Venus Hurdy Gurdy
By Deborah Walker
A version of the story first published in Twisted Tongue 2010
Alice dances at the Venus Bar. She loses herself in the movement and the music. The lights are so bright that she can’t see the customers, but she can hear fragments of their guttural conversations. Sometimes their thoughts cling to her like regolith.
She sways as she tunes her mind to the lilting music of the hurdy gurdy, wondering how she got here, so very far away from home.
Alice dances at the Venus Bar, under a distant sun, a moon, light-years from Earth.
She never wants the music to end. Alice is a human woman watched by alien appetites.
Find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration or on her blog: Deborah Walker’s Bibliography
