#patrickkwon

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natovna over the sea

sea bound, the airship thrashed against its leash.

natovna, thirteen, daughter of the house of romanov, held, since farthest memory, an abysmal curiosity about her hohenzollern relations.

she had never set foot on prussian soil, nor met the muddied hand of any junker that might have tendered it; now here she was, in the escort of count ferdinand von zeppelin, for an aristocratic demonstration of german craftsmanship.

she could not be impressed. she was not, however, indifferent to the gravity of the event, but she was old enough to hide her disinterest.

her tutors, those curators of the old world who thrust themselves against the cuspated weirs of modernity, now inventoried on a mechanized assembly line, where civil gentry, and practiced decorum crashed, thunderingly, onto the stoney breaks of modern shores, had quietly indoctrinated her with a deeply sowed romantic lust for poetry and architecture. she burned for bostogne, under a cover of snow, nestled within a smithed shield wrought in frankish relief, wreathed in animal skin, burrowed like a romanesque detail clustered on a frieze of a towering spire, of an high gothic abbey, a bas cut of stone, crowning an halo, orbiting arched masonry.

they that exercise destiny do so in the hall of mirrors so that every angle of their aspect is softened by the prismatic flare of the casted hues. a ring in the eye produces an agitation, a black pearl. and the bearer of the object, once discovered, must feel the world for the hard obsidian that formed it. because if you do not practice volition, as it is said, the will to power will will itself against you. this was not a man that fought nature, or beast, or the man opposite him, or even himself, but the idea of an idea.

it wasn't the wild primitive passions that would slay her, but the absent minded neglect of routine engineering that would throttle her fortune.

she carried with her, in her heart, certain short passages of literature, poetry committed to daily meditation, a mantra whose long arm still held onto the snow covered roots of barbarian encampment.

it was her latest devotion.

"sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity, and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of envy and spite; how it sets running in the vein the free waters of generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks, or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he supposed, for, he thought, shakespeare must have written like that, anonymously, needing no thanking, or naming, but only their work in the daytime and a little ale at night".

the horns blasted and a sharp looking queue advanced into the hot aired future of space travel.

the dirigible was clasped by cable and seemed to tug at it's repression with a malignant despair.

natovna set one foot into the future with a vacant resolve, then finally with a solid acquiescence, and when they were in the air she unclasped her armrest and slumped low in the seat. finally, when her discomfort seemed to abate a little, and her curiosity seemed to swell a little, she decided to peek over the window, and seeing the tiny lighted cities far below, slammed back into her seat wide-eyed, with a composition of panic and tingly excitement.

later, somewhere over normandy, a large mass, glowing in the evening sky, announced it's presence with a blistering thunder; an electric cloud, crackling with tungsten bolts, drifted into their path.

then all the orders were given.

and the airship began to tilt.

and natovna remembered,

shy one, shy one, shy one of my heart, she moves in the firelight pensively apart.

she carries in the dishes, and lays them in a row. to an aisle in the water with her i would go.

she carries in the candles, and lights the curtained room, shy in the doorway and shy in the gloom;

and shy as a rabbit, helpful and shy. to an aisle in the water with her i would fly.

--patrick kwon

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