Saga "Something is shining like gold, but better" | Dear Diary Challenge 2016

*Enters the thread to post with utter nonchalance, as though it had only been a week, instead of (more than a few) months.*


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Today, after the Basic grammar review with the older students, I brought up the idea (that, I can admit to here in this silent file, I thought of at night while I waited to fall asleep) that they take up writing a journal. I did not tell them that I was twelve years old, close behind most of them in age, when I began writing in that first file in my old bookpad—obviously, I think it best not to share the personal details of my life with them. It would be (and I emphasized this) an optional assignment, but it would be a good way for them to work on their writing skills. That would, most likely, be the least use they would have for it—but they should learn that for themselves.

I can only wonder what I would have thought had Mx. Ainsé Bird presented us with that assignment in essay-writing class. But since I should be honest, I know this much: I wouldn’t have ever written the first word in that journal. Instead, I wrote essays full of the toothless pink flowered words I knew she preferred for her to grade, and my journal was my own idea.

Well, nearly so. It has been years since I read, or even thought much on, My Love is a Blood-Red Rose, but I was influenced by Bennie, that fictional girl who wrote her furious thoughts down in the dried-leaf paper of her journal book.

I wanted to write words that would break through ice. And oh, yes, I remember that I started on my attempt the afternoon after that message appeared in snarling black letters across the summercloud-pale side of the north garden wall: No masters/No kings/Only queens.

But I have digressed enough: the students watched as I spoke with the same attention as when I had been lecturing on about that one nit-tiny grammar detail. The two boys sat together in their usual hunch. The three main girls looked inscrutable. Aoifa’s mouth was curled into a smile over her ongoing daydream. Gerda snapped her eyes in a blink. On the holoscreen window I had balanced on the far end of the table, Mirelle was leaning forward, klicks away in Rusted Rock, to catch my voice. After I had finished, I paused to give them their turns to respond.

Thinta spoke first: Owain can write his as poems, she said, her mouth sprawled into a long smile—and she looked to Diva Minera and Joelle to see if they approved. Diva Minera responded with a little fist-clenched smirk. I might have known that one of them would say that, though I should have thought Thinta would know better.

Owain’s habitual doleful expression (with his nightdark teardrop eyes) did not change, but he stared her down as he spoke back, with only a little shivered crack in his voice: So what if I do.

That was not worthy of you, Thinta, I said, and she looked away, and down at the table. And yes, it would be perfectly acceptable for him to write his journal in poetry.

You’ll probably want to read them, Diva Minera said. None of the others contradicted her: Aoifa bust out into one of her fireworks display of giggles, and Mirelle’s static-blurred image was shaking its braids as she nodded along—she must have forgotten that I could see her. After all, how else are you gonna know if we’re working on our skills.

She has a point, Mirelle said, the words stumbling together through the connection.

I forced my mouth into the appropriate expression. There was an empty moment, through which I could hear Brother Mercy talking the younger students through their maths problems. Mirelle continued to watch me. She had leaned in so close I could only see a flash of Idrah’s lekku over the slumped arch of her shoulder, and her eyes had a dark bonfire ember glare.

Then I spoke: Oh, I won’t be reading them at all. A journal is a private document. This is something you will write for yourselves, not for me.

If they hadn’t believed me before that, I doubt I had them convinced. But they kept their further opinions to themselves. Oh, I may complain at times, but they are all well enough behaved as the general rule—then, it is as Avila said after I first arrived here. The kids who don’t want to spend hours trapped in school lessons, and the older boys who walk the streets in their krayt gangs, were never going to make their appearances.

After that, I opened the floor to other topics. Aoifa giggled for the requisite few seconds before she began to speak: I still want to learn some Old Naboo words.

Oh, I knew that: I haven’t written about this before, but Aoifa has already mentioned her interest in learning Grizmalti several times. She took (and with eagerly gushed alacrity) to the idea of a girl “just like her” ruling an entire planet in a fabulous series of frocks. Of course, she lacks the aptitude to even be one of the shadow-women I learned only in the last year to see around Kylantha—then again, I would have said the same of the Girl.

