5 Sentence Fiction – Yearning

I am so excited because I got to choose this week’s Five Sentence Fiction inspiration word at Lillie McFerrin Writes.

So I picked Yearning. If you weren’t aware, it’s one of my very favorite words and the constant inspiration for this blog. Of course I had to enter!

Despite the fact that I am short on sleep, I scribbled my entry on a tiny square of paper at work, folded it up and smuggled it home to share with you. Be sure to go read the other ‘Yearning’ entries and maybe enter yourself!


Yearning

He bounded up the wide stone steps two at a time, his heart slamming frantically against the birdcage of his ribs, and flung open her tower chamber door, “Princess!”

The room was strangely still — even the dove loose in the rafters was hushed — and white muslin curtains flapped loose in the breeze. A thick rope was knotted tight round the carved mahogany bedpost; his eye traced it across the floor and over the edge of the window sill.

Her pillow, plumped up on her neatly made bed, had a note pinned to the satin coverlet: ‘I couldn’t wait any more.’

 Far below, he heard departing hoof beats and watched as she rode his horse away.

“Fair Rosamund” (detail) by John William Waterhouse

The Perils of Period Film Research

All those rumors you heard are true. I did post over at Dasia’s amazing blog, Dasia Has a Blog. You can go read it here: Anna’s Guest Post on Dasia Has a Blog – Top Ten Torrid Moments in Period Film.

Disclaimer: This guest post includes a great deal of blushing and self-fanning, as well as some of the most torrid moments in period film I could find. It was too saucy for this blog, which ranks it roughly at PG-13.

I’m still missing my number 10, so head over there and share your favorite. Seriously. Because there’s only so many times I can watch some of these scenes over and over again before people start talking.

WARNING: May cause quickened breathing and increased heart rate. Just saying.

The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart by Matthias Malzieu


What if falling in love cost you your life? Would you be able to resist?

The story opens in Edinburgh, in the late 1800s, during the greatest freeze the city has known. In this introduction, the cold and snow almost become a character on their own. You meet the protagonist, Jack, as a frail infant abandoned by his mother to the idiosyncratic and brilliant Dr. Madeleine.
To save his life, Madeleine grafts a cuckoo clock to his heart, but this alteration requires rules that cannot be broken:
“FIRSTLY: DON’T TOUCH THE HANDS OF YOUR CUCKOO-CLOCK HEART. SECONDLY: MASTER YOUR ANGER. THIRDLY: NEVER EVER FALL IN LOVE. FOR IF YOU DO, THE HOUR HAND WILL POKE THROUGH YOUR SKIN, YOUR BONES WILL SHATTER, AND YOUR HEART WILL BREAK ONCE MORE.”

Jack is tortured by the continual presence of his clock heart, which ticks and whirrs and cuckoos at the least convenient moment. He is bullied and mocked at school and it embarrasses him in public. 
The cast of characters that surrounds Jack as he grows is colorful and eclectic, a peg-leg prostitute and a Scotsman with a musical spine, all overseen by the protective and loving Dr. Madeleine, who has adopted her boy with the cuckoo clock heart.
The heart of the story is Jack’s doomed love for the coquettish, mercurial and short-sighted Miss Acacia, a street singer turned cabaret performer. For Jack, the perils of love are very real and shape all of his choices throughout the book. It’s not only love he has to control, but jealousy and anger ground through the gears of love, as his rival Big Joe vies for the hand of Miss Acacia. 
Jack later teams up with the famous film pioneer and illusionist Géorges Melies, who becomes enamored of his condition and its ramifications. The theme of illusions figures strongly, for nothing is quite as it seems in this little fable.
Malzieu seamlessly integrates the elements of steampunk with literary fiction, allowing this novella to transcend the usually cursed designation of “genre fiction”. It should, for this is really literary steampunk and you need neither to be really very literary or steampunk to enjoy it.
Melzieu’s prose has a dreamy, cinematic elegance, distinctly European. The pacing ticks along steadily – it is a quick read at 172 pages – and the action winds tighter and tighter until you cannot wait any longer for the denouement. The vivid characters stay with you long after you close this slim volume. There is a twist at the end, which cuts sharp as the second hand of a clock.

The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart has already been lauded as an adult fairytale, but it seems even more than that. The story concerns the lies we tell ourselves and others in our pursuit of love and our fear of love’s loss. It’s a magical journey that ends too soon, but makes the re-reading all too pleasurable.
Mathias Melzieu is also known as the lead singer of the French band, Dionysos. I have included the peculiarly wonderful book trailer, set to the music of Dionysos. The book is currently in production to become a full-length animated film, La Mécanique du Coeur, directed by the author and Stéphane Berla. In short, Malzieu proves steampunk offers stories with a beating heart.
Article first published as Book Review:The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu on Blogcritics.