Among the Whispering
Fiction
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” — The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
A wave of anger flowed through me like a typhoon, brow-beating the ship I had only just learned how to steer.
“In this day and age, technology should work!”
The elevator had broken down. Mitch, sat down in the corner, pulled a box of matches from his pocket.
“We don’t need matches, Mitch, we need an electrician.”
“They’re candy cigarettes.”
“Why do you carry them in a match box?”
He shrugged.
“They’re easy to carry.”
I looked at him and he understood.
“It’s for emergencies. If I feel faint, I know I have something sugary to save me from public humiliation.”
The entire elevator was crystalline glass. You were able to see the remains of West Egg. Gatsby’s dilapidated estate lay overrun by the very thing we are subordinates to—nature. Nick Carraway tried to keep it preserved, but The Globe made sure that could never be the case.
Everybody in town would talk of Gatsby’s parties. He brought such glitter to people’s lives, and I don’t think he even realised it. Such an inward man. The act of longing for times gone by is the most primal of all instincts. I wish I had met Gatsby, but I’m glad he was spared the travesty that would follow.
Long gone were the days of flapper dresses and champagne flutes. We were stuck in an elevator that was beginning to freeze. A new dawn brought an ice age into our lives. Could the Buchanans have held strong under the bite of the big freeze? When they found Daisy, she had a piece of paper tucked in her bra. In Gatsby’s handwriting, it read:
If I knew that you were
Belladonna of the soul,
I would have retreated
to the womb long ago…
How do you carry permanence in a fragile world? It’s a question we asked ourselves over and over, but we could never settle on an answer. If everything you touched fell apart, would you reach out at all?
Tom Buchanan tried to drill Daisy out of the ice, but something went wrong and he died. They were eventually buried together. Rumours circulated about the ice being far hotter where they were than anywhere else. I never found out if it was really true.
“What are you thinking about, old sport?” Mitch asked, with an heir of Gatsby’s cadence.
“The very man you just impersonated. Everything snowballed after he died.”
“They say that Myrtle looked like an angel wrapped in silk when she was hit. Like all the secrets they kept buried themselves into her like a burning beehive. Killing her was simply blowing out the cards, and she was the joker—discarded.”
“Nick doted on Gatsby. His mansion was The Garden of Eden for Carraway. Daisy took the fruit from a forbidden tree, and Gatsby fell down with her.”
Mitch took out a lighter and let the flame hug the tip of the candy cigarette. A spark came and sugar burned. Pointing to the flame, Mitch said:
“This is Gatsby, and Daisy is the candy. They lived in a drowned world, pulling down everyone they got close to.”
I blew out the flame, running my hand along the top and snakily down Mitch’s skin.
“Now, we are creatures in white. Afraid to touch. Afraid to love. Even the gentlest gesture has an obliterating consequence.”
Mitch snapped the candy cigarette in half, crushing it into a fine powder.
“Snap.”
I looked out the window, from West Egg to East Egg and back again.
“Nothing but dust…”
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