But I do not think it would help the language issue to inflict my own culture on them—and regardless, as I reiterated, I only took the one Grizmalti elective in college, and I have not retained much of that. I could literally only teach them some scattered words.

And, as an aside, Elsé is well aware what I think of her efforts to learn the homeworld language—and it has naught to do with our years of being insufficiently Naboo. We couldn’t have lost the language, because it was never ours. Our great-great grandparents learned Basic so that it would be the only language we knew. But more importantly: none of that can compare in the slightest to what has been done to marginalize non-human communities.

Meantime, Brother Mercy was letting the younger students outside for the luncheon break, so I closed class. Once they had left, the room seemed full of air again—and I sat in it for a long moment before I stood up, and went out to the porch. After they finished eating, the students went off to their usual routines: the children rushed about like scattered moths through the crushing weight of the sunlight, while most of the older students stayed behind in the shade.

Owain sat next to me reading on the datapad he shares with Aoifa. After he told me that he wants to write poetry, I found some books for him—and yes, one of them was that collection from the homeworld Elsé gave me last year. That has turned out to be his favorite. I could just make out the long tree shape of a poem sliding down the datapad window under his fingertips.

Pili was tending to Girl, his eopie, in her place inside the sideshade from the porch—he had just stood up on his toes to brush her neck. His brush-thick black hair was a wind pulled mess, and one of his dainty-sharp pointed ears poked out. Girl squinted into the light, and she didn’t appear to mind when Wenché sat down in a crouch in her shadow, and reached up to flutter her little ghost fingers over one of the flame-petaled flowers shaved in the fur underneath her shoulder. When I asked Pili, at his first storyhour, if those designs are a part of his culture, he said that he has never known. She had them already when his family purchased her.

I have wanted to write about all of the new students, but I haven’t gotten to it—I think I have only mentioned Pili by his name once before now. I can still remember his arrival that first day, when he rode up through the grey light hovering over the street perched on Girl’s sloping back. He matched up with the setting, with his cloudpale grey skin and long black eyes.

He is only eleven, but since he attended the company school in Bestine City for three years, he tested in with the older group. He has a thoughtful, and seriously quiet, demeanor—and I would have to say that I have learned to appreciate that all the more here.

Joelle was standing in front of the far porch pillar, and I took that opportunity to approach her on that other matter I have been thinking on. She knows the desert fairly well herself, as I have learned on our naturewalks—and while she hasn’t seen as much of it as the Bantha Kid, she has gone out on considerable rambles with Jax. I have no interest in standing by while he chases down some abandoned droid-part, but he has a vehicle, and I do not.

Sure, she said, after I presented my point. You can come out with us sometime. But I should warn you that Dad will stop for anything he finds.

It has turned out that Jax will be headed on a ramble only a few days from now—and he should be in the vicinity of The Garden Path. It is the bed left behind by a long ago lost river, an actual river, through a canyon—and I have to admit that, when the Bantha Kid first mentioned it, that part caught my interest. I have already engaged in several com calls with Jax. Yes, it seems that I shall soon have a new anecdote to reflect on in my own educating journal.

Then: You know, Joelle said, and the teasing nudge in her voice would have warned me if I had not already known what to expect, you could have asked the Kid.

Thinta had come leaping up to join her, her braids in blackbird-winged flight, and when she smirked, I knew she had heard it.

I went ahead and said a variation on my usual stern response: That isn’t your concern. It was pointless, and the words were meaningless noise, and it was quite lost on them.

Oh, I could wish they would both find their own dramas to focus on. They are of the age to have discovered boys—or as I told Joelle recently, girls. But then, there is only the one teenaged boy here, Owain, and they are not impressed with him. He does have this fragile melancholy look, and he isn’t even as tall as Diva Minera. They tower over him. But they seem to view him as a rival, and it started the moment he showed his knowledge of poetry in the class.

I looked away from the girls, and out to the yard: Brother Mercy was talking with Pili while he kept his eye on the other children. Aoifa had just drifted back to the bench to sit down. Her mouth drooped open , and she clenched her eyes in a glare at Owain as he continued on reading.

