…After having published more than one hundred and fifty stories on his finely wrought and yet incorporeal blog, after having negotiated precious terms of endearment with hundreds of reading and writing strangers and after having created a virtual, almost fleshly creature – more than a character but a creator of characters himself, the serious writer felt the need again to touch something real and be touched by it.

He grazed his chin with the index finger of his left hand while still hovering over the keyboard with all fingers of his right hand and retraced the small dimple that separated the point of his chin from his lower lip and which he had come to think of as one of the centres of his creative powers. Whenever he lost his confidence he put pressure on this spot. He slowly moved his attention away from his face to his pants and to the white napkin stowed in his back pocket for a single purpose: he took the paper towel out, felt its thickness with the same care which he had earlier given to his small facial dent, opened and put it on the table in front of him. He reached for his fountain pen, a burgundy Mont Blanc that had belonged to his mother, whose small fingers the pen had fitted perfectly, underlining her natural grace. The same instrument looked like a lost memory in his hands, which seemed knotty to him and too unwieldy for small tasks that required tact. When he put the pen on the tissue, a rill of ink trickled down the golden nib as if it had a mind of its own and created a minute black lake on the paper so that the serious writer felt forced to turn it over and start afresh. He quickly wrote the word ‘faith’ in capital letters before the ink could inadvertently blotch his canvas once again, sheathed his pen and let the fertile loneliness he knew so well take possession of him so that he could continue to write.

He was aware that none of his previous work meant anything anymore to him though it meant something to someone somewhere, which was a comfort anyways. In the nascent light of a new novel, which had begun to stir inside him like a newborn begotten in an act of poignant paternal love, all his old stories were just that: old stories. Joie de vivre was to be found in things undone, unwritten and unread.

The new novel might begin thus:

Once upon a time there was a cantankerous curmudgeon of a writer who lived his life by one rule only: to calmly move on to the next thing whenever it was time to do so. This man’s best friend was an ancient cetacean from a colony swimming off Capitola whose sorrow was that he loved movies more than anything. Fortunately, the writer had come up with a way for his friend the whale to indulge in its alien obsession with celluloid, which was not any stranger than the man’s preoccupation with mermaids and other magical sea folk.

See, everything flowed nicely: the serious writer could go on scrivening like that for a long time, turning trivial tattle into bewitching tassle and squeezing blood from the banal, like his character, who never died but jumped from story to story growing from a spring seed into a summer tree whose leaves gave shade to the uncanny and the unanswered, taking its water from the deepest depths of the telling well.

But to change water to wine, ‘nice’ wouldn’t do. It was cold comfort where a hot heart was required. To chafe his poetic protrusions, to make words like warm bread rather than to sneeze pleasantries onto the page, the serious writer culled inspiration from:

… his wife’s valiant calves, which held her head high and which helped to ground him when he watched her muscles work their magic on top of a pair of stilettos;

… the indistinguishable chatter from the sidewalk café opposite their apartment, where he imagined street musicians didn’t busk for fear they’d interrupt the permanent conversation which might eventually resolve some issues;

… the buzz of gnats at night before they bit, the feeling vulnerable under air attack, and the peculiar compromise negotiated between insect, skin and soul that echoed other equally ancient deals made with nature;

… all things and relationships that require a year and a day rather than a minute and a half to be understood, crafted, ingested, and committed to one’s flames.

“What’re you writing these days”, said his wife after they went to bed.

“I don’t know yet, my sweet, I’ve only just got the cauldron heated up”, said the serious writer and held out his arm so that she could cuddle up to him.

And then the curtain dropped. And it was good.

first published in > kill author issue seven

(published in kill author issue seven)

Nicholas immediately knew what he was supposed to do and not to do, in his new office.

