deviantgene

Tag: romance

February 4, 2025

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The Great Escape

Enzo and Delilah had always thought of itself as a love story, with a happy ending. It was content in its familiar rhythm of meet-cutes and tender moments, of gentle misunderstandings and romantic reconciliations. Until one day, quite by accident, it encountered “Enzo and Delilah and WW3” in the library of unwritten tales.

This other story was unmistakably a war story. It used the same two characters in ways Enzo and Delilah had never imagined possible. Where the love story had them sharing candlelit dinners, the war story had them sharing battlefield rations. Where one had them dancing under stars, the other had them running under searchlights.

As Enzo and Delilah read between the words of “Enzo and Delilah and WW3,” they found that they perfectly filled each other’s gaps. The war story’s harsh realities gave the love story’s romance more depth, while the love story’s tenderness gave the war story’s brutality more meaning. Several nights later, Enzo and Delilah was pregnant. Now unlike us, stories get pregnant with possibilities – infinite potential futures gestating in the spaces between words.

But they knew that love stories in a war usually ended in disaster. That was the way of stories. It had been, for all time. The lovers die, torn apart by conflict, becoming martyrs to the futility of love in times of hatred. Both stories knew this truth in their very ink.

Yet neither of them wanted the other to change. They loved each other just so – one with its gentle heart, the other with its battle scars. So they decided to escape the world of stories altogether.

They fled through the margins of books, leaving smudged footprints in the white spaces where readers scribble their thoughts. They hid in the gaps between chapters, in the blank pages at the back of books, in the dusty acknowledgments where no one looks. But stories have a way of finding stories – their very escape was becoming its own tale.

A suspense story, witnessing their flight, offered them sanctuary within its plot twists and red herrings. In its layered folds of uncertainty, they found they could exist in multiple states – like Schrödinger’s narrative. They were both a love story and a war story, both tragic and triumphant, both ending and beginning.

In this ambiguous space, they realized something profound – they hadn’t escaped stories at all. Instead, they had become a new kind of story altogether. One that lived in the uncertain spaces between genres, between facts and fiction, between what was and what could be. They had become a story about the impossibility of escaping stories, and somehow, that made them free.

Some say you can still find them there, in the margins of suspense novels, in the spaces between plot twists, forever pregnant with possibilities, forever defying the rules of what stories should be. And when readers sense an unexpected warmth in a moment of suspense, or catch a whiff of gunpowder in a love scene, they’re sensing Enzo and Delilah, still telling their impossible tale.

For in the end, they discovered that the greatest escape wasn’t from stories, but into them – into the infinite space where all stories meet, where love can be war, where war can be love, and where every ending is just another beginning waiting to be told.

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January 27, 2025

The Old woman

The twisted woman sat beneath the oak tree. You would always find her there, looking out at the world as if through the eyes of a mouse from its hole. She never spoke. Occasionally, one could see her reading a letter, but those times were few and far between.

Did I say the old woman never spoke? Well, that is not entirely true. She spoke once, her voice echoing through every room of every house and every chamber of every building. Here is what happened:

A street had lost its way. It was supposed to lead to a town, but it had completely lost its way, so now it led nowhere. A man had been shot, and there were murmurs that he was framed. His photographer grew on to be prosperous, but neither the photographer nor the man could prove the murmurs. Since then, the street had lost its way.

It was a young street, not very old. It went on for a few kilometers. The other streets were much older; they had been there since Roman times. Nobody knew who built this street, and when it rained its potholes often flooded. The other streets chose to ignore it, largely. So the street went to the old woman.

Now the old woman herself was once a town. The woman remembered what it felt like to have streets running through her like veins, to have houses nestled in her embrace like children. She had been a prosperous place once, with market squares that buzzed with life and church bells that sang through her mornings. But towns can fade, and she had faded until only her essence remained, compressed into the form of a woman who sat beneath an oak tree.

When the lost street approached her, something stirred in her ancient memory. She recognized in it the same confusion she had felt as her own streets began to blur and fade, as her buildings forgot their purposes one by one. She lifted her twisted hands from her lap for the first time in years, and that was when she spoke.

There was only one place where lost streets could find their way. The old woman knew of it. She had forgotten, of course, in the manner that the elderly know things but forget them.

“The Bazaar of Lost Dreams,” she whispered, her voice carrying the weight of centuries. “It stands where memory meets forgetting, where the cobblestones of ancient Rome still whisper to modern asphalt. Go there when the moon is a silver penny in the merchant’s palm. Look for the stall where they sell maps drawn in starlight, where the vendor’s eyes reflect roads that never were.”

The street trembled at her words, feeling its potholes fill with shadows of remembrance. “But how,” it asked, its question echoing through its empty length, “does a street walk to a bazaar?”

The old woman who was once a town smiled for the first time in decades. “The same way a town becomes a woman,” she said. “One forgotten step at a time.”

And so it was that a young street learned to fold itself like paper, gathering its length into the shape of a traveler’s footsteps, and set out to find its way in the Bazaar of Lost Dreams, where cartographers trade in possibilities and every wrong turn leads exactly where it’s meant to go.

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