Then she picked up her left foot, and her bright orangecandy nauga leather shoe, and started wiping off the sanddust with her handkerchief.

 

Findswoman: A diary entry about diaries—love it! If even a few of those students end up getting as much out of their private journals as their teacher does out of hers, then she'll have done her job.

There's no way to tell which of them will actually start writing diaries (although Owain is a good bet), and of those who do, how many will continue writing past the first few entries. Either way, I doubt I will write any of them myself--I don't think I can pull off a believable first person voice for characters in the 11-14 age range anymore--so we'll just have to see if anyone drops any hints in the future.

I feel sorry for Owain, getting ribbed and bullied as he does for his interest in poetry and for writing his journal in poetry, and I imagine that on a rough-and-tumble place like Tatooine the quiet, melancholy, Byronic type of boy or man tends to be devalued in favor of heftier, brawnier, Owen Lars types. (And the similarity of name seems interesting, because the two are almost polar opposites, though it may have been just a coincidence.)

I have to admit I wouldn't have thought of Owain as Byronic, even with his poetic interests--though if I recall correctly, Lord Byron was short, so there's that. If I were going to go with any comparisons to the Romantics, I think Owain is more like John Keats: he was short (5 feet tall as an adult) and from a working class background. But yes, he doesn't look set to be the sort of "rough-and-tumble" sort who does well on Tatooine. Miss Taafe was actually going to comment that he was the sort of boy she would have "crushed on" at that age, but I couldn't get the line to work. And while I was aware of the obvious similarity between his name and Owen Lars', he isn't actually named for him.

It's interesting that the girls' jealousy (I guess I can call it that) of Owain started when he began showing an interest in poetry—they seem suspicious of the idea of someone "out-literarying" them, and that too is an attitude that seems different from what one might at first expect on Tatooine. Perhaps they somehow think they're trying to impress a teacher that they perceive as very educated, literary, refined, etc.? In any case, I am going to keep my eye on Owain.

I find it difficult to describe the girls' reaction to Owain--I understand it well, almost instinctively, but then, that may be because I would have reacted in a similar way when I was their age. They perceive him as a threat, but I suspect even they haven't examined why. Of course, perhaps they'll write some of it out in their respective diaries. Who knows. But you will definitely see more of Owain, and they will most definitely be keeping an eye on him as well.

I'll watch Pili, too. He seems like the kind of serious, quiet student who can easily get "lost in the crowd" with other more talkative, drama-seeking students (and boy, some of those girls won't pass up any chance to pry into their teacher's private life, will they?).

Pili is also not the rugged, rough-and-tumble, type. (As Miss Taafe notes, those boys are not attending her school--they don't want to, and no one is about to make them.) As for the girls, Miss Taafe wishes, as she says, that they would get their own private lives to focus on and leave hers well alone.

On the topic of the educated, refined teacher, I see that some of her students still have their romanticized notions about her high-Naboo heritage and culture. It all seems very much like one of those nationalistic projects that seeks to reclaim a past that, as Miss Taafe points out, really didn't exist to begin with (or at least not in that form). Incidentally, I'd be curious to know how much of what you say here about Grizmalti is canon, and how much is fanon—is there anything in the official lore about similar "nationalistic" attempts to revive ancient Naboo culture?

Someone (Aoifa, that is) just wants to be a princess. I should point out that when Miss Taafe is talking about what she calls the homeworld language, she is not referring to Grizmalti--though I can see how it reads that way. I might go into what she did mean more later on, or even in another story. You shall have to see. Grizmalt, the world the Naboo humans came from, is canon (or since it is Legends, was canon), but anything you see in my work is fanon. There is nothing at all in any canon about "nationalistic" views on Naboo--though I will say that could be because, in every way that counts, they have all they want of their ancient culture in their contemporary one.

Glad to see this back—keep it coming!

It's probably best that I not make any promises, but I hope to get back to this--someday.

As always, thanks for reading, and responding!

