H. R. M. Laventure
Bio
Stories (4/0)
The Botanist's Son
“And this one, my boy, I call a chalice, brimming with sunlight.” My earliest years are to me a flux of images. The first chapters in the story are not really linear, and this makes it quite difficult for me to keep track. I haven’t made sense of it all just yet. There are, however, a few facts that remain my frame to cling on, defiant columns rising from the sea. Firstly, I know my father was a scientist. More specifically, a botanist. The man loved flowers, and he could tell you a lot about them. Often too much. I’ve been told that he possessed the conversational quality of a single C-sharp note, sustained on an organ; at first one was curious to hear it, then one became bored, then one would be forced to take leave before their lack of tolerance became too obvious and, more than anything, impolite. His lectures were notorious for being at once zesty and unbearable. But, as a boy, I was rapt with them. Something I’d inherited from my mother.
By H. R. M. Laventure3 years ago in Fiction
The Publisher's Prejudice
“To my friends I am known as Mace, to my clients Mr Nase, and to you I am God.” So spoke the elderly publisher with a kind of judicious weight on each syllable, shaking his opposite’s hand, and dressing the furniture in his coat. His entrance had heralded a collective holding of the café’s breath, and only when Mr Nase was seated were the ricochets of quotidian busyness around allowed to reanimate – albeit in his orbit. Although the room was overpopulated with the clanging of spoons on crockery and the timekeeping of invisible footsteps, their shadows were mute; the world outside the little table between these two men was intangible, a cacophony of meaning so multivalent that it seeped into their senses as white noise; but here, there was anticipation, a shared sense of gravity, as if a letter were to slide through the door imminently with the kind of news enclosed that changes a life. It was under this very gravity that the publisher leaned back for a moment and let his hands tesselate on the finely tailored trousers lining his lap. His eyes wandered around the place with a purposeful gait, apparently indifferent to the silent defiance returned by the author opposite him.
By H. R. M. Laventure3 years ago in Fiction
The Patient's Plea
I As the day came to bloom, one Grace Swanson washed herself in the tide of the sun’s last cadences before it left for the wings. Its grandiose, vermillion light let the walls of her hospital room possess a warm fragrance of meditation, kept in time only by the audible measure of her heartrate. Such tranquillity as this was enough to beckon a knowing smile from the elderly woman, expelling the creases in her face only to accentuate her eyes – a rare shade of sapphire - and indulging in a particular kind of elusive harmony that can only be found in one’s own company.
By H. R. M. Laventure3 years ago in Fiction
The Woman's Reprieve
The Woman’s Reprieve I On no particular day, a very ordinary woman sat rewriting her own personal history. The pen felt heavier than usual, and there was a sense that she had to carve each line into the paper rather than simply filling in the form, ticking and crossing her way into the life she was soon to live. With the surrounding waiting room left bereft of her attention, the pause and play of ink scratching the page gave a definite sense to each stroke. These were no doubt symptoms of the gravitas of her choices, with her inner turbulence unveiling itself in the twiddling of a heart-shaped locket between her fingers, a relic of a time before. A better time, before the fallout of the present.
By H. R. M. Laventure3 years ago in Fiction