Under Construction @ Keele 2018 Vol. IV (II) | Page 46

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Orlando. Woken after years of sleep. She has a bad back and pressure sores. Old queen of
England, she has awoken to LGBT adverts for vodka that offend her subjects. They sear, with
angry red faces, and predict that there will be a backlash to this – Chicago has a lot to answer
for, ‘Anything goes’? Yes, then Hitler arrived and wiped them all out (what if he had won the
game?).
Orlando ate majestically, because it has been a long time. She’ll sort this trouble out,
no doubt. Once loved by the populace, she left this place to explore and find other adventures
in a dream world. She was aware of the slight misgiving for lesbian poets stirring up in Greece
at the time and, never cowardly, left to influence the populace through their dreams. To grasp
their unconscious, and their egos, which were just developing. Circling fossils twirl round and
round and fix thought onto unknowing minds. Orlando was not sorry for her infiltration, as
chimpanzees and gorillas, humanity loves war.
She got on, as before. Nothing was different for her, the tunnels of love cascaded until
they became a labyrinth where you get lost, not eaten. I stared at my stomach, layers of skin
were covering that dirty mesh of food. How long before Orlando comes to visit me?
The following piece was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. The novel explores gender
(trouble) through the ages. Orlando switches from man to woman, inconceivably, but gains great
insight into femaleness through this switch. I have expanded this theme to include the queer and
sexuality (which Woolf also addresses).
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