***
1996
Elena pushed on the lid of the coffin and it opened.
The crypt was cold, bare metal on all sides. The lamp was bright white. The flame, encased in glass, didn’t flicker or make heat. Elena knew nothing and remembered nothing.
Men in foolish clothes she had never seen the likes of came in. The dress they gave her was so small it was barely there, and it clung to her figure in ways that shocked her. They covered her with jewels and brought her strange shoes that made her seem taller and were difficult to wear, and they daubed odd-smelling perfume onto her throat and breast.
She followed them into a house lit by unreal, heatless ghost lamps. She went to the balcony and realized she was in Venice, but it was a nightmare Venice of impossible buildings she didn’t know and blinding lights that sometimes flew through the air like stars fallen out of their spheres. Frightened, she went in and tried to lock the world out.
She followed the servants to a sitting room. A woman was waiting for her, a strange woman who wore trousers and shook Elena’s hand as if they were men. She had with her a metal box with something like a glass eye in it, and something else that looked to Elena like a canvas, though it was of very thin substance, and was very wide.
“We have it,” said the woman. “I suppose you want to see it now?”
The woman spoke…English, Elena thought. But it sounded only a little like the English she remembered.
Elena sat (the shape of the furniture in this room was the most bizarre thing yet). The woman put the canvas against one wall, and then she set her strange box on the table and attached flat things like wheels to the top of it. “Lights please?” she said.
A servant made the room go dark with a wave of his hand. The mysterious box’s glass eye glowed and, to Elena’s alarm, phantoms appeared, glowing silver figures of light on the canvas. The entire city of Venice was there on the wall; the old Venice, as she thought it should look. She recognized the clothing and the buildings and the old gondolas. Was this woman a sorceress, who had trapped the real Venice in her magic box and replaced it with the apparition outside?
Gradually, Elena gathered that she was seeing some kind of play, and these people merely actors (though what magic art was causing them to manifest in the room she didn‘t know.) She began to piece together the meaning of the story: A wealthy Venetian girl, the most beautiful in the world, was put under a spell by her jealous godmother, so that she would sleep forever, waking only at night, and even then as a monster.
The spell could only be broken when the girl saw her own image. But this proved impossible, since the wicked godmother stole the girl’s reflection as well (a cruel trick to play on one whose beauty had captivated so many). Great artists came to paint her portrait in hopes that they might break the spell, but each failed.
The sleeping girl never changed: She was a shadow and a shape and the reflection of nothing, illustrated in silver light before Elena’s eyes, real and not real at the same time. She was nothing but a face…
Elena’s hand darted out, touching the button on the side of the box. The phantoms disappeared. She stood, pacing the room, heart racing. The lights came on again. The strange woman looked at her.
“What’s wrong?”
Elena wasn’t sure. She walked to the screen and touched it, checking for any impressions that the moving pictures might have left behind. Everything had been real; she had seen it all with her own eyes. But now it was as if it had never existed. What kind of portraits were these that were as fleeting as the light of day?
The strange woman sat on the couch, drinking something from a flat metal bottle. “You don’t like it,” she said. “We tailored the script to your specifications. What did we get wrong?”
Elena said nothing. She sat. She put her hand on the woman’s knee. The woman sat up a little and looked at Elena from the edge of her eye, obviously unsure what to think. Elena sat a little closer and, leaning down, she kissed the woman’s wrist, letting the tip of her tongue tickle the sensitive skin there. The woman made an “oomph” sound, and Elena did it again. She could very nearly taste the hot blood pulsing through the veins beneath her mouth, but she didn’t bite down.
Instead she kissed her way up the arm and, soon, across the rounded shoulder, pushing the strange, short-sleeved man’s shirt out of the way. The woman tasted like curiosity, gratification, intrigue, and secrets. Very good.
The strange woman pushed back for a second. “Lady,” she said. “are you on something? Because you are damn spooky.”
Elena brushed her lips over the other woman’s in answer. She strained away a little but did not get up and leave.
“You’re my client,” she said. “I don’t need hassle like this.” A few more teasing kisses reeled her in, though, and soon she kissed back.
