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

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.

“I love you so much, Raymond, and I think it’s really cool that you’re so into words”, says my wife when I ask her what ‘epanorthosis’ meant.

“You’re one writer in a thousand – no, in a million”, she says, leaving me scratching my head but also wanting for a mirror and a comb, because I know it’s not enough to be into words in this world, one must also look the part.

As if she read my thoughts, she adds “I love your beard – it makes you look like a writer, too, and so intelligent.”

“You think so?”, I say, pleased about the success of my facial hair, which I groomed to distract onlookers from my baldness. That I may be more concerned about the remaining tendrils sprouting off my otherwise naked head than about my art is beginning to worry me, but I put it down to advancing age.

A shrinking violet most of my life, it was only the arrival of who later was to become my spouse, that swept me off my feet like the blizzard of ’57.

Now you probably want to hear that story. But since I was once called a “periphrastic writer” in a now famous article in the New Yorker written by no less a penman than J D Salinger [in his essay entitled "Cornered by Conspiracy"] I shall not tell that tale in a straightforward manner, but by putting you in the mood for love first using the eclectic style that you, as my reader, have come to expect from me.

You know, until meeting her I did not know love first-hand. When writing about love, however deeply I probed my own brain, I could not come up with that crimson feeling – my head was filled with antiquated ideas of woe and the savoir-faire needed to last through a date between strangers. The very idea of falling for a woman myself was about as attractive to me as catching small pox – given that the reality of AIDS had not begun to occupy our modern minds in those days.

I lived in a shack then that was an asylum for me from the world at large and from people at close range. It stood on top of a venue called “The Crystal Palace Union” in Hartford, Connecticut and was rented out to local performance art students, who developed what is called ‘popsicals’ – neither music proper nor musical – but a melange of light tunes and brainless theatrical plots, usually arranged around mankind’s most pertinent pestilence – love. I was an involuntary witness to these stage creations: the music, or what I assumed was the music, floated through the ventilator shafts across the roof mixing with the stench of rancid butter on my table. Night after night, I was overloaded with stupid story lines, and I wrote partly in order to fend off these simple schemes, because my soul hungered for the real thing.

I was like a taxidermist, trying to give the appearance of life to something that was dead inside me. The truth is, of course, I was only scared. But working so hard to describe the unfathomable made me stronger, too.

“Tell me”, I ask my wife, “when you met me, what did you see in me?”

“You are a great writer”, she says. “It doesn’t matter to me that you are uncool.”

“Ah”, I say. “That makes sense. That was what I was thinking. What does ‘vasoconstriction’ mean?” I pull the string again.

“I love you so much, Raymond, and I think it’s really cool that you’re so into words”, she says. You’re one writer in a thousand – no, in a million”.

“I love you, too”, I say, “and thank you so much, you don’t know how good it feels to hear that.”

I think have to put more words on that tape and I have to change her filling because she might have got wet and I don’t want her to rot from the inside.

Submission for the 1st Milk Wood First Annual Writers’ Dash Competition hosted by Harriet Gausman. See also Virtual Writers, Inc. Blog.

The serious writer has a hamster. The hamster is dying. She drags her hindlegs and pees herself. The spirit of life is still strong in her: she climbs up the cage as she used to, then falls over to one side. Her left eye is half closed. She might have had a stroke. As he sees this, the serious writer’s heart breaks in small pieces suitable to feed the rodent, who will not eat or drink.

The serious writer has come to rely on his pet. He is reluctant to call her that, since she’s become a member of the family, albeit the least talkative one. He used to read his pieces to her. He enjoyed being with another creature purposelessly immersed in a mutual moment late at night.

Out of her one dark eye, the hamster considers the serious writer, who feels his humanity melt under her unlooking gaze. She feels little pain, only a deep tiredness as if she’d gone down one road too many. She delights in being able to move at all. She knows nothing of the embarrassment of her wobbly walk. The swaying of her little body seems odd but acceptable to her, as were the conditions of her incarceration, which she did not perceive as prison nor as a privilege. The large animals surrounding her, their stomping and shouting, reach her as if through a thick fog. She feels everything with the greatest alacrity now.

As she stiffens, as her small frame withers like a brush stroke splashed with water, the serious writer tears up and begins to sob angrily. He howls, his wail travels out on the street, rises above the roofs, and the soul of the tiny mammal rides to hamster heaven on a moonlight ray, carrying the sacrament of her short, nutty life to the starry skies.

Published in the Metazen Charity Christmas Book 2009.

I have plans to write a Christmas story for Metazen, an online journal specialising in metafiction. I don’t know exactly what I am going to write yet, but it better be good.

