Irruption Into White
Short Fiction by Victoria C. Roskams
In this evocative short fiction, white space and black lines intertwine, exploring fashion, sensation, and transformation. A man’s musings on attire and the body’s whispers create a vivid, dreamlike narrative of touch, movement, and self-discovery. If you enjoy this feature and would like to see more, let me know with a comment, 💌 share, ♥️ like, or better yet, a 🔄 restack!
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White space swells, becomes tumescent. This is, perchance, the cape, the coat, a broad-brimmed hat. Black lines fill in, penetrate. These are, it may be, a plume, a tassel, a curl – the curls, the curls. An abundance of lustre against the skin. Skin so white and suffering – it must be covered, and yet what garb? The tassel by the brow is his own affectation: it dangles, it frames him. He ponders, as he reclines, the fashions of yesteryear. To advance up the leg one must have stockings, their line soft, threading, but upwards, pointing. If one can look up from the blare of the buckle on the shoe, one is happily rewarded, led up and up! This is a suggestion of muscle – in the round, he feels a twinge. The skin answers back to the cloth. The leg becomes the stocking, becomes the fashion, becomes the fancy. The hand throbs, ingratiated. There is a line direct to the tip. It is the tip that announces the éclat of contact, bestows the benison, that needles restlessly, restlessly injecting. From whence is the fluidity: the tip or the hand that guides it? White spaces swell. The skin is a moon accompanied by a howl. O, Venus! Might she transform? With a twist – just so – he rests now on a shoulder. Rounded, it calls for an arabesque, which feels like the rush of a fountain or a falling into dreams or love. Down and down, until the arm bends, muscle is suggested when there is a lift (a twinge again), veins jumping, a thousand nerve endings responding. They converse at the tip. The body is a thousand conversations.
Now here, now there, hands might point at an unseen world beyond his sight. Suggestions, merely. All that is needed is here, says a face that drinks with its eyes, lips curling, hints of cosmetics or of features drawn this way, always. It is pleasing, he feels, not quite to know. It smacks of a delicious cruelty, a delight in play, where winning is felt on the hairs of the arm: a pleasure down to the goose pimples. And so, feathers, lending their swoop to a hat or a hairpiece, and one must look at the feather. Look and look again. It draws the eye. It points, points. He points, too. Somewhere in the folds of the bloomers, perhaps, they give cover to so very much. Heavy curtains surround the figure pillowed in the bed. Venus lies in furs – so he has heard.
In the anteroom of the doctor’s he and the other yellow men had coughed. White space had filled up their lungs in a fugal concatenation: from one man to the next, on and on, feel the fullness of it over the body, feel the body come into one being around this miscreant lung, expel bile as black as the lines that will crowd his vision, later. He and the other yellow men had coughed, and he had had a vision of curious pleasures.
His gaze flits now to the entrance, two bending graces curling, cupping the scene inside, curtains pulled away now, only the pillars, which may really be hips, haunches, who could say, curves undulating and never holding. With such pillars, the building cannot hold: better replace them with a firm line, erect (think what hides in plain sight within, continue to twinge), a hardness to sustain. It can sustain – if he only looks – looks harder, keener, beyond the entrance now at the disrobing figure who holds him, body and all, in her gaze. She holds him down to the very point. No wonder her eyes are so sharp. Does she disrobe? Can she ever have covered this effluence, this ornate feast, this dance of parts which, as she turns, gives her away as having a member herself? He sees it, its line replaying and replenishing, ever and ever, vigorously. It is all the rococo in itself, filigree and ornamented, just a touch fussy. He tilts his head as if in rejoinder. Might she not? a feather or two, delicately, judiciously placed – plumage made prudent – yet there is no disguising, now, the irruption into the white. Try as he might, he cannot now apprehend this onward movement, this flow, that seems to gush from under the skin, at command of the muscles themselves. Onwards, onwards, it is only growth now. The white spattered with black. Circles punctured in the middle by dots finding targets. Shirtsleeves find cufflinks, shoes are buckled, gilt and shining, belt loops gleam, capes swirl, all onto the floor and out of the frame. And out! And out! More space to behold what it may be that moves, now, fixes him with that grin of the coquette, bends (might it be) a finger in connivance, beckons. Onwards, onwards!
In the atrium of the doctor’s, he and the other yellow man had coughed and shaken hands. Their resolve had blared like a drone: to see and keep seeing what he saw now, some exquisite intercourse between fancy and truth, and to offer it in the fullness of adulation to others who shared their sympathies until the last gasp. But the last gasp would be the greatest. The entire body would thrill –
A kick against the table leg, a throbbing in the leg. A hand on the neck inside and under the ruff. A profusion of curls, where, where? It is only curls and curves. And the white space grows and grows, the black enters and enters. O, Venus! If he might proffer the pen to her hand – place the pen in her hand – place with paroxysms the pen in her hand – induce her to trace, to keep on tracing as he traces, the pen’s travels over Venus’s hills, over Aubrey’s hills, until the nib is fit to burst and to break, until he wrests back the pen and rescues the nib and returns to being Aubrey Beardsley again.
Victoria C. Roskams writes short fiction about the arts and the uncanny: exploring the strange lives and afterlives of artists and artworks. Beyond fictional writing, Roskams pursues academic research interests in various kinds of writing about music, especially the intersections of fiction and non-fiction.