Ophelia

A Note For My Dear (And potentially estranged) Readers:
Awhile Back I began writing a story about a made-up woman and a egotistical writer. I posted those things on this blog and then hated every word I wrote. I then ask you, my closest friends, to disregard any beginning involving apartments, fish, dreams involving horribly thin train metaphors,and made up women and instead try this very new (albeit pretentious and underdeveloped) beginning to 'Ophelia'.




Stephanie Mersault gazed quietly at the face of her brother as he read to her from a book she had read many times before. His voice was calm and deep, the sound of a childhood lullaby heard in a half remembered moment of nostalgia. It did not crack and it did not waver; it held strong to the course plotted by its master, its even monotone cutting clear and bright through waves of fever. It was the voice of a man in complete control of his own world; a man absent of doubt. She realized that this voice was the one thing that she would miss, and the last thing she would ever wish to hear.
She coughed. A spatter of red, a dizzying spiral downward.
He stopped reading and looked up. A look of concern began to spread across his face, but she waved it away and struggled to catch her breath. “I’m… all right Eli…keep reading…please.” His gray eyes flashed fluorescent as they flicked back to the book. He read quietly, and she closed her eyes, falling again into the sound of his voice. She was alone, in some warm place untouched and deep inside.
There was a banging at the door, and a woman’s voice screeched. “Eli! Unlock this door immediately! You have no right to keep me out! She is my daughter, Eli, my baby girl! I need to be there! I need to be there when-” The voice stopped, stumbling to a halt before the remainder slipped out. A throat was cleared. “I need to be there when she dies. Eli, please open this door.”
Eli had stopped reading. He looked towards his sister’s bed and watched for the rising of her chest. He closed the book and gently placed it on the pillow beside her. He stood up, ran his fingers through his dark brown hair and walked towards the door. He pushed aside the wicker chair he had wedged under the doorknob, and swiftly opened the door. His mother rushed by him and into the room, her normally kempt hair a wild and vicious thing. She knelt beside her daughter’s bed and grasped her pale hand. “Stephanie, I’m-”
“It’s too late mother. She’s dead.”
Mrs. Mersault whipped around, her face turning purple in quiet rage. “You little bastard, you-“
“That is quite enough.”
“You’ve taken her from me! You’ve taken my darling girl from me!”
Eli laughed. It was a cold and foreign thing. “You did this to yourself, so don’t point that bony finger at me. You never cared for Stephanie before, so don’t start pretending now. It’s disgusting to watch you try.” Mrs. Mersault stood up, her entire body shaking with rage.
“You contemptible brat. I loved Stephanie more than any mother ever could!”
“She didn’t see it that way, and neither do I. I’m going to ask you to leave, and you will do as I say. If you don’t, I won’t hesitate to throw you out of this house myself. “
“You wouldn’t lay a finger on me!”
“You know that isn’t true.”
Mrs. Mersault stared at her son and then brusquely walked out of the room. There was a clatter of heels in the hall, the sound of her descent and then the slam of the front door.
Eli sat down on his sister’s bed and brushed a stray strand of blonde hair off of her face. Her blue eyes were closed, and with a sudden pang of sadness Eli knew that he would never see them again.

She had left everything to him, the house, her small fortune, everything. Eli had accepted it quietly and just as quietly gave most of it away. The only thing he kept was the house.
It was a small home, nestled in the valley of a quiet New England township. It was elegant in its confusion and had been praised by various visitors for its striking resemblance to an observatory. An old friend of Stephanie’s had once told her that there nothing else that could possibly fit her so perfectly, that this unconventional home was the only thing that could possibly contain her. She had laughed and said, “You’re absolutely wrong. This is the only place where I have ever felt truly free.”
Stephanie Mersault had been a woman of modest fame. A musical genius, she had written music for three films, conducted a well known chamber orchestra for two years, had composed several original pieces, all of which received glowing praise from several big names, and had discreetly aided in the composition of well known musical giant Marcel Gideon’s magnum opus Koshka. She had been described as one of the greatest composers alive, a burning sun.
Then she wrote M.
It had premiered on a Sunday in January three years before her death. It was a small piece, written for one cello and two violins. She had selected the musicians herself, a rag tag group of unknowns. The cello was played by a Mr. Jonah Gerring, a music professor at a small Midwestern University. The two violins were played by a pair of burnouts discovered in the dregs of a failing New England conservatory. After the performance, no one could recall their names.
The crowd had arrived, stocked to the brim with followers of Mersualt, critics of well known publications such as the ever prestigious art rag Literature Abounds! and the major musical authority Minor Notes. The music hall had been filled with the refined babble of the intelligentsia as they waited for the unveiling of what was undoubtedly Miss Mersault’s greatest work.
She had taken the stage under a roar of thunderous applause, her blonde hair tied neatly into a tight bun and her slender frame tucked into a skintight red dress. She was, to many drooling men in the audience that night, the embodiment of seduction. She bowed deeply and the thunder abated. She stared at the music spread before her on the black stand, the musicians sat, their bows poised and ready, and with a flourish described later as the pulling of a trigger, M sprang into existence.
When it was done, Stephanie stood on the stage, her back turned to a bemused crowd. She smiled to Jonah Gerring and his two compatriots; she did not turn to look at the faces of the critics and fans who sat in dark silence behind her. Instead, she turned sharply and, in the company of her three unknowns, exited stage left.
M, once anticipated as the crowning jewel of a young genius’s career, was lambasted. When asked for a comment on the composition, Stephanie had refused, saying: “You don’t care to hear what I have to say. You only want to hear an apology. I don’t apologize for my work.”
After M, she retreated to the safety of her home in her quiet New England township and allowed herself to fade into obscurity. A year after the premier of M, Stephanie Mersault was diagnosed with lung cancer. She refused treatment, electing instead to live her life as she wished, not as her disease demanded. Two years later, in the room where she had built the bullet that killed her career, Stephanie Mersault died.