An Infinity of Stars - SF Smackdown

The Ultimate Cure for Athlete's Foot

The Ultimate Cure for Athlete’s Foot

Smackdown Round 2. Brief: mash up a couple of stories and give ‘em a SF twist.

For some unknown reason I chose The Portrait of Dorian Grey and Twilight.

Oh dear…

~

It was a day where cerulean and azure could be used to describe the sky, particularly if the author had been reading Oscar Wilde prior to trying to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard or even ThoughtInk to screen.

Bella was waiting; waiting with baited breath and her lower lip clenched delicately under pearly white teeth for her beau to arrive. They had met for the first time a few weeks before when she had performed the bard’s Hamlet in front of the mixed races of the Galaxy Playhouse in the Red Quadrant. As the place was a notorious dive, she had been startled to see a member of the gentry in the box normally reserved for the stage manager. That particular reservation was normally required to allow him a clear shot at any of the more unruly patrons, but Bella had been acquiring a growing reputation as a singer, one who could calm even the most rowdy onlooker, so to see someone different hovering gently next to the stage was a delight rather than the normal harbinger of someone getting zapped.

She had sung well that night, entranced by the idea of performing for someone other than the peanut throwing masses, and at the end of the performance the inappropriately named Mr Grey, he of English spelling and deliciously strawberry lips, had swept into her dressing room expounding with delight as to the superfluity of her performance, and thankfully narrowly missing the moment when she had been scraping the dead skin off her Athlete’s Foot.

Instantly smitten by his boyish charm and good looks, the high noble cheekbones and swept back hair of his forehead, that and the slightly metallic sheen to his skin, Bella had swooned into his arms, delighting Dorian and leading to a meeting the following morning in one of the more fashionable parlours, where they had whiled away the afternoon walking through fields of holographic daffodils and cavorting with virtual comets. Daydreams of his embrace had haunted her waking hours since, and had only enhanced her longing for a replacement to the vampiric liaisons that she had left behind her.

It had been only four weeks since she had been caught up in the temporal vortex that had whisked her Dorothy-like away from high school and the tribulations of vapidly written teen life, weeks where she’d found herself in the tortuous and twisted world in which she now co-inhabited with all manner of strange races and alien beings. Thankfully though they all valued music and she’d put her predilection for the works of Showaddywaddy into good use earning a living as a singer, before the owner of the Red Quadrant had spotted her and asked her if she fancied moving into acting. It was there that she’d first seen Dorian, and had since seen him as often as possible. The practiced airs and experienced charm of a man graced a boyish face, a face that seemed to almost sparkle with life and energy, his curiously English affectations leaving her breathless with anticipation at another meeting. There was a slight darkness to him that she found intriguing too, something that spoke straight to her fantasies. The more time she spent with him, the greater the longing to become his had become, until she had made up her mind that morning that she would hand him her soul to do with as he wished.

“My lady, I appear to have caught you deep in thought, I can only hope that one day you will look into mine eyes with such concentration and ardour of intellect.”

Bella flushed and leapt to her feet as Dorian joined her at her small table, knocking over the small swan faced alien who had come to take her order, reeling back from the flapping wings with warnings of swans breaking arms flapping across her mind with the voice of her mother.