What’s ‘good’, though? Children are good, and angels, and reindeer. Children aren’t so good when they’re bad: when they torture their little brother for example or when they grate on my last nerve, the one I really needed to make it through this day with the slush on the road and everyone driving as if they’d contracted mad cow disease. Angels aren’t always good either, I guess, not that I’m an expert (which might thwart this entire enterprise of Christmas story writing), but what if, say, a guardian angel (they are a common sort of angel, not like archangels, which are more like archbishops), in an attempt to protect his liege (is that how you say it? coachee? client?) harms another person? I told Jessica Mary about that.

Jessica Mary said: “That’s stupid, all the guardian angel has to do is to shield the person” – I made a mental note to ask her later how you call such a person: it isn’t fair that I should be the only one in this family, who has to figure this stuff out, I mean, I do accept that women play a different part in life altogether and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but there needs to be a balance, don’t you think? (I wonder how you handle that with your spouse at home), and she said “I don’t see how that could compromise the angel’s inherent goodness.”

Gosh, I hated it when Jessica Mary used words like ‘inherent’. She had more degrees than I had toes left – how I lost some of my toes is another story, which would lead us far astray, to the North Pole, I may tell it some time – and a big bundle of fancy words, too.

“But what if the angel’s client is held at gun point”, I said, using one of my favourite expressions, not fancy but forceful, “And in order to save him when the gangster shoots, the angel must stop the bullet from coming out of the barrel so that the revolver explodes into the face of the gangster, disfiguring him forever or even killing him. Surely an action cannot be good if it leads to maiming and death?”

“He’s acted in self defense”, Jessica Mary said coolly.

“But nobody attacked the angel”, I said, and then, inflamed by the heat of our debate: “What about Hitler’s guardian angel!?”

That made us both squirm, quite against the spirit of Christmas, because the implications of assuming Hitler had a guardian angel (and why wouldn’t he have had one?), who, in mad pursuit of his master’s best interest, like a ghost from a bottle, had condemned millions of others to certain death, left us stunned and perplexed. Evidently, we hadn’t thought this through properly, not Jessica Mary with her affinity for florid words or me with my natural ponderousness. As we fell on the floor, still flabbergasted, I said “you’re one smart woman, Jessica Mary”, and she, reaching for my tackle, murmured “I love you too, Nick, you big hunk of man meat”.

And now I’ve run out of time. Christmas is here and there’s work to do. There’s just too much going on and I’ve got too many open questions to ponder before I could put anything down, inkwise. Christmas may be a great time for you to let it all rest, and you should. My good reindeer are getting nervous already.
I suppose I won’t be writing a Christmas story for Metazen after all.

Being your slave what should I do but tend
Upon the hours, and times of your desire?

Shakespeare

i do not i do not want i do i do want i do not want to want. i plead instead, i sulk, i defend i talk to my selves at night before the moon before the seedless moonlight i converse with me because i want, i do not want, i want to want, i do not want to want. i would want if i could but that’s not the want that i want and not the way i want it.

i want him to kiss me even if it feels like being licked by a fish.

i grew out of a root stalk drunken with possibility with potentiality with no pardon for not wanting. not wanting to. wanting to want, not wanting to not want to want i do i do i do.

i want her to make love to me whatever that means.

what do i want to do when no want can be bought cannot be pulled off store shelves burdened with the produce of prosperity, the produce of partiality, because i am partial to my very own self. pregnant with partiality, penniless from giving it all away before i had it. i never had it but now i want it. no i don’t. yes i do.

i want him i want him so much.

maybe i have sex or i don’t. i talk but i don’t talk about what i want. instead, all knowing that what i want, knowing my wants and everybody’s wants because i can see them in their eyes, i talk so much so that i don’t want so i forget the want until i want a beer or a sausage or sex after all. or maybe i won’t talk at all any more, like ever.

i want her to want me so that i know how i feel.

i applaud those who have forgotten their wants and who are brilliantly functioning without them, operating  only on the want of others who also want but don’t want to want. i write about it and i write of it and i write for it, but i don’t write the want itself, the very want, the wondrous want, because if i did, a giant serpent might grow from my hip, its scales covering every one of the products and papers and paravents, our houses of unwanted wares – a snake slithering rhythmically, sighing the song written by want only in the language of want which can only be understood by those in the presence and the state of want, the chanters of want.

i want him to want me to want him.

what am i afraid of, what is behind the great want? there’s nothing, the want stands on its own pink purple little feet, it hovers around my head thickly layered with wormfood whispering faerielike sounds spreading feathery dust to get me to get up and want and fly on the wings of the want – where to?

i want her to make me forget myself.

when i come to close to the want, there’s a guardian of the anti-want the don’t want, the no-man the big mask in the vault, the cloudmaker, the sensor of resistance, the nurturer of no & the enemy of yes. so i stop wanting because i don’t believe i can overcome this fierce warrior because i don’t know the strength of the fire in my belly forged by lifelong want throughout the ages.

what is it you want?

