(This is a work in progress for a super creative writing course at Bangor University. The prompt for this piece came from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. ) Guess the city?!
Buried beneath the swarming scooters (no helmets, just heels and loose hair), Frankie could hear the stones breathing, whispering out their regrets, their captured spirits still awaiting release.
For all space in this city was dedicated to greatness, to monumental ambition, to the visionary vanity of immortal life.
Even the crowded scents of the city reminded her of the past and she listed them in her head like an incantation so that the city became more alive to her and she felt less alone. Orchid, lavender, now tuberose, leather, even saffron, vanilla. Each scent a pulse in her head.
Guerlain’s Jicky perfume followed her around the squares, haunting shared gelato, mingling with tender urgent farewells, yet still finding time to visit her again on the wrist of an American seated inside the city’s most ancient theatre of murder. In that place the dusty stones breathed more darkly, crying out hoarse reprimands to these new spectators on their misery.
The American turned another page of a book.
For this city was a city of roaming words, where Frankie found fragments of every hope known to man, all written down on stored manuscripts, or on magnificent gold leaf in lofty pulpits. But still Frankie heard beneath the city’s crumbling architecture, lost words, fallen words, words without redemption; reminding all visitors to this city that however careful, kind or reckless your life might prove, your ending must always be the same.
Frankie bought flowers as a gift for someone she had never met, but whose words had travelled this far and then stopped, certain only that what he had written would disappear forever. She stood by his bed and saw what he must have witnessed each morning; the indifferent crowds of a city moving without conscience, whilst his posthumous life ebbed away.
Night scents paraded themselves without shame during daytime. The yellow buses heaved with sweat. Frankie developed the habit of looking like a boy and always stood by the doors holding her bag closely. Ambivalent intimacies were a specialty of this city and Frankie watched heavily painted figures lean back into the shadows of ruined buildings, calling out curious promises to passers-by.