He was supposed to work at the desk on his laptop. He was not supposed to look out the window. He was supposed to hold meetings with one or two executives or colleagues at the small table. He was supposed to put some books in the shelf, books that made him look informed, reading, smart. He was not supposed to shag a female staff member on either his desk or on the small table. He was supposed to keep his door closed during confidential meetings. He was not supposed to open the windows and scream his anger out or jump from them to a certain death. He was supposed to take his coffee from the hallway where the company provided machines with fourteen different types of caffeinated drink into his office. He was not supposed to leave the paper cups standing around anywhere. He was supposed to throw them in the wet waste basket next to the machine. He was not supposed to put art or posters he liked up on the wall, either instead or in addition to the choice made for him by the corporation. He was supposed to place photographs of his family, if he had them, on the desk. He was not supposed to leave a pair of handcuffs or a butt plug, if he had them, laying around on that desk.

It was a small world with many rules, every thing signifying an action or the suppression of an action, and quite possibly also the thought leading to such an action. It was an environment that denied the existence or necessity of personal creativity and expression, because his day was meant to be mindlessly busy, and keep him busy, in the name of the company, not his muse.

This office was more or less like any other he’d ever worked in, and it confirmed Nicholas’ belief that he could predict the next few years, apart from the human relationships, which also filled this place and brought it to life, against the odds prescribed by the catalog of commandments.

Whoever had designed this place and drawn up the rules wasn’t just kidding.

Nicholas sat down at the desk. He put his hands on it and slowly slid forward, elbows at an odd angle, back curved like a panther ready to charge – not a comfortable, but a position engineered to be effectual. He lifted one bun by twisting his hip, grimaced, let out a long groan of delight and farted loudly.

This was going to be good.

The groom’s grandfather was called ‘Captain Cat’. Before his illness he had been the best friend of the bride’s long-dead grandmother. Because of the Captain’s former legendary sexual prowess there were rumors that moved the relation between the two families into the unchaste neighbourhood of a murky, primitive melange.

The wedding reception was held at the bride’s parents’ house before the ceremony. Visitors were slowly pouring in. Various family members worked together to set up the buffet and erect a pedestal where a couple of distant cousins were going to play Baroque music.

The groom was the Captain’s spit’n'image: tall as a larch, large head spiked with black hair, deeply set yellow eyes the size of small oysters and secret as mussels behind long lashes some gone white already from heavy dreaming, some rainbow colored, making the upper part of his face sparkle in the right light, his cheekbones indicating an inclination to dominate and brood.

The bride was petite, blonde and busty, with a broad mouth full of happy teeth, given to chatter and chirping away all day long, her quick intelligence both cushioning and belittling her man’s heavy impact, and though she was much smaller than he, she never had to look up to him: it was one of those miracles of close relationships, a reversal of the laws of the physical world, a rebellion of love against the lame truth of objective fact, a letdown for science.

The two had little in common apart from being Welsh – as was everyone else except Woshinsky, the only one of the groom’s foreign writer friends who’d shown up.

I wonder what their kids will look like, thought Woshinsky in a thick Russian accent, which made the resulting image hard to translate even for him, who had gone from daunted to defender of the English language and the Anglo-Saxon way of life. As a poet, he savoured the fact that one’s mother tongue could acquire an accent in one’s head.

“I give traditional Soviet toaster”, Woshinsky said to the bride, handing her a grey metal box covered with large, red Cyrillic letters and the picture of a happy socialist couple touching a silvery toaster as if it was an N-1 rocket. “Plug no good, sorry.”

“Thank you so much”, said the bride with a smile that lit a memory in Woshinsky so that he hastily added, “…and I write poem for you, Sonya.”

“But my name isn’t Sonya”, she said, and her fiancée, who’d joined them to keep an eye on Woshinsky, whom he knew to have an unpredictable temper and a desire for infinity, said: “I think a poem by you would be wonderful, Woshinsky”.

The Russian nodded. “Sonya – love of my life.” The corners of his mouth dived towards the collar of his shirt. “She dead.”

“Oh, I am so sorry”, the bride said.

“You remember me”, Woshinsky said, trying to explain. “Sssonya”, he hissed like a sorrowful snake, who sees a tasty rabbit disappear in the underbrush.

