A Taster from New Ceres Nights …

The Piece of Ice in Miss Windermere’s Heart
Violet liked a challenge, most of the time. But then again, most of the time she was not hanging upside down over the bed of one very fat, very drunk, impossibly rich noble. Breathing in the fumes that rose from him might very well finish her off before she got the job done. Then there was the dog; a very old, superannuated, sleeping kind of a dog to be sure, but large and, well, leaving a puddle of drool on the floor roughly the size of New Lake Lucerne. If nothing else, she might drown were she to fall into it. 
       
The chandelier from which she hung was a sturdy thing (for this fact alone she was eternally grateful), almost two metres in diameter, firmly lodged in the plaster of the reinforced ceiling, its eight arms spread wide and covered in a dazzling variety of cut crystal prisms. She was small, a girl who brought to mind the word ‘wispy’ (Violet herself preferred ‘delicate’) and so her weight did not add much of a strain to the structure. She twisted and slithered her way towards the middle of the thing.

She could see her goal. In the central column, three of the dangling crystals looked quite different to the rest. By the moonlight streaming through the large French windows the fine tracery that wove inside was visible: one set was gold, one silver, one green. All very lovely and subtle, and pretty much undetectable unless you had managed to get inside the crawl space of the house, shuffle your way along the dusty tubes, then slip through the air vent, and hang your very small self off the very large light source and examine each of its component parts very carefully.

It was all going so well when she slipped. There was no reason for it to happen, but it did indeed happen. One moment she was holding on tight with her hands while she unravelled her legs from the branches of the chandelier. The next, the air was rushing by, removing her small black cloth cap, and she hit the bed.

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