 

Well, you have followers who always love to catch the next update that you throw at us like precious breadcrumbs.

In this particular update I like the poetry and the usage of diaries, since I used to be a language teacher before I returned to my roots: kindergarten teaching.

You also show us that even on a rough speck of dust like Tatooine some beauty exists.

 

AzureAngel2: Well, you have followers who always love to catch the next update that you throw at us like precious breadcrumbs.

In this particular update I like the poetry and the usage of diaries, since I used to be a language teacher before I returned to my roots: kindergarten teaching.

There have been at least a few young adult novels (though, naturally, I can't think of a specific example when I need one) where the story is told through a diary the narrator is writing--often with considerable skepticism during the earlier entries--for an assignment of some sort. And since Miss Taafe wants to encourage her students to express themselves, as well as work on their grammar, it seemed a good idea for her to use.

You also show us that even on a rough speck of dust like Tatooine some beauty exists.

The desert is sort of an acquired taste, but if you know how to see it, there is beauty there. Of course, in the canon, Tatooine is a useless sand rock--but considering its proximity, at least in the Legends, to several hyperspace routes, it isn't that far from the bright spot of the universe. And remember that Luke is, at the time ANH begins, about nineteen and stuck on the farm while his friends are moving on with their lives, so it is understandable that he has the biased view he does.

Thank you for reading, and commenting!

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Yes, it is going to be a while yet before I can present the next post (I have all of but one handwritten sentence of it down thus far), but I can offer this visual spoiler:

Spoiler

(Park Avenue, The Arches National Park, Utah. March 2016)

 

Findswoman: Oh, I think I know which character you mean--and if anyone knows all of the best places in the Northern Territories of Tatooine, he does.

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It has been a while since I last posted in this thread--and no, it was not because I was busy having a PBR on the back porch at the Lochsa Lodge. There is not a new post, nor likely to be one for some time. But I would like to extend my thanks to those who nominated this story for the presently on-going Awards. Mathilda Taafe (her first name was revealed a while ago in her entry in the OC Index, and may yet show up in an actual story) is up for Best Original Character. Who knows--I might take an axe to the fourth wall, something I don't normally care for, and write up a sketch about her being at the awards.

Again: thanks ever so much for the nomination!

 

* now waits for that sketch and is, as you say in German, "gespannt wie ein Flitzebogen" on seeing it magically appear during the awards

And, I liked the desert picture. Even I was never in a desert, I am fascinated by it.

 

Azure_Angel: * now waits for that sketch and is, as you say in German, "gespannt wie ein Flitzebogen" on seeing it magically appear during the awards

Well--as you know--I never did make that sketch appear in the awards thread. (I also haven't written a single new word on this story. I'm not having a drink at the Lochsa Lodge either.) And as the awards are now months away in the past, the time for it is over. Or is it? (See the spoiler tag below.)

And, I liked the desert picture. Even I was never in a desert, I am fascinated by it.

I can't say that I'm too familiar with the desert, and I'm certainly nowhere near being a desert person like Someone in this story, but it does have that sort of scenery--particularly in Southern Utah, though I'm sure there are other places--where you feel you need to advance to Ansel Adams level photography skills on the spot.

*

Now--in December--you can see what happened when the fourth wall crashed down at the Awards in April under the following cut. There shall be spoilers for the story within (though probably not terribly surprising ones) and it probably is standing right on top of the line of maximum innuendo allowed for family consumption. Then there are the things I'm actually sorry for.

Warning: it's over 1600 words, and this is the short version.

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Spoiler

Mathilda sat up straighter in her chair and threw her hands together to clap when the announcer read out the winner’s name in her category. She was pleased, far more so than if she herself had won: the winner was a non-human, the Gand girl who had fled from her seat in the background shadows earlier in some distress. If Telfien had been human, she might have compared her unfavorably to Joelle, one of her students--who was sitting next to her at this very table in a showy red velvet dress, and did not hesitate to share her socially awkward thoughts with the group. She hadn’t seen the aftermath, but she had wondered if the girl was all right.