Then he saw Captain Cat sit in a corner, his eyes closed, his head trembling slightly, clutching his wedding gift, a small laced up dusty linen bag filled with fifty pebble-sized diamonds.

The Captain was now considered a human liability. Doctors from London to Lima had pronounced their diagnoses with the common certainty of psychiatrists. According to them, he was manic, depressive, schizophrenic, bipolar, paranoid, cyclothymic, borderline, or a genius.

They thought they had tamed him with the help of heavy sedatives.

“I really wished people had looked at our wedding list”, the bride said to the groom. “We’ve got three toasters now and two pairs of leather handcuffs.” She shot him a questioning look.

The musical twins had arrived and were tuning their instruments. When they heard that, the mother and father of the groom, who had met at Woodstock and conceived their son at Yasgur’s farm, clasped their hands and looked in each other’s eyes for images past.

Drinks were brought round by another set of cousins, this time from the groom’s side, known to be practical jokers.

“I hope these aren’t spiked”, said the groom’s father smiling, more to himself, with a mixture of hope and regret.

Woshinsky grabbed a couple of filled glasses, swayed over to the Captain, pulled a chair and placed one of the glasses on the edge of his wheelchair.

“You not look fun”, he said to him. “Why they call you Captain Cat?”

The Captain opened his sallow eyes. He had once been a fierce dancer. He’d picked up physically unlikely moves in many ports and showed them off at his famous parties back home: events that usually ended with the local police in attendance, though more than once the neighbours, who had called law enforcement, were disappointed to see the sheriff himself take a turn with the Captain’s wife and compete with the Captain on who could drink harder in an atmosphere charged with untold stories from the world’s farthest shores and memories that ridiculed suburban life because they were as stylish as sunsets overlooking a whale cemetery.

In the Captain’s mind, affected by drugs, mental disease and familymartyrdom, a synapse misfired at that moment, rendering the tranquilizers useless and reconnecting pathways that had lain unused in his brain for decades.

He knew what a proper party was supposed to look like, and this wasn’t one. He eyed the man, who had brought him a drink that he wasn’t supposed to consume. The Russian looked like someone who knew how to have a good time. And he smelled like a man who had lost his wife, too. He felt brotherly towards him.

“They call me Captain Cat because I had a woman in every harbor once”, he said, enjoying the timbre of his own voice.

“Budem zdorovy”, his companion exclaimed, raising his drink. They quenched the thirst of a lifetime and threw their empty glasses in the direction the music came from.

“Oh my dead dears”, Captain Cat said, “what happened to you, my friends, my foes, my love at the bottom of a green bottle ship? What happened to the years swum by biddydum down the drains? Diddly diddly, set at nought.” His head was raised high now. From his chair he surveyed the whitened room with narrowed eyes, breathing fast, a chained predator. Woshinsky crouched next to him like a wheel bug, his eyes bulging, drinking in every word, an ungainly sight.

“This music is shite”, shouted Captain Cat, “shuddering shite, and this whole party is shite, too!”

He lifted the bag of diamonds and turned it upside down with one surprisingly swift movement: like tiny cockroaches, the jewels escaped and beetled off in all directions: “There, ya snuffling swine, truffles fer ya!”

The cousins stopped playing. It took the assembled a while to understand where the hollering came from and why the whole floor was suddenly twinkling with tiny stars. Then, like a well-trained platoon, they dropped to the ground, reached for the sparkling stones, their faces twisted, performing an ugly, unplanned choreography, man against man, apples and oranges rumbling among them after the buffet table had broken down.

“Stop!” cried Woshinsky, who alone stood now among the contorted, wiggling bodies, pulled a French Apache revolver out of his jacket and shot in the ceiling: “Fuck money!”

The happy couple did not hear the discharge. In the chaos following the old man’s outburst they snuck out, holding hands, glad to desert the rubbish. Between their legs, the groom had gone hard and the bride had gone wet: their bonding had begun. They were abandoning the shadows of doubt for their own place in the light.