© 2009 finnegan flawnt with a little help from his teenage angst

the funeral party hurried up the hill following the fat priest with designer glasses. the wind was blowing in their faces so that they had to squint. the light had the subtle quality of a foggy argument among friends.

up on the hill by the grave stood the muse of the dead man they had come to bury. she was visible to everyone, mentioned by nobody. the mourners huddled around her gown shuffling nervously as one does in the presence of an angel. the priest was conscious of his inept performance earlier in the chapel. the muse made him feel queasy. he thought of himself as a servant to the Lord & now the muse’s elongated eye lashes brought unease to his heart, a weak muscle constricted by ritual incantations and praying performances. to the feeble-minded, the muse looked like a lion unitiated untamed ready to devour their souls. to the steadfast, she simply rose from the Earth like a tamarix adorned with only a tuft of hair swaying in the breeze, a figure of no failure to fend off bad spirits.

the untertaker put the urn in the square-shaped hollow in the ground, twitched & hid behind the father. as the angel stepped forward, the cinerary container rose from its early grave and became an onion, an orange, an olive: it opened and grew a single leaf: this was the dead man’s fate dangling by the seraph’s unsullied fingers. thus spake the Great One:

i have weighed this man and measured him and looked at his life’s work. he spent years in the shade of his endowments, he accrued accolades for his art & he bore the sign of creation on his high forehead. he was a king in his own realm, which stretched from everwhere to nowhere & was governed by but one principle: beauty. then she lowered the ashen cask & disappeared leaving tranquil thought so that even the cleric dropped his defiant demeanour.

the bereaved shuddered at her might & every one of them thought of their own talent & felt elevated by the eulogy. they began to breathe as if reborn. they became mulberry shoots, every single one of the people who had merely pondered life’s small matters a moment earlier, they turned into apollonian arrows hurling themselves at any one standing in their human way. they had come as a flock & left as a truculent platoon. they had meant to pray and fear & departed with death their friendly companion on the longest the shortest journey made by man and woman & the dead only preceded them by a bit, bite-sized and not too big to chew.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt – after burying his uncle, a great artisan if there ever was one.

i’m removing the bread and what i have now is the dough. it’s shaped like a heart without a purpose, an edge without center, my dream’s nightmarish core. must take a sip of coffee, the sapful spunk, then must move on: my road is not thorny, that’s for Jesus people, my road is smooth the surface specious & nogood fumes effluence from it. above the road a sulky sky curves like a crazy racer on the hockenheim ring. the air is full of pretzels. they are served by busty bakerswomen & strapping bakerstuds & baked of the soil of eden. they’re promises dangling from the tree of wisdom & i’m trying to reach them. but i can’t because nobody’s watching me.

i can’t because nobody’s watching me. because to perform to show my tricks to jump through the burning hoop at highest speed i need an audience larger than my own. i shake my long hair. i call for war. peace be with you. i am tolstoy now trying the ramen from the japanese restaurant on old curfew street the place where they smile at you with their naturally narrow eyes wide open & the prices aren’t bad at all either. i’m eve and i don’t know the name for eve in japanese. but i know the prices of apples everywhere.

i sit there & the sun shines out of my arse as in the stories of ancient heroines they who can do no wrong because they were born on the good side of the world, singing my song a brahmany kite, a herald of the better the stronger life. i sit there & i do no harm when a man suddenly runs into my knee which has been smelling street freedom & perhaps peeked out a bit, my bad. he runs into my knee, my knee retracts, the man goes up in flames, right there and then right next to my gyoza my to die for delicious dumplings. i throw him a dumpling & he catches it with his teeth. the people applaud. he’s not just a bully he’s a performer, a street god, he can balance burning bars with his pectorals, what a sygfryd.

the surprise success has made him mild-mannered and now we snog & share the good beer on a good day & he buys me more gyoza & i let my knee trust him again. good man. he whips out his mobile, his cellular lifeline & makes a call, barking. whazzup, i ask & he says i just quit my job because how can the going ever get better than this, he is in tears now, and i tear up too & the japanese waiters from up the counter are nodding while their black black hair bobs up and down & they keep the gyoza coming & the sake. my man. my love dumpling. who lives with me at the center of the world.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt

Eros, mr sex himself, once a formidable winged god & not too hairy, now lives in the suburbs under the name Eros Smith & works for the city’s authorities regulating and policing prostitutes. This sounds exciting but it isn’t. the job’s pure drudgery: the laws are boring & irrelevant & suppressive. the practice of the world’s oldest profession pierces the body of democracy and decency (that’s the whole point) and society strikes back. Hookers have unions now & health insurance like their clients & brothels have receptionists who can say “cunnilingus” in seven languages.

nobody knows better than Eros what sexloveandlust is all about. when he appeared, ladies used to get wetter than Seattle & gents wilder than broncos, their eyes sparkling with lust and love. The Body Electric – these were not just words in the small shapely hands of the old Eros, but dough to sculpt desires & to make or break careers & lives all tied together by immeasurable longings, by lifelong bonds or shortlived encounters. he soothed the woe of the life-weary by injecting pure endlessness in their pulsing veins & helped lovers build comfortable nests in fertile dirt.

now he is mr Smith with a face like a sour apple, with a sandwich for lunch and bags under his eyes from too much TV. his loins are dry & his mouth is drier.