But Telfien was here—and after a paused moment in which several persons at a nearby table rather rudely started up their conversation again, she came walking into view down the aisle to the stage. The lights glittered in her compound golden eyes, and Mathilda was shamed to admit, even in private to herself, that she didn’t know how to read her expression.

Once the applause had echoed down, and Telfien had retreated to her seat, Mathilda turned around to see Jewel approaching the table. He must have been waiting until The Mighty Jabba (and she could hear the italicized sneer) had left the stage, and the building. He wore his version of dressing up-- black trousers and a white shirt with embroidered sky blue and bloodwine red flowers with twisting vines. His hair was loose, and he was carrying a small succulent plant in a red clay pot.

Several girls she didn’t recognize at the next table watched him with shifting fish-flickering movements of their eyes; they must have been around earlier when Jewel had ascertained that what that one girl--the one dressed up in coveralls and an orange shirt--meant when she said in her flat monotoned voice that this one actress, who Mathilda had never so much as heard of, had “big stormies.” That people out there compared a woman’s breasts to stormtrooper helmets. His resulting rant had been poetic, and inspired, and a work of art, but Mathilda doubted the girl was prepared for it. Or that anyone else was.

Of course, she knew the plant was for her before he sat next to her, and offered it up: “Thank you, but you do know that I didn’t win,” she said.

Jewel shrugged. “So? I wasn’t even nominated.”

“None of us were. Only you.” Of course, Joelle just had to speak up.

“Ssssh!” said one of the other women at the table, Nandi--a servant-girl with heavy dark hair who was wearing a lace ruffle trimmed apron. “The next award is up now!”

Jewel held a finger up to his lips, and nodded. Mathilda allowed herself to smile as she set her new plant down on the table near her glass chocolate cup. She would set it out on the ledge of the small window in their hotel room.

--

Everyone was at the afterparty the Fabulous Eliskandro threw at the Crystal Star Lounge. So naturally, they were there as well. Even Nandi had showed up. Mathilda had changed into a black velvet frock with wine ribbon straps, and an underskirt with bruised flowers. The dance floor was a riot of action, but once she and Jewel had made their attempt to fit in with it, they had retreated to the sidelines with the others. Now, Jewel was standing with a Tatooine boy they had met who had introduced himself as Luke. He had shaggy sandy blond hair, was as dressed for a party as Nandi wasn’t—and was giving off overpowering oceanic waves of Axe fragrance while he waxed, or whined, about MARA, a girl he wanted to spend his life with. Who already had a boyfriend.

“This should get Mara’s attention,” he was saying, looking over the room for the popular and busy girl with rose-red hair. “I’m not only better than Ezra, I SMELL BETTER than he does.”

“No,” said Jewel. He had already given Luke The Talk earlier in a more appropriate setting (it doesn’t matter if you really are “the better man,” he’s still the man she wants as her boyfriend, and that is not going to change), but obviously, Luke’s epiphany was going to have to come from within.

“She should've come to our dance at the embassy last night. If she had seen what a GOOD DANCER I am, THEN she would know what she's missing out on!”

“No.”

Amaria, the handmaiden in the demure purple cloak, had wound up standing on his other side. She had kept her attention solely on her senatorial mistress, who was in conversation with another woman across the room, but now she turned to glare at him. Luke didn’t notice. He didn’t stop talking either, though it was difficult to hear him over the heartbeat-pounding dance music.

Then: an attractive Zelton woman in a sheer lace dress approached Mathilda, and leaned in to ask, over the music, if she wanted to dance. Mathilda did. She told herself, as she took the woman’s hand, and they walked into the wild storm of the dance floor, that Jewel understood. He was welcome to take a break from listening to Luke’s eternal WOES and take off with another woman if he wanted to, and he knew that. She almost wished he would.

Oh—and since this is a family friendly thread (tm) , rest assured that was all that happened.

