on the near, and those things blurred into transparence, becoming shadows of distortion between himself and the too sharp objects in the distance. The old woman was so close he could hear her breathing, smell the seed scent, but she was invisible. In the Secret Tongue she said, “My unknown sister may be better with a curse than I am, but not by much. Not by much. I have eased some of her knots. And made another change or two. You will approve. Do not doubt it, you will approve.”
The air stirred where she had been. Cayfall tried to nod. To agree. To thank her for leaving. His head moved slightly, and that cheered him. In fact, he was beginning to feel fine. Light. Very clear. He spent some time on that thought, and concluded that he might, indeed be growing clear to the eye. He gazed down at his hand, browned from those long months sailing, and not soft, pale and groomed for having left the sea. He stared at the blood inside it flowing, amber brown.
The closing marked seemed unusually bright and at the same time, difficult to see. The contradiction amused him, and he found that thought so fascinating that he grew lost in all it’s ramifications. He was sitting on the side of his own bed when he realized that he was no longer in the dusty market. He had a great thirst, and thought that perhaps a little rest would be worthwhile. He had no plans for the evening. A little water, a little sleep. It seemed like an excellent idea.T

Watching

bytch — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:27:21 +0000

“He’s a strange one,” she said.
Horace, looking past her shoulder, down and past the gateway to the square, ignored half a dozen men she could have used those words about, and said, “The Scrivener. Who’s this that calls him strange? Not Wanda, surely.”
She looked at the table she was using for a writing desk, set to catch the afternoon light and cluttered with weighted piles of paper scraps. “Wanda has unplumbed depths. But no, Pinky, I’m serious.
“He’s always there. Always around. And listening. You like him, don’t you? Not just the boy; the poet. Better than me, I imagine. I think more people have heard his little rhymes than have ever seen mine. With all there are in print, nobody reads them. Father—yes, I’m using “Father” now—he has them set in type and gives the things away like they were some sort of tea biscuits with the royal favor stamped in gold.”
He thought that John did well with the books. The crests were barely noticible.
“Michael wants me to move back home.”
That would be the reason for her mood now after the visit. “Hmm. You would have known they might expect that some day he would produce an heir.”
“Oh, I’ve convinced Aunt Emily at least. Finally. That however things might look on paper, Michael can do much better. I have her looking more closely at Robin. Poor little duck. She’s been in love with him since she was nine.”
“You’d have him trade one cousin for another? Swap a Swan for a duckling.”
“Oh, but Michael’s half in love with Wanda. I think he would marry her instead of me, if I’d go through with it. I admit it has it’s charms.”
“The mistress wife. You wrote that one already in The Bishop’s Second Woman. And the way you turned that ending shows you know better than to try it, even if only as a joke between the two of you. You have a better grasp of reality than that.”
“You think I would make a poor tragic heroine?”
“I think you’re insane and this whole whoring business proves it.”
“But, Pinky, I ‘m a very well-respected whore. And it is what tipped the scales with Auntie Queen.”
The lower angled sunlight put her face somewhat in shadow, but tipped the the curls formed from her newly shortened hair. He wondered if she’d washed away the tint and before or after her interview.
“I saw you the day of your Baptism,” he said. It was the light that made him think of that. The light and the thought of the Queen and her strange brood. “I met (___cousin) in the market. They were drunk or halfway there and making a party up as they went along. Buying presents for a baby. You.
“You know the things Linette did to have you born within the city and acknowledged by the family? Six months of secrets and plotting boiled down to that. Drunks buying presents for a baby.”
“They dragged me along to (________house). I got lost. Then I walked into the Little Garden.”
“The Pretty Garden. I called it, as if all the others there weren’t”
“You were sleeping in her lap. In that contraption Phillip’s uncle designed. Glider swing.”
“I think you may have mentioned the moment once or twice. You bad thing thinking you had fallen in love with some new mother.
“You know, Pinky, I only recently found out you could have been my father. Not me, of course. I wouldn’t have been me with you for a father, but Linette’s baby.”
“John told you that?”
“No, Linnie, silly.”
“You went there.”
“I had some questions.” For both Linette the mother and Linette of the church, he imagined.
“You would go that far. Rather than marry Michael?”
“As she said: even now a woman could do worse than going to the church.
“She ‘s proud of me, Pinky. She doesn’t just have my books, she reads them. She knows them at least as well as Roger does. Almost as well as you.”
“And this recent phase?”
“Is sex: pftt!”
“Emily would not have been so cavalier”
“Well, she has wanted me for Michael, or Elaine—god help, if I had been a boy—since the day she found out John had done the deed to Linnie. It’s difficult for her to let an idea go.”
“And you will be punished.”
“Or have her take it out on everyone I care about.”
“Not an easy woman to have a disagreement with.”
She did not need to answer that. In the square the lamps were being kindled. The scrivener was folding the letter he’d composed for an old woman wrapped in brown cheap cloth that pooled into the dust and hid her feet. The woman touched the still warm sealing wax to print it with her thumb. A sensation almost as intimate as the way he formed thoughts into words and wrote. As Wanda, she had found that disconcerting.”
“No,” she said, “not an easy woman.”