Both women rolled over on the couch, first Elena on top, then the stranger, then back again. Clothes slid off so easily it was like they were barely there to begin with. The smell of Elena’s perfumed body mingled the woman’s own natural smell. Her skin was hard and tanned next to Elena’s delicate pallor, and she kissed roughly. Though she looked soft and womanish she felt strong, and the two of them fell on and over each other and twisted around in tight embraces and breathed each other in while outside the long, hot, Venice night stretched out like a dark mirror outside.
Elena kissed the other woman to keep her from talking. Words were mysteries that scared her. Touch was the only thing that worked the way it should anymore. The couch was slick leather, cool against her own cool body. The witch lights that lit this midnight world seemed harsh, but in that otherwordly halo their bodies glowed with a light of their own. Elena crushing her small breasts against her lover’s and rocked back and forth with naked thighs clasped. They fitted together perfectly.
Elena listened to the rush of blood in the woman’s veins. Her tongue flickered over her sharp teeth. The woman kissed her way across Elena’s thighs. Her mouth was softer than velvet. Elena watched the telltale throb in her neck and wondered how it might taste, mouth watering
The woman was licking at her now. It was a pleasantly distracting stimulation, but even with the woman’s face buried between Elena’s thighs her attention couldn’t wander for long away from the steady beat of the pulse. The more excited the woman became, the faster and harder the blood beat through her. Elena ran her nails up and down the woman’s back while her open mouth massaged Elena’s sex. She pressed hard enough to break the skin, and her hand came up with one bright scarlet drop clinging to the tip of a nail. The taste of it danced across her tongue.
Eager for more, she scratched again, and the woman cried out, sitting up and backing away. “What the hell?” she said. She touched the scratches tenderly. “You don’t have to get so–“
But before she could say anything else Elena caught her again, lips parted, teeth poised just above the soft hollow of the other woman’s throat. And then…
She noticed the blank screen on the other side of the room, flapping a little in an otherwise undetectable breeze. A faint nagging sense settled on her. She turned away from her lover, all but dropping her. The other woman staggered and caught her own balance. “Hey?!“ she said.
Elena examined the strange box on the table more closely. She was convinced now that it wasn’t really magic, though what it was instead she couldn’t say. It made a whirring sound, and the wheels on top sprang into motion when she pressed the button, and the ghostly figures appeared again on the wall.
The girl on the screen was a graceful phantom in a world of silver and black. She floated down dark corridors and wept into the canals, forgotten and alone. At the play’s end she stood on a balcony as the sun rose over Venice and then–Elena blinked, dazzled by the image of the dawn–she seemed to catch fire in the sunlight, burning away and leaving the face of the sun as the only thing on the screen, a white disc against a sea of silver.
Captivated, Elena walked to where the image of the sun met the wall. She expected it to be hot when she touched it, but it wasn’t. The light filled up her eyes.
“Is it real?” she said.
The strange woman looked up. She‘d put half of her clothes back on and returned to her bottle, sulking. Elena turned to her, the light from the magic box shining right into her face.
“Is it real?” she said again.
The woman blinked. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“This–this–painting with light,” Elena said. “Is it a real thing? Is that really the sun?”
The woman blinked, dumbfounded. “You are the strangest fucking person I have ever met,” she said.
Elena reached for the image of the sun on the wall. “It is real,” she said. “I can feel it. It’s almost warm. Can’t you feel it too? It’s like…a kiss.”
The strange woman cried out. “What’s happening? You’re–?”
Elena was on fire. Her hand on the screen was lined in white flames, and smoke rose in curls from her arms and shoulders. Her hair was burning. But it didn’t hurt. In fact, she liked it. She felt the warmth of the sunlight. It was better than real. It was more perfect than any painting, more lasting and true than any portrait she’d ever seen. She threw her arms open, as if she could gather the sun up in them, and when she did–
Quietly, she crumbled away, burning in the false sunlight until there was nothing left. The film ended and the projector snapped off. The producer was alone in the dark penthouse. Try as she might, she couldn’t find it in herself to scream.
She didn’t understand what had happened. She didn’t know what she had just seen. In a few years, she would convince herself that this was all a dream, and that her entire time in Venice was nothing but a kind of waking sleep.
In the morning, a servant scattered Elena’s ashes over the canal. They mingled with the waters of Venice, and perhaps they are part of it still.
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