SCINTILLATIONS
(n.) (pl.) (astronomy) The twinkling of a star or other celestial body caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere.
SOPHIE | 22 | SHE/HER
Full-time English Literature undergrad between Trinity College Dublin and Columbia University, currently in my senior year. My academic interests are centred around prosody, poetry (particularly of the Romantic period) and late nineteenth century to early twentieth century literary fiction. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edith Wharton, J. D. Salinger, Sylvia Plath and M. L. Rio are some of my primary literary influences, though I draw much of my inspiration from a wealth of personal experience. I have been writing since childhood, with Scintillations encompassing nine years of my last decade's work.Stylistically I aim to achieve a blended balance of poetics within prose; as a literary fiction writer I am constantly conscious of the weight of my words and focus more on the purpose and presentation of my writing than anything else. I hope to elevate the everyday and create a sense of estrangement within the familiar world to heighten our consciousness of the human condition and its place in the wider world. Each entry of Scintillations is written in the present tense from a first person perspective to lend a structural credence to the sense of urgency and immediacy of the narrative.I can be contacted on any of the social medias linked on this site, and am always more than happy to discuss my academic or writing endeavours.←
GENERAL CONTENT WARNING: GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF SUICIDE; SELF HARM; PHYSICAL, EMOTIONAL AND SEXUAL ABUSE; EATING DISORDERS; DRUG USE.
A young man stares transfixed at the hands before him. They are, of course, his hands, and over the short course of his life they have held many things, from panicked fistfuls of prescription pills to paintbrushes. As he thinks back over some of the most pivotal points in his life, he comes to a simple revelation: there are people in this world who are meant to create and there are people in this world who are meant to destroy, and if we're not one then we're most certainly the other.All that's left for him to do is to embrace that much.—Hubble Constant is the first entry in the Scintillations series, a picaresque novel narrated by the world-weary Nathaniel Milsom as he traverses his teenage years with resentment and remorse. The narrative spans five years and follows the most significant relationships in his life from their brilliant beginnings to their seemingly fated failures.Discover its cast here. Read its prologue here.←
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Nathaniel Milsom: The narrator of Hubble Constant. Troubled and terrified, he begins the novel unable and unwilling to find a reason to linger in a lacklustre life any longer.Alistair Fellows: Nathaniel's chief confidant, an aspiring actor in every sense of the word. The unexpected product of a turbulent home life, Alistair acts as the group's voice of reason, much to his own detriment.Ezra Blake: Alistair's boyfriend, a meek and morose photographer whose deathly devotion to beauty often leaves those around him devastated. Always searching for something unconventional.Alban Tenley: An artist, Ezra and Easton's childhood friend. Loyal to a fault and looking ever forwards, he is an open and often overly-enthusiastic optimist. He means well at heart, but has difficulty understand his priorities.Isabeau Durant: A cousin of Alban's, or the closest thing to it. Though her neuroblastoma keeps her confined to hospital hallways and wheelchair wanderings, her fight against the illness reminds Nathaniel of his own childhood.←
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??? T ??? T U S: ???Hands were always supposed to create.Of course they were, of course they were — isn’t that the very reason we were given them in the first place, after all? To create something of worth? I saw it time after time after time in his dim bedroom, those small hands sweeping across the blank canvas, his pale skin stained with paint he could never quite wash off after yet another evening at work. I’m watching the soft flecks falling like snow onto his smock, laughing as he reaches a hand upwards to brush back a stray strand of hair, unknowingly colouring his forehead a soft, pastel green in the process, and he’s giving me a sidelong glance and a smile, asking what I find so funny while I’m shaking my head with a chuckle, telling him to just focus on finishing the painting, the last I would ever see him working on.I never did get to see the final product, and yet in spite of all that transpired between us, I have no doubt but that it was something beautifully bright and brilliant, if only by virtue of having been created by his hands, his hands which I so often held in my own, alabaster on copper, seafoam on sand. Those hands — and indeed the hands of those I have pushed away, those who have forced me to push them