O wat the hay

bytch — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:34:21 +0000

I’m thinking life’s too short. Giving the idea of a little sensitive fantasy the royal send-off. Once the ghost of old chris morley settled in, I could see I don’t have much of a chance .

So, why not just go all the way and make her royal, as well as a royal pain. Or three or so removes from royal, in the family. Supposedly betrothed to cousin Michael, who’s somewhere in the line of succession, and answers to Auntie Queen about where he goes to say his vows. pippip

I can’t remember what they’re called–the liner notes? In Shakespeare’s plays somebody stands and gives the setting, telling you what’s happening and what to look for, tragedy or laughs.

Well, I’ve written me a brief synopsis in that vein, not going into much, though. No mention of disguise and whoring women poets. Or, for that matter cursed poemizing men, sent away from home as boys. I use the plural, both of these are singular, but what the hey.

we shall have rot and poppycock

and laughing voices off

let us have tears upon this stage

laughter’s tears or if not tears

let’s have the smiles

that recognition brings

and find no wisdom here but incidental

here fools play at nobility

while nobles play the fool

Enter throught the front of Horace Muffin’s store

bytch — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:34:16 +0000

Enter throught the front of Horace Muffin’s store. The door is wide and welcoming, and open every day of the week when Horace is in town, which recently is almost always. Thread you way into the Emporium, through tables stacked with this and that useful thing or odd and desirable bit of whimsy, and past free standing shelves packed tightly carrying a wealth of something other. You will pass the counter used by Horace and a trustworthy employee or two for measuring, counting, ordering, and graciously accepting coinage for the empire or any trading partner with a mint. Do not pause to speak, although you would enjoy the conversation, as would any of the rarely very busy group who would, you may be certain prefer to talk and not to clean and dust and tidy up the goods.
Instead, continue to your left and toward the rear of the salesroom where you will find a staircase to the second floor. There things are less intended for display and more for an organized abeyance of their journey. Re-cased and -crated goods for which some need will come in time paused stacked in order well protected against the chance of dust or mishap for as long as needs to be.
From here, another set of steps, somewhat more narrow, leads upward yet again to Horace Muffin’s attic. In his first years as a merchant, Horace lived in this apartment, in these neat rooms above the store. In the front an open parlor overlooking Scofflaw’s heart, the Square with its constant busyness of travelling and loitering, Market at the week’s end, trollies passing from the northwest going to the southeast and from the northeast going round the square a circle and a half before continuing to the southwest. The cars passed round the circle of the town’s four Laws, from square to square and rarely meeting when they ran on time, though now and then required to find a siding, each driver keeping score of just how often he had been the one to wait while someone else went hurrying along his appointed route.
With windows on the alleyway behind the shop, and ample bedroom and a small but not cramped kitchen were spared the noise and looked down onto ________’s large and well-kept garden, walled as if it were a northern city orchard of espalliered tender fruits, when in fact it held entirely a carpet of native flowers, stalk and bush and vine.
The central attic room, which might have been by previous store families a nursery and playroom for two or three, never filled its role for Horace Muffin. Instead, it served to house his overflow, both as storage for the goods intended to be sold some day and for his own diverse accumulations.
