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Welcome to Charming, the year is now 1895. It’s time to join us and immerse yourself in scandal and drama interlaced with magic both light and dark.

Where will you fall?

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Did you know? Jewelry of jet was the haute jewelry of the Victorian era. — Fallin
What she got was the opposite of what she wanted, also known as the subtitle to her marriage.
all dolled up with you


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I'm not your protagonist, I'm not even my own
#1

EXCERPTS FROM THE UNFINISHED, UNPUBLISHED AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DON JUAN DEMPSEY
PRESENTED IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

The next morning she wakes before I do, which means I am immediately immersed in her attentions. She's nervous, but in a way she likes. Her whole being is abuzz, thrumming with happiness. She wonders if it can last forever. She's been told, probably, that it can't; that eventually this glow will ebb, time will round the edges off, and it will just become the mundane contentment she's seen for others, but she's not sure whether it's true. Her life began last night when she said I do; this is a new world and anything is possible, if only she can will it to be. She's nervous that something she says or does will push the moment down towards the mundane; she wants to keep it just the way it is forever. I bask in her adoration like a vacationeer from a cloud-covered land soaking up sunlight for the first time in months. She cherishes the morning because she thinks it can last if she's careful; I cherish it because I know precisely how fleeting her affection will prove to be. The window in which I could have avoided breaking her heart and ruining her life, however long it was open, is firmly closed now. She doesn't know it, but we're only waiting for the end.


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   Valencia Delgado

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#2
Did our parents raise us to be writers? When I was a child I didn't think so; it was never explicit. Our lessons from the governess were, to the best of my knowledge, the same as any other family in our position. We were certainly never taken into their confidences for their own poetry in progress; never made an active member of the creative process. Still, when I went to school and began to interact with my age-peers more consistently and more meaningfully it became apparent to me that we viewed the world very differently than most children did. I find it difficult to believe it wasn't an intentional design my parents made, given that the results were so consistent across their children. But where other children saw leaves turn and thought soon I shall need a scarf, we would ponder whether the tops of the trees were better described as mahogany or carnelian. Some of my siblings went through school as Ravenclaws, but I don't think any of us were ever half as interested in schoolwork as we were with the machinations of our own minds. This had the effect in my early school years of
(...page ends mid-sentence)


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#3
The letter waited at home for me some days or perhaps even weeks before I opened it. The envelope was small, with crisp clean edges and carefully printed address. It was a letter of business, one could see right away; to this day I consider it something of a miracle that no one opened it before me, presuming it a bill. In a way that's what it was: an announcement of the cost come due for mistakes made long ago. It was polite and professional; perfunctory. My response was the same.

In the days that followed I wondered often what the girl might have heard about me from her mother. I pulled out the memories of our time together, ran my fingers over the surface, finding the familiar bumps and cracks. I relived them as they might have existed in a story: the people we had been drawn out to charicatures, the shadows extending to form the black and white divisions of fairy tale morals. I might have been portrayed sympathetically, a tragic hero in a cautionary tale of youthful folly; I might just as easily have been the villain.

I thought too about what I might have told the girl about her mother, had the roles been reversed. I rehearsed our story in my head. I experimented with the world-building, the themes, nods to dramatic irony. The girl will not hear these stories, but you
(...trails off in a scribble)

(...after some space, Don Juan notes "sounds pompous". The rest of the page is blank.)


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#4
When I was twenty five, I began what was to be one of the more infamous chapters of my narrative, though I didn't realize it at the time. It began the way anything else did: with smiles that existed more in the eyes than in the mouth; with the gentle graze of fingers against a hand; with a flush on her cheeks that tormented me long after she was gone. There is no reason I can articulate, even with the benefit of hindsight, why she would have been exceptional. I had been with many women before her; I had been with married women before her. I had been with pretty women, innocent women, charming women. But something about her ignited something in me which made it difficult to keep away from her, even later in our affair when it was obviously advantageous to keep caution at the forefront. In fact, the longer we saw each other the less possible it seemed to hold in mind anything else that might have been important, save us two — but I get ahead of the narrative here.

I met her, I wooed her, I loved her. There was a hunger in her that I longed to satisfy. It was as though she possessed a conspicuous absence in her life, a gap that I might swell to fill. By my loving her I might become more than myself; I had a greater potential when I was with her, because of what she saw in me. It was more intoxicating than any drug.


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   Elfrieda Yaxley

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#5
In my self-imposed exile from Britain I received a wealth of correspondence, from friends and former paramours and acquaintances and some who were none of the above. The scandal associated with my departure had made me a popular penpal; everyone wanted to hear something of what had really happened. This meant that I had ample opportunity to revise and refine and rehearse my story; a dozen, two dozen, three dozen retellings all with slightly different emphasis and flair. I lived more on paper those days than I did in the real world, and as time wore on I felt more and more acutely the widening gap between the fantasy I spun for those at home in England and the despondence that I felt privately. At some point I began to feel that if this continued much longer I would never again be able to reconcile the two; that my exile would become a permanent one because the Dempsey that I constructed for the benefit of others would have so little in common with reality. So to reconcile this, I set about falling in love again.



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#6
Artistic depictions of angels often share a specific countenance, recognizable most usually in the round faces of young children and generally lost to adults except when they are deep in peaceful sleep. One moment I remember very clearly from the short period in which we lived together: she was asleep, features guileless and divine, with the blanket cast across her torso in a fashion very reminiscent of marble statuary with draped flowing linen. Usually in such moments as these my habit is to stop and look awhile, drinking in the beauty of the world, but in this occasion I merely smiled and reached to adjust the blanket to cover her shoulder. It was in that moment I was first conscious of having done something for her which was caring and attentive but not performative; a gentle gesture without expectation of being observed doing it. In this moment I first thought: perhaps I could love her. Perhaps I already do.


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   Valencia Delgado

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#7
Fantasies, by their nature, have very few traits in common with reality. Many of the entanglements I had in my youth came and went without particular fanfare, but there was one that affected me very deeply when it ended. Compared to some of my other exploits it happened almost invisibly: no argument, no discovery, no dramatics. The ending was signaled by the quiet closing of a door which had always previously been open.

I thought about it incessantly for weeks. Not about the past, which was newly painful with the benefit of hindsight, but about a potential future — a fantasy. Perhaps I would be proud and triumphant, smugly turning away a proffered hand when the door was opened back to me — or perhaps things would fall back into place, as seamlessly as though they had never broken. In these fantasies I was always a better person than I was at present: wiser, stronger, more dignified, less inclined to youthful follies. In reality I was taking precisely no steps towards those ends — particularly not in the avoidance of youthful follies.


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   Dean Hudson

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#8
In December of 1894, I died.















for a long time, he wasn't sure what else to write. He put the parchment down, walked away from it, and came back several times.











As it turned out, even that wasn't enough.


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   Samuel Griffith

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