away, those who have pushed me away — are capable of creating so much, so much; how could I ever hope to live amongst them?How, with these hands, could I ever hope to create a life worth anything?Staring down at them now, each and every mistake is visible, etched onto their scarred surface: that hazy June evening, the grey bedsheets bunded into my broken hands, my fingers struggling to make the noose I had practiced so diligently for days beforehand, slipping it over my head, tightening it around my neck, a familiar suffocation; years later, that horrid January night, the white tablets stained black with my blood, my palms cupping them gently, cradling them as though they were something precious, something perfect, a chemical salvation; how could such hands as these build a life for anyone? Steeped in such rich sorrows, how could these hands do anything ever again?As harsh as it may be, the simple truth of the matter is that there are people in this world whose hands were meant to create, and there are people in this world whose hands were meant to destroy, and if we’re not one then we must be the other. For a long while I hid myself inside a hypocritical hope, trying to trick myself into thinking that I was capable of anything other than the destruction I knew so well, and yet in the end the illusion came crashing down around me regardless, leaving me with no choice but this.In a way I suppose it’s an apt end, isn’t it?
On the back of my left hand sits one lone scrape, about three or four inches in length, occupying the once empty space between the slight curve of my thumb and index finger. The cut is shallow, having barely bled above the surface at all, and it has scabbed since I last looked upon it, fickle flakes of rust surrounding its angry agate centre. A mountain of my own making, the sore skin is raised and elevated above the flat plains either side. I raise my hand slightly, turning it so that the cut catches the light from the window and throws it back at my tired eyes, almost glowing amidst the small scraps of June sun.As far as these self-inflicted injuries go, this one would be rather unremarkable had it not acted as the catalyst for this entire catastrophe. The first cut of the evening, the first cut of the last year to falter in its purpose of eliciting that sharp scorch at the soft sundering of skin; what else was I to do but what I did? That desperate desolation, that dire desire for death brought on by the rapid realisation that the only thing keeping breath in my broken body had just failed — what else could I have done? Attempt after attempt after attempt at recreating the expected hurt, each and every one failing, a newfound numbness that I wanted nothing to do with. Who could fairly blame me for acting as I have?Who, in my position, would have done any different?
CHAPTER FOUR.←
“You must be living here, right?” he asks, continuing on without even bothering to wait for my answer. “There’s no way you could make that sort of commute, even if you wanted to.”“I’m boarding.”“Really? So you’re here by yourself?”“Yes.”“I can’t even imagine. Still, it must be pretty convenient living right by the main building though, huh?” he says with a laugh, shifting his gaze to the window just opposite, and right as he does I can’t help but spy a small trail of yellowing blotches running from his ear along his neck until they disappear beneath his wrinkled shirt collar…bruises? “I thought I’d like to board, but my townhouse is only about a half hour drive, so it would hardly be worth it.” Alistair is looking out at the tennis courts as I look at him. “Even so, I’m pretty envious, to be honest.”The shadow is looking at the light and wondering how it got such ugly marks.They wouldn’t have caught my attention if he hadn’t tried to hide them, but even without my glasses I can see the rough, uneven streaks where whatever cheap makeup he’s tried to cover them with has melted away with the heat. Why would he go to such lengths to disguise them? A soft yellow around the edges, darkening to a rich purple in the centre; old injuries, fading now but still forcing themselves through his foundation. Something about their placement seems peculiar, too — it must be damn near impossible to injure your neck like that unintentionally, but if it weren’t an accident, what could have bruised him so? And why the haphazard effort to hide them?Alistair continues to gaze silently at the green below, sandy skin illuminated by the setting sun, apparently entirely unaware of my stare; looking at him while I wonder about those mysterious bruises, I can’t help but feel an oddly vast distance between the two of us. I glance at the split desk, and back to him. As I’m turning it over in my mind I try another shallow breath for the sake of it, but it insists upon following the path of its predecessors, stubbornly lodging itself in my ever-tightening throat as if to mock my very attempt. What is this?His eyes return to mine before I can look away. “Something the matter?”