Horace himself now lived in some degree of splendor on a hill above the town, between the South Law and the more exclusive North, trending somewhat toward the eastern slope with its more modest garden homes and neatly cultivated plots of this or that special favorite green or dainty fruit. He enjoyed his twice daily walk, even when the weather drove most people to remain in doors or resort to some sort of dry conveyance. Nothing less than a typhoon would prevent him from coming in to work, though on occasion he would remain at the Emporium where his rooms were always neatly kept in order and no less clean than when his still-mourned wife had kept their home there.
Windows front and rear wide to catch the breezes, and deep to keep the shade, combined with pocket doors wide and open to allow air’s free movement made the attic rooms as comfortable as any place in town to pass the day. And they were cooled, not as some might have you think by magic, but by good insulation and superb design.
****************
On the morning of what would have been the Autumn Equinox if seasons in the islands carried weight as in the temperate south and very distant north, Horace Muffin, Proprietor, had left the workings of the store to _____ and ______. A dependable pair. The owner was to be found, if necessary to discuss something confidential, in the attic, able at last to indulge himself and visit the crate of books which had arrived now going on to ten days past. Such pleasures were not to be taken lightly, and not to be rushed. Business had had first place for long enough, but all the orders from that shipment had been taken care of, and everything for a while was in its proper place. The time was ripe for books.
In addition to his enjoyable unpacking, Horace had another, less expected purpose for his attic time. An unanticipated companion had settled into his parlor, with packages and diversions of her own, and as he inspected books ordered months and even years before, he could stroll into the other room to show his friend the new addition and explain the volume’s provenance or how he’d learned about the author, or some minutae on the binding or the type.
She, in her turn, had gone so far as to bestir herself to make a pot of tea for them both, and had offered him a mug before drifting back to her own papers. And if the tea had been steeped overlong, and left to cool to tepid, barely hot at all, then he would sip the bitter brew in the spirit it was given. Horace did, however, find himself wondering when she would get around to explaining where she’d been hiding ever since her return to town, on the same ship that had brought his books. And it did seem odd that she, however welcome, seemed set to settle down here in his parlor. She had already had him moving furniture around to more nearly suit her taste and needs.
Trailing after her into his parlor, Horace was considering how he might phrase politely a suggestion that she open up and spill the beans.
Mug in hand, she perched on the window’s sill, a comfortable seat from many hours of contemplating there himself. Dressed in that mannish manner she most often chose for travelling away from the population centers of the coast, she might have been a truant boy returning to his schoolroom by the same route he had used to leave. Seh had acted more demanding roles than that in the years they had been friends. Something made him wonder if she were about to retire one of her characters for good.
She stared out the window and down into the square, intently as if something there had caught her more than passing interest, and when at last she spoke it was as a tired and rather sad young woman Horace had not seen for half a dozen years. The whore Wanda the Swan might never see the light again, and the same thing might be happening to his old friend the most illustrious of the Empire’s poets. A disturbing possibility.