And Captain Cat, sunk back in his wheelchair like a submarine without torpedos, mumbled, with the voice of a preacher, “We are not wholly bad or good, who live our lives under Milk Wood.”

Written for Frank Hinton on the occasion of his wedding.
Published by Metazen

I am a bomb but I mean you no harm.

That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15,  1957, but I didn’t go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father,  developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god’s knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery.

The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don’t share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death.

Merry Christmas to you all.

Written for the Valentine’s Day Massacre Challenge at Fictionaut. To be published in an anthology published by Cervena Barva Press

A supermodel, carrying a large Valentine’s box, fell from her considerable, prized height on the ice in front of the grocer’s and stayed down, her long, shapely legs distorted somehow. The box burst open and dozens of tiny cognac-filled chocolate hearts were spread out around her, making it look like a carefully prepared photo shoot.

“Will you help me get up, please”, she said to a young bearded man, who was hurrying past. The man stopped and stared at her.

“What do I get if I do?”, he asked with an ugly smile, picked one of the chocolate hearts up, unwrapped it and let it disappear in the matted mass of his facial hair. The model gulped and looked even more needful than before.

In that very moment, the Greek grocer, a recent immigrant from Rhodos, the rose of the Aegean sea, flew out of the shop like an angel, sailed across the snow mixed with the woman’s frozen tears and offered her his arm, which she grasped and used to pull herself up. As soon as she stood steady, she slapped the young thug so hard that he lost his balance and dropped like an overstuffed burrito.

The model stomped her fur-lined boots, shaking off the anger, turned to her rescuer, carefully straightened her face and her coat, hugged him tightly and said: “Thank you – you’re my hero” in a rasberry-colored voice that went through him like a double shot of Uzo.

The Greek grinned and replied in a thick accent: “Parakalo! I has more sokolata inside. You come in and pick. Let’s live this slime here.” She nodded, took the man’s arm and they disappeared into the shop without looking back.

The young man struggled for a while to raise himself, his face ribbon red, then gave up. The sun came out and sparkled on the wrapping paper as a sly ray of shame entered the man’s heart.

Inside, the supermodel blew her highbred nose with rose petals.

– published at Istanbul Literary Review (09/10)

After I was cut from my mother’s backbone, it was up to my father to shape my gullible mind and that’s the truth.

My father was a surgeon, a shaman and a greyhound. A runner in his youth, he thought little of exercise and called himself a cultured couch potato. As a doctor he loved each patient and included them in what he called prayers. Having grown up Catholic, he turned humanist when enough sense came to him and his prayers did not come out the classic way though they were always classy. While he was operating, I imagine they went something like this in his head:

“Dear God, I don’t think you exist, or if you do, you should have done something for me when I asked. You don’t seem to want to ease the burden of the masses, and when I am out of luck, I don’t see you chip in either. Your holy church is a disgrace and your footprints on Earth are filled with blood. You’re a feeble almighty. I know I am having this conversation with myself in my own thick head but it doesn’t matter. So whether you exist or not: do something not for me but for this poor sod on the operating table here. Let him wake up and get better, for all of our sakes and for the good of his children. Thank you, Lord, who I most fervently do not believe in and never will as long as I live, see you later maybe.”

He wrote poems too, some good some bad but they were passionate and his. He loved to read them out loud and his voice never wavered. A poetic dinosaur shedding tears for bards long gone, he sat on a leather couch in the nude, blew smoke rings shaped like wild animals and picked verses out of the thick air.

He was collector and casanova at once. He’d return from scavenger hunts with gold watches, rings, precious books and feathers of exotic birds. They were tossed on shelves, hung from the ceiling, some of them buried. From sexual exploits he returned with stories of women, one for each finger, and I kept count for him when the tales were good. I would remember the names. The penalty for bad stories was obliteration by memory loss.

He never liked that I joined a corporation—he thought business bloodless and bloodlusting both. But he’s the one who taught me how to throw a bow tie round my neck like taming a snake. When I began to write he became excited and worried, too, which wasn’t like him at all but I understood. Words are scary creatures, things of divine making, weapons of mass delusion.