CHAPTER ONE.←
“So, Ezra, how was your drive down? Any good photo spots on the way?”“Well, coming from Stamford, I was graced with a few — the area’s pretty scenic, so I asked the driver to pull up a fair bit on the way. I guess it’s as well that Alban couldn’t come with. He’d have killed me.” Another small laugh as he roots up a dusty satchel and starts to rummage about in it, eventually producing an elaborate-looking camera. He turns it over in skeletal hands, pressing this button and that but to no avail before setting it down on his lap with a sigh. “Damn. I must have killed the battery on the drive.”“You’re a photographer?”“Er, I suppose so.” There’s hesitance in his voice, and he stares at the camera in his hands as he answers. “I’m still very much an amateur, though, so I’m not sure I’d call myself an actual ‘photographer’ right now.”“Why on earth are you being so modest?” Alistair chuckles. “Ezra’s won every photography contest he’s entered in the last two years except for one. His work is phenomenal.”“They’ve been small contests, to be fair. Regional at best.”Alistair dismisses his comments with a shake of his head and turns his attention to me, though his gaze remains on Ezra. “I think you’d really love his stuff, Nate. It’s all about trying to capture the beauty in the unconventional.” Ezra is shrinking farther and farther back into his jacket with every word that comes out of Alistair’s mouth, yet he continues on still. “It’s very thematic, you know?”“Oh?”“It’s nowhere near as grand as Alistair would have you believe,” Ezra mumbles with a sheepish smile that seems so out of place on such a gaunt face. “I just try to look at things in a different way when I’m shooting, you know? I think maybe there’s some kind of beauty in everything, depending on how you look at it.”I'm thinking about my arms.
CHAPTER TWO.←
“I wasn’t really sure where I was supposed to go,” the boy is saying with a laugh, “so all I could think to do was to keep an eye out for Alistair’s hair. I’ve been wandering around this place for a good twenty minutes, trying to peep through the windows without getting the security called on me. It’s a good thing I managed to spy you when I did.”“You should’ve texted. I didn’t know you were on the way.”“Truthfully, I wasn’t, initially. I was taking a walk in Green Park when Ez called and asked if I could come down here and let you go home for a bit. He’s still trying to get a lift down from Stamford.”“Wait, did you walk down here from the park?”“Oh, no, don’t be daft! I got a cab from there down to Kennington, but then the traffic got pretty heavy after we crossed the river and I said I’d just walk the rest of the way. It really didn’t take too long at all.”“That must be a mile or more. You should’ve just waited.”“It’s fine, honestly. Ez sounded pretty all over the place, so I figured I was better off to get down here as fast as I could. Speaking of, actually…” He turns back to me, smiling once more. “We haven’t met, have we?”I shake my head, unable to form anything that even remotely like a response.“Ah, I thought so. I’m Alban,” he says, extending a hand to me. “And you?”The hand he holds out to me hangs in the air between us, cheerful and childish, the slightest remnants of baby fat in his fingers subtly suggesting that his body still carelessly clings to the scattered scraps of time that has long since been lost to the past; beneath the quilt, my own hand twitches, threatens to speak on my behalf if not for my deliberate effort to keep it hidden. How could I reach for his hand, knowing the stains still sinking into the skin of mine? How could I take his hand, fearing that in so doing I will unintentionally colour his fate the very same as my own?Too terrified to make contact, I drop my eyes to my bedsheets yet again.“Oh, I guess you’re probably not feeling too well, are you?” he asks, voice as chipper as ever as he pulls his arm back. “You look quite tired. I’ll just — I’ll just let you alone for a little.”
CHAPTER FOUR.←
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