Wanda the Swan at the fig tree

bytch — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:53:59 +0000

“You need to be more careful where you put your hands, letter writer.” He jerked reflexively away from both the bushy red-leafed fruit tree and the woman on the other side of the low fence. The redhead from his first day in the square had chopped her hair to shoulder length and turned it to the color of a river on a moonless night. She looked nothing like a whore today, more like one of his sisters or his mother in the picture from her wedding day.
She seemed pleased by his reaction. “There are plenty here who won’t warn you and won’t blink before they cut your hand off for you,” she said, companionably, offering a little friendly advice with her menace. “And just because they can’t afford a good steel knife don’t think they go unarmed. Little girls here stay up half the night to put an edge on something you would throw away as worthless. Friend of mine, a pocket thief, uses bits of broken glass, smoothed on the back and razor sharp along the edge. She favors blues and greens and wraps the handle end in tar and cord and wears them dangling all around like jewelry.
“I don’t see how she keeps from slicing off some live bits of herself.” She said that as if the puzzle of it had never occurred to her before.
“You live here?” he asked with a gesture that took in the tall stone house, its gardens, and enough unused space to hold two of Scofflaw’s market squares.
She had the grace to blush. “You might say that I am making a delivery. You do your work sometimes in people’s homes, don’t you? Somebody says: Scrivener, come and write a letter for my Auntie, for her secretary’s taken off to Fairport on the packet, wanting to be there to watch her brother’s wife in labor.” It was a perfect mimicry of the errand he had just finished, and close enough to the reason that he wondered if she knew what had brought him to this more elegant side of town.
“I might live here. I might live someplace like this. There are girls from city families who work for their own reasons. I could be one of those. But this is actually as public a house as Feather’s Tickle. Ask around about the Good House.
“There are some things you can learn. You don’t think that we all live in the house, do you? Believe me, even you would want to have some time away from twenty girls, not mentioning the Mister and the paying guests.”
He felt all sudden like the first, no second, night away from home. His father thought he’d learn to be a scholar, along with losing that inconvenient curse. His mother said good-bye and meant forever, sure that what the priests at the father house could do for him would not mean that what they returned would be her son. That night he learned that it was mother who was right, though no one touched his body. They took every thing from him that he was certain of, and gave him nothing in return so that he crept back to his cot and hid beneath the blanket in the dark of wool while all the others went about the day. He curled into a bean and slept and dreamed in shapes and colors unrelated to the normal world, with a smell of something like dirt burning. He could almost smell the wool and burning now.

Cayfall Cayll __bath

bytch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:34:06 +0000

Like many men in Scofflaw Square, and no small number of the women, for that matter, Cayfall got his bathing done at Feather’s Tickle. The Missus came from some land-bound place whose name apparently could not be spelled in common script. The word—or words, Cayfall could not be certain which—was guttural and harsh and long, with some sound like a chicken clucking halfway through. The Missus drew the name for him when he first met her. It was not writing as he knew it, but pencil painting of a sort. The brevity of the few strokes was so at odds with the spoken name he’d had to laugh. Four brief lines to mean so many syllables. He’d said it must be language designed for clerks.
The Missus had agreed on that account. Some kingdom long ago and long ago departed had invaded her ancestor’s home with soldiers instead of raiding cattle thieves. They seemed intent on staying, and brought writing and some form of government to the nomadic villagers. They had always been good hands at mathematics, but passed their literature along from voice to ear, and practiced chanting on the herds daylong and into night.
The conquerors made the priests and village leaders learn the language. Which seems to have provided fodder for a raft of songs and stories in the vernacular. But the writing stayed long after the conquerors were dust, though as a rule it only served for itemizing stock and keeping track of mundane things. The histories and songs remained live sounds taught one to one.
The other thing that outlived the foreigners had been their plumbing. They built outposts of permanence where the plains and woodlands met, and each one was a wonder to the forest folk and nomads alike. Stone buildings, where less effort could have built stockades of log. Wells and cisterns when there were good spring-fed streams. Enclosed rooms filled with water hot enough to use for soup, and full of herbs for sitting in like hides soaking in a vat of piss.
She had said that in her language a bath tub was a piss pot. A good joke and a reminder that not all the world was cities and not every body thought alike. Even when you came to view your weekly bath as a necessity. She thought it so important that she’d turn a man away who wouldn’t wash before he used her whores, and expected all her girls to clean themselves between their men. And no nonsense of mixing up the two unless the man had paid for one of the special rooms that came with its own bath for two.
Cayfall enjoyed his weekly bath without partaking of the main menu items. And thought himself as fortunate as any to have that hour for his soul’s repose. His dirty clothing was next door, soaking just as he was, and in water that had been some stranger’s bath. The laundry and the bathhouse used the same fires and soaked both skin and fiber in the same waters, twice or so before sending some to alley gardens and some to sluice the sewers.
It was the Missus’ interpretation of the same plumbing from her homeland that Cayfall had seen adapted in places so far apart you’d wonder people there could still be people. But they were, and all alike had been visited by those same old time martial bureaucrats who left their marks in stone, if seldom on paper.