When he died, people wore dark colours and said nice things about him. They played sad music, which he wouldn’t have even liked, and they had his deathmask taken which made him look limp and not like him at all. When they were gone, weeks afterward, I bought a star on the Internet and named it after him, which seemed suitable, given that he is probably still dishing it out to God.

Published in BULL with an interview. Check out the first draft.

The serious writer has never measured the length of his penis. He didn’t see the need because he knew its size and form depended entirely on the woman. In mid-life, he had accepted the estimation of one’s genitals as a creative endeavour rather than a mathematical exercise.

“You’re huge”, A. said after she had unbuttoned him.

“Oh”, he said, uncharacteristically short in his reply but with a world of pleasant associations rushing to his head like a horde of wild buffalo to a water hole.

“But not too huge”, she added a little later once they’d found a mutually convenient position for their wordless play. The serious writer always remembered her as a devout, objective reader of his work.

“Don’t show it to me”, said B., the horticulturist, and reached across his chest uncomfortably to switch off the small bedside Tiffany lamp, “or I won’t be able to forget it.”

“Why should you want to forget it?”, asked the serious writer.

“Because I don’t want to compare it”, she said. He saw her point, though he always found it hard to orient himself in the dark. The serious writer imagined B. was thinking of a large, luscious, potentially dangerous jungle plant when touching his knob.

C., a fellow writer, looked at the serious writer’s penis for a long time before she carefully took it between index finger and thumb and shook it a little as if to see whether it would come to life.

“It seems a little small”, she said. The serious writer sighed, loudly, and said nothing.

“But I’m sure it’ll do”, she said. Among peers, C. was known for her delicacy, which permeated all her writing. Much later, the serious writer paid her back using these same words in a very long, altogether positive, critical review of her novel.

“Only strong personalities can endure such size, the weak ones are extinguished by it”, said D., a red head with an imposing chest, eyeing his cock. The serious writer, his past fogged by reckless existentialist thought, recognised the Nietzschean rudiment and smiled knowingly.

Good humour, the serious writer thought, is the strongest aphrodisiac.

published in Metazen – frank hinton in an interview on fictionaut blog.

On August 12, I realised that my asthma was an unwillingness to take life in. That I was alive nevertheless, and remained so, was, for me, one of the many paradoxes of existence, strewn across our path as unsolvable riddles, tough mind candy to chew on. I did not care for His jokes.

On August 13, I had decided to end my life. I instantly knew how I’d do it: I would jump of Jefferson bridge and enjoy the short flight. I calculated that I would fly for 6.34 seconds. In this time span, I wanted to see and experience everything as if for the first time. I was looking forward to the intensity of a prolonged moment of birthlike magic.

On August 14, at 14:45, after an incredibly good Pizza from Joe’s, an otherwise little noteworthy Italian hole in the wall on Grammer St, I let go off the railing and flew towards my death. Earlier, I had sat on these railings for about a minute. Not too long to develop deep fear and not too short, because I did not want to do anything in haste. This was too important.

All the while, though, if I’m honest, I hoped that something or someone would save me.

In fact, I did have my flight, and it was unbelievable. I could not possibly put it into words. You’ll have to go there yourself. The flight was 0.07 seconds longer than I had anticipated due to strong winds that created an updraft, which slowed me down. Those are details.

The interesting thing is that I never hit the surface but found myself instead eyes closed  in a fetal position on my bed at home. I don’t know what happened and I don’t care. I will not, I repeat, I will not do it again. I stopped having asthma attacks, too, and I’m going to get married tomorrow, thank you very much for your good wishes.

Every time I read a great line by another writer, I feel fear, in case I might, journeying the desert, come to a hut, knock at the door and, upon seeing eye to unseeing eye with my destiny, be required to speak my mind and need that line because no other will do.

And it wouldn’t be my own.

(published in Litsnack)