So what had happened?

let us wind back to a rainy night a few years ago & quicken the pace of our story:

lovely lara leiblich had a lover: ludvig lorry, a hunky fisherman. in the hut by the village, by the village he had told her but no way she’d go there with him just to you know what. but then she did anyway. ludvig as large as gentle. guiding her carefully. his wet thick blonde hair. sweat on his brow and on his upper arms glistening in the moonlight. romance novel stuff. sentimental hadn’t there been ludvigs large limb she longed for, and likewise, ludvig’s stirring was caused by the sweet caressing of lara’s labia.

Eros the god of earthly and heavenly love, son of aphrodite, conceived by Plentitude and Poverty, had stood bye from the first moment that lara laid lusty eyes on ludvig and ludvig gladly cocked his cap for lara. ‘t was like a pinch they both felt at the same time, the divine belly laugh, that libido lizardry making dr freud proud.

fast forward & you could see sheer screwing – they fucked until the angels wept willingly & eros flapped his wings with joy. ’twas a simple enough fondness that made them find & fondle each other. ’twasn’t correct or civil but in that barbecue space between their legs & thighs everything was in order without proper spelling. they spoke litle & breathed hard. is this how the universe began?

at home, their parents sat wondering. rain drops drizzled. fires flared. lara & ludvig were at large. eros was there for the parents as well-he watched over couples old and young, wet and dry, hot and cold, everywhere & anytime. the parents were calmed: deep down they knew an old story was repeating itself and a good thing that was.

meanwhile in detroit, in a former derelict can factory, a group of activists wrote a manifesto that would end it all. in it they listed all things that Eros cared about. made connections between lust & science, sex & labanotation built not on mathematical formulae or sound statistics, but on the powerful lyrics of soul. they proved, once and for all, from a feminist & a chauvinist, a marxist & a neoliberal point of view that Eros did what he did better than anyone else without any knowledge of history, biology, french, geography, trigonometry, algebra. the essay showed that mankind, in fact, would be served a lot better if Eros’ services were taken over by professionals with pedigree and a higher authority than the god could ever muster up. they took his job & left him with a bowl of lukewarm soup. they warmed up Apollo’s ancient argument that Eros’ archery skills were inferior and laughable & they injected their manifesto upon its completion in the internet where it circulated uncontrolled, virally infecting appassionati anywhere.

Eros, second in self-love only to narcissus, took all this really badly, especially the renewed ridicule, dropped the bow and reached for the billy club, the paddy wacker, the nightstick.

for ludvig and lara & millions of passionate lovers since then, a world ended. once again, divine intervention had been interrupted, intercourse itself gone off the rails, and the god vacated his olympic throne in exchange for a desk, left Psyche’s divan & moved into a bunk in the suburbs.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt

they fight at night when the chest feels tight. oh right, he’s wrong, again, and she’s right, of course she’s right. and he shouts, he always shouts. and then she screams, always screams. now he sulks, always sulking that bastard, i did ask him when we met whether he sulked easily and told him i couldnt stand it and he said smiling yes i sulk and they laughed it off. doves were circling above the lake then and the mood was good and the pants were tight oh so tight too tight. their work was done and they were far away from everyone.

there were sounds around them then and they were whispering to each other and holding on to their sanity because the love seemed to make them crazy. or perhaps it was the fear of coming close again, who knows now after all these years.

now it is night, and they fight, and then they grit their teeth and they smoke and they make plans anyway and run their life, run their lifelines from the ship, the family ship around their house and their car and their jobs around a pillar knot them so they don’t come loose because then everything might come loose.

they fight, at night they fight. oh right, she’s wrong, again, and he’s right, of course he’s right. the bitch. and she shouts and he sulks and later they hug, dug in their trenches, firing from close range, all their ammunition comes from a deep sea of love, muddy waters but theirs. around them stand others, billions of lovers and shouters, all right, all wrong all the time every day and every night. and they fight.

later that night, after the fight, the dove comes again, in their sleep. He reaches out to touch her and she doesn’t flinch. their hands clasp, from way up they look like one, and down there, it feels like they’re together, something to fight for, at night. they’re allright.