outhouse, in color similar to the sycamore

bytch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:31:49 +0000

I am going to tell you as much as I can, and stripped as life of life and poetry lest I get lost in the words and forget
There was a young man living in the alley behind Muffin’s shop which he called the Emporium.
The young man’s shack faced the alley with its single door, and with its only windows faced a garden. The landlord’s house. Two trees: a tall splotched sycamore, and a willow.
An outhouse, in color similar to the sycamore.
In order to reach his toilet, the young man, day night summer or winter, would raise the window that was not above his bed and prop it open before climbing over the sill and stepping onto a pile of three only slightly unstable rocks which made the exit less of a fall and made re-entrance possible.
Guests were less likely to comment on the arrangement than on the object used to hold the window open.
The young man, who sometimes went by the name of Capers, was not a native of the area. And yes, indeed, many of the people who lived in the Scofflaw Square vicinity were native to the place. Capers, the scrivner, however was not one of the dynastic villains. He arrived, as did many others, unceremoniously by ship. Kicked off half starved and well beaten, grateful to be alive after having worked enough for three passages beyond his stowaway’s penalty. In the “had he but known” category of things he eventually learned in life: he could have hired onto the ship had he asked for work, and would have been paid for doing less, much less.

consider

bytch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:49:23 +0000

consdrn that wanda the swan may be the bard or whatever

the most famous poet/playrie

in kingstown and beyond

Ideas

bytch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:45:40 +0000

capers the farseeing scrivner, a man with a gift and a curse,

had a shack with its back on the alley

that ran behind Muffin’s Emporium, a somewhat odd building perched, round a s turtle, dead on the wouthwestern corner of the place known as

scofflaw square

“poems Promptly written” read the sign above the door, although few of the customers who came to capers could appreciate the information.

Horace Muffin was a careful man, precise and thorough. every morning when he opened the emporium, he placed in a pocket of the sign in his window a list of things he intended to accomplish during the day and a list of things he would need to do on his way home. At the end of the day, when he turned the sign around, so that it read Closed to the rest of the world and told Horace Muffin that the world beyond his window was now Open for him, he would remove both lists, and stand for a minute, perusing them and contemplating the things he had accomplished and wondering how it could be that he had not taken care of everything on the list.

Then he would close the shades in the windows, check that he had doused all open flames, and let himself out into the night.

In the tidy shack across the alley, Capers would be preparing his evening meal, most likely to be a small potato, boiled; a piece of cold bacon, a good hunk of yellow cheese, and an apple

later I shall tell you about capers’ home, the door with four hinges, and the outhouse in his landlord’s garden, accessible only by way of the shack’s south garden window.

and I will tell you about capers’ mother and her oracular relatives and the inordinate number of orphans residing in the area surrounding scofflaw square. and perhaps if you are very good you will hear about the orphanage. That is, the Goode Orphanage. We will not be discussing the other Home, which was in no way good.

Sketches

bytch — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:57:13 +0000

Wanda The Swan waves a brief greeting
to Caper the scrivener passing her window.
soft faded robe
showing less than it seems,
she smiles at her friend and returns to her hair.
Wanda’s not the first Swan
at the place called the Fan
(curved carved wooden feather plume over the door)
years ago there were two,
sisters Alice and Kate,
whose long lovely necks
spawned the monkier
and gave madam’s mister the bright idea
to call all the Fan’s girls
by feathery names.
Dark eyed tall Wanda takes well to the Swan,
long elegant limbs
thick hair soft as down
(and now colored chestnut instead of its blond)
The gentlemen do love her curves and her curls.

The port called Kings Town never saw a king
in flesh,
but had great reverence
for any silver sovereign
whose alloy passed assay.
(the rarity of gold reliefs
was such that their mere sight
halted commerce,
and sent the bankers to their brothels
for reliefs in vice,
face and reverse)

In Scofflaw Square the trade
was of a copper kind.
Brown coins of twenty countries
mingled in the tills on market days

The vehicles of Kings Town
were of varied kinds,
and powered
in as many modes as there were motives for their movements.
flat boards under legless pedlers
selling war wounds, sleds pulled up to the square each day
by small strong boys who lived in packs beneath the walk
exchanging work for sugar cones.
One-wheeled barrows,
carts for pushing,
carts for pulling
goat-drawn,
dog-drawn,
hauled by horses.
Carridges and fine equipages, steaming engines stoked with coal
even auto mobiles
of the well established ladies
in the care of liveried drivers
and requiring constant services
of the new mechanic’s corps