Fly Me To The Moon (Bell Book & Candle Pt. IV)

Serena was sitting at her favorite table at the boulangerie and watched  disinterestedly as the fidgety young woman was nervously rummaging through her enormous Marc Jacobs' bag. Funny, Serena thought, how fashions do seem to imperiously dictate what was merely acceptable and what was so very chic.

Take this young woman she had been observing. Mid-twenties, rail thin, flip-flop clad well-manicured feet, hair carefully tousled to give that "I just fucked my brains out & need a a ciggy" look who now after digging through a suitcase-sized purse was wielding her Marlboro Light cigarette like Darth Vader engaging in battle with Luke Skywalker in some Star Wars flick with one hand & loudly & crudely screeching, "Alright, alright, already... to make a long story short, here's what the fuck he said...." into her Blackberry with another.

All while the young woman's table companions engaged in similar modes of behavior. Chomping on their gum, slurping their overpriced five adjective coffees, blowing their noses, making maddening sounds as they tore into their pastries like lions tucking into antelopes. Gorging themselves on everything at once, appreciating none of it as they did!

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!



A choler rose within her.

Such cretins offended Serena's well developed aesthetic sensibilities.
The desire to crush the offensive sight was strong, not unlike that of a dutiful housewife who has just spied a roach climbing on the dinner table.

It was a combination of revulsion & rage, how dare something so vile show itself so brazenly!

Serena came so very close to demonstrating her disgust, it was just a matter of unthinking her, a small but distinct chasm would form between the right & left hemispheres of the girl's brain, slowly but surely creating an avalanche of neural synaptic dysfunction all at once, like watching a stunned insect frying on a light bulb, but the creature was simply not worth the energy expenditure.

When Serena plucked the gowans fine with some of the creme de la creme of La Belle Epoque society no more than 100 years ago, this young woman wouldn't even have been thought to have sufficient charm to use as a scarecrow for a field of corn.  Though Serena likely would have hung her out in a lonely field back then.
Crows needed food, too, poor things. Ah, those days of the 19th century neo-renaissance.

Now women like that were considered the height of desirability.
Astonishing.
What an era....

No wonder, Serena had been so depressed as of late without any desire whatsoever to practice her unique type of social intercourse. She could find no one worthy of assimilating during her daily prowls around the city these days.
The UnBecomings had been just that these days....
Unbecoming.

Ugly, mentally flaccid, completely unsatisfying...
An intellectual abortion, a lonely ghost ride in a barren, inhospitable desert.


Serena was ravenous.
Starved for the kind of mind & souls that could fill the vacuous void that threatened to annihilate her...
It was an endless hunger, an aching need that became excruciatingly painful during long droughts like this. She could feel the tsunami of tears rising within her, inundating her...

NOOOOOOO!!!!!!

All these years amongst these beings had left a truly unwelcome emotional imprint upon her, she must refocus.

Being what some would crudely call a mental vampire, an intellectual succubus was just not the same existence as those creatures of the night that flopped around as the occasional bat & drew the plasma out of their victims. They could feast on rats, vermin, and other undesirables easily. This would sustain them, but not never an Eskaran like her.

Unlike the Nosferatus of this planet, Serena could not survive for long without a particular kind of mind... she couldn't conjoin with just anyone or anything. It would not fill the hollowness within her. Such things would would be too ephemeral like air through a flute, making music for the length of the player's breath, yes, but no more than that.

She was so weary... of it all.
The false charm, the luring, the constant search for the perfect prey...
To what end all of this?

Perhaps it was time for her to be assimilated...
The truth is she longed to love & be loved as these humans did.

To look upon the face of the moon and see not merely some satellite to an unimportant planet in some obscure galaxy, but instead to see the ivory-laced visage of what Italo Calvino explained to her on the starry night that he un-Became so willingly in her arms:

My return was sweet,

my home refound, but my thoughts were filled only with grief at having lost her, and my eyes gazed at the Moon, forever beyond my reach, as I sought her. And I saw her. She was there where I had left her, lying on a beach directly over our heads, and she said nothing. She was the color of the Moon; she held the harp at her side and moved one hand now and then in slow arpeggios. I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first silver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.