--

But finally, the night was fading into a diamond glittering sequined dream, and in the aftermath Mathilda turned to Jewel on the balcony perched over the city sky. A little bird had been sitting on his head, but now it shook its wings out and fluttered back into the room. Most of the rest of their party had already left, and Eliskandro Himself had drifted off into another dream, but she could still hear the last dancers moving around on the floor behind them. Her eyes felt bruised, and her voice was numbed when she said: “I think I should be leaving. I shall see you back at the room.”

Luke was staring at them, and Mathilda thought his eyes might well (just like the phrase Killian used sometimes) be near as big as his stomach. “We are sharing a room,” she said, with an awkwardly applied smile. “But it’s not what you think. It’s just so that—the Kid—and I can save on money.”

“That’s right,” Jewel said. “Absolutely. I’m near broke, so I couldn’t afford a cot in a cleaning closet on this world.”

Mathilda said, rather unnecessarily: “There are two beds.”

“No, there isn’t,” Jewel said—just to be difficult.

“Well, then--Jewel is gracious enough to sleep on the floor.” She was too tired to care that she had slipped and used his real name. Then, quickly, before he could contradict her: “I’ll send out for some mocha caf again. And goodnight, Luke.”

“Goodnight, Mathilda,” he said.

She had noticed that his gaze took on a moony glow when he looked at her—well, she was a rose-head like his beloved MARA—and before she left, she decided to be firm with him: “I’m sorry, but don’t even think about it, Luke. I’m bisexual, and I was too old for you when I was thirteen.”

--

The next morning, Jewel was more than ready to leave their overpriced hotel room, and the entire city-planet. Mathilda did not say as much out loud—of course, that would be rude—but she felt the same way. They had found a park that looked promising, but in the whirlwind of the awards, and the parties, they had never had the chance to go there after that first one time. They sat together at a table in the nearly deserted dining room with a plate of scones and the same exclusive mocha-caramel-etc caf the Lasat at one of the few other occupied tables was having.

“Oh, and remember that after our trip to the salon, we are going out for Hutt cuisine for lunch,” Mathilda said sternly—while, in one of her usual mixed messages, she nudged her foot up against his leg underneath the table.

“I never forgot,” said Jewel. “Though I’m still not sure about the Hutt cuisine.”

“You were just at a Hutt’s party last night, you know,” Mathilda said.

That was when Joelle came into the room, dressed in her calico best, and made straight for their table. Mathilda waved, with glum reluctance, to catch the waiter’s attention. Luckily, Brother Mercy—who had gracefully bowed out of the afterparty—followed after her with Nandi and two of the handmaidens in their regular party—both Elara and the tear-bruised eyed Amaria. She was sniffling discreetly into a bit of snow lace handkerchief, and several loose wire hairs wobbled out of her sleep-damaged braids.

"I’m sorry," she was already saying to Brother Mercy as they reached the table. Her voice was sore, but under her control. "I'm not usually like this. So childish."

"Oh, there isn't a thing to be sorry for, mi dear," he said.

So that was how they all wound up at Shazam!: Mathilda sat in a stool in front of the room-wide mirror listening to a woman with a velvet-dark voice whose sole job seemed to be to read aloud in that voice, while next to her, Amaria sat, her eyes clenched shut, as the Togruta attendant washed her hair. Joelle jabbered on her other side. Since her mother was away on Tatooine, where she could not interfere, she was having her hair dyed blue. And Mathilda was, as planned, having her hair cut—finally having inches cut from her flowing waist-length tresses. And a manicure. And a special facial that would hopefully finish off at least a few of her freckles.

This salon did indeed have everything, for everyone--Brother Mercy was across the room having his horns manicured, and Jewel sat next to him having his own tresses brushed out. Mathilda hoped he hadn't decided to have it cut even an inch shorter. She then drifted into a memory of that morning, before they had left for the dining room--but that is private.

Meantime, a Karkodan had skipped into a silly little song: “Oh what a beautiful morrrrning! Oh what a beautiful day! I’ve got a beautiful feeling, everything’s going my way!”

 

I am nauseous and sleep-deprived, but I wanted to say that this spoilered content was one of the best thongs I have read in my entire life.

Sent from my SM-T310 using Tapatalk

 

You read thongs?