Blogophilia 50.2 Topic: "To Make a Long Story Short"

Bonus points

(hard, 2 pts): mention a scary movie (i.e., the movie title)

(easy, 1 pt): mention a brand of cigarettes (i.e., brand name of cigarettes)

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The Un-Becoming: Bell, Book & Candle Pt. 3

The shades of night fell over the bay.
Darkness cloaked the sky in its inky phosphorescence as the stars began their nightly dance quiring to their ever attendant cosmic audience. Serena spied the very first one to trill out to her and she sang back sweetly to it,

"Star light, star bright; first star I see tonight.
I wish I may, I wish I might... have the wish I wish tonight."

The old childhood ditty taking her back on a walk down memory lane.
All magnolia blossom-lined and honeysuckle-scented.
She could fairly hear the chirruping of the cicadas and see the liquid-flashed lovelight of an amorous firefly flickering through the sweetness of a midsummer night....

Only they weren't exactly her memories, were they?
Serena smiled as she realized that it had happened again, quite unconsciously.
Not in the usual way that she invoked her powers.

Her native Pyrenees held many charms, including starlit evenings and fragrant flora, but no such saccharine-soaked musical pleas of youth were part of her past. No, she thought while chuckling to herself, that quaint picture burning like incense in her mental retina came from quite a different source.

Her mind held many such thoughts in proxy, that spun kaleidoscope-like in their random patterns, but they were not her own memories. They were the residual energy she had appropriated over the eons , a byproduct of the assimilation of her victims. 

Sadly in these modern times of Twitter and Play Station 3, most of her prey was so provincial in their worldly knowledge & so limited in their mental capacity that they offered very little pure entertainment value as they un-became.

Serena sighed wistfully, moving away from her expansive bay view, sat down on her Ruhlmann club chair, reached for the glass of reposado on the Mies sidetable & sipped slowly. Drinking deeply from the font of the agave nectar as she began to muse...

She licked her lush lips in contemplation of more interesting times; feeling the phantom taste of her very first victim. Such ambrosial essence did that beloved Queen of the Nile exude the night Serena took her. The many-headed supposed it was just an ordinary asp that drained the lifeforce from Cleopatra's milk-soaked body. 

Never realizing it was just a parlor trick, really, an easy bit of transmogrification into a lower beast.

Serena still remembered the creaminess of her first dip into immortality; the excitement of suddenly feeling every hope, every dream, every tear, every scream flood out of that woman of the Nile and into Serena's own empty being... This emotional napalming nearly annihilated her at first. Prior to that Serena had been just an empty vessel, an inanimate thing, needing to be filled.
The un-Becoming of a victim was like no merely visceral orgasmic experience ever known. The KNOW-ing that came subsequent to the un-Becoming was something many an ancient Eskaran poet had tried & failed to describe. It was an intellectual & emotional smorgasbord. The feral hunger for it, a terrible need when left unsatisfied. 

It was the oldest parasitic force in the galaxy and the most creative...
Certain human scientists, like the famed Professor Hawking, had come close to revealing their truth. They were stopped, of course. 

No such lower life-form could hold such a sacred trust.

Serena did take pity on him, though...
She coveted his brain, but loved his spirit and allowed him to live, though in a sadly incapacitated way. Still, he was allowed to continue his work but was slightly misdirected by her gentle molding into the soft clay of his grey cells. He never knew it was she who persuaded the others to allow him to live or that she had ever so slightly derailed his life's work. Allowing him glimpses of "heaven" but no real promise of the milk & honey that he had merited on his own.


She took quite a bit of ribbing for her rank sentimentality, but her wishes prevailed, as usual. She was a remarkably persuasive creature.

Funny to her how the pages of human history were nothing more than incoherent scribblings, really. Mythologizing the most important truths. And turning the myths into what they called empirical facts. Why the Eskaran race ever deigned to descend upon this third rock from a rather ordinary sun in a such a dull spiral galaxy that was peopled with such cosmic mutants was beyond Serena's ken. Many of the original pilgrims, the Elders, (the ones who didn't assimilate into this race of glorified monkeys) joked that it was likely some accident, some existential joke that landed them here... The old we ran out of light fuel on our way to the Virgo Cluster.

Yes, every Eskaran was taught the hard way:
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong...."





Blogophilia 49.2 Topic: "Walk Down Memory Lane"

Bonus points:

(hard, 2 pts): incorporate a Murphy's Law

(easy, 1 pt): mention a species of poisonous snake

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