…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.

Standing in front of the ‘new movies’ shelf at the local vid store, the serious writer wondered if watching flicks like “Last Day In Hell”, “Vikings vs. Aliens III” or “The Grand Rapids Sawdust Massacre” would help him understand plot and become a better writer or if they might short-circuit his already overwrought mental machinery.

After some deliberation, he finally settled on an indie called, somewhat obscurely, “Julia, Julienne, Jules And Their Incredibly Indelible Love Affair Between The Sheets Of A Greek Tavern In My Neighbourhood”.

This movie also ran in the local cinema, whose Art Deco exterior was modeled after the first Nanking movie house.

The serious writer had worn a black patch on his left wonky eye for days and had lain in a dark room imprisoned with fierce imagination as his only companion.

He finally left the house to get some air. Out on the street, a break dancer was spinning round and round. His xanthous baseball cap lay on the sidewalk like a sacred Tibetan bronze bowl. A radio stood next to it blaring loud music and the words ‘PLEEZE DONADE’ were visible on the concrete.

The serious writer recognised the song as ‘Get Together’ and it improved his mood at once. He dropped a couple of coins in the hat and realised his eye felt allright all of a sudden. He took his patch off and felt the sunlight stream into his eye ball and traverse it, all the way to his mortal soul.

I found this among the papers of the serious writer that were passed to me after his death. I offer it without an agenda, like a pair of well-worn gloves for your dashboard compartment. Do with it as you wish. I think he might have liked for you to read it closely. As always, his writing throws up more questions than answers. Some might call this a condition of modern man. Others call it inferior insight. I call it common.

The serious writer always knew there would be a last story but when the time was near, he felt ill-prepared.

One day, after settling in his favourite chair by the window but turned away from it, he told a visiting friend: “It’s well arranged that you don’t know which of the many will be your last: your last piss, your last time being touched by someone, the last warm cup of coffee in the morning. The last chat with a friend. The last supper. You enjoy all of these in the most present of tenses, carried by the hope that there may be another one, and then another and so on. And since we are an ingeniously lazy and trusting species, we take the routine to be a principle and we shrink it on the occasion of its repeated occurrence without further thought.”

The friend lit a pipe and said: “I think I see where you’re coming from. I understand death is on your mind.”

The serious writer shifted his weight in his chair and looked at the pipe with longing. Having stopped smoking years ago, he now afforded himself only the second hand experience. He made a mental note regarding the loss of certain pleasures over time.

“The older I get”, he said, “the less I appreciate the fact that one of my stories will come round and not leave, (like a hot beverage going entropically from scorching to lukewarm to cold), and then what? Become an epitaph?” He chuckled.

“You know that Koschinsky has begun to write your obituary already, I hear. That’s outstanding”, his friend said and found himself obliged to clarify: “Given Koschinsky’s reputation as a critic these days, of course.”

“I have not only heard it, I suggested it to Koschinsky”, said the serious writer. “I thought: why not take the initiative in final affairs while I can?” He crossed his legs, laid one hand on top of the other, rubbing them so as to feel the knobbly bits.

“I have recently disregarded my bodily needs terribly. Come to think of it, I also have not listened to my inner voice lately. I don’t know why. Perhaps because otherwise I won’t write that last story ― I’m afraid to leave an unfinished opus behind, you know?”, he said and his friend nodded, churning out blueish clouds.

The serious writer said lightly, “I have always been a great fan of the auto-da-fé as a way of maintaining a certain degree of control beyond the grave while at the same time keeping your fans giddy and guessing until Judgement Day: ‘Did he or did he not…?’, ‘What if he had…?’, ‘Could this have been…?’, ‘We wonder if he…’, and so on – it keeps me young I think. But the difficulty with burning your stuff in reference to the possibility of your death is two-fold: you don’t know if you’re wasting your time because you might be alive for another X years; and it makes you think of your own death”.

“It would be a terrible crime to do that. I don’t think your readers or your critics could ever forgive you after your death,” said his friend. He didn’t seem to notice his own tactlessness.

“Well”, said the serious writer, serious again, “as you know, I abhor both waste and thoughts of death. Hence I only carry the idea of an auto-da-fé around with me, together with a small canister of gasoline and a matchbox. Rather like the plan for a certain prayer and a rosary, which I never touch. I don’t know if I fantasise that I might burn not only my work but myself, but I am certainly stocked up just in case.”

The friend shook his head gently, trying to disperse the thought, and waved his hands, or so it seemed to the writer, because the fumes had become so thick now that he was separated from his visitor by a grey wall of smoke. He went on voicing his thoughts aloud, as was his habit even when he was alone.

“The stories I will write before that last one will be as prayerful as anything I have ever penned: the characters will be mild and philosophical, apt to hold life’s whole in appropriate balance, with an even demeanour gracing my own age, like a study of butterflies at the end of their long, ardous journey. These not quite last stories shall, I think, test my very existence by throwing up many questions that had plagued me for a lifetime of serious writing, like the question of whether we determine our fate or are determined by it.”

He heard his friend mumble something across from him and took it as approval to continue.

“One of these stories will be about a man who sat across me once on an underground train: his right arm hung limply as if he’d had a stroke and he looked at me open-eyed and yet guarding his self behind his condition. He had to lurch forward three times (as if performing a secret ritual) in order to shift his centre of mass and get up at all, ignoring me throughout this maneuver and finally smiling – unless it was not a smile but a strained grimace. I wonder: did this man feel that he chose his partial paralysis by making a silent wish between clenched teeth, or by dreaming it in advance? Perhaps he felt that he’d been dealt a bad card, not quite the last one, by some god not merciful, overlooking him, with respect only for the fabric of everything but not this particular man’s happiness?”

The serious writer realised in that moment how the word ‘happiness’ betrayed its own meaning, because in reality it boiled down to mundane things like chicken soup, which he then dressed up as something less plain than farts and farewells. But he was not ready to interrupt himself quite yet and continued:

“Or is this man, let us call him Max (a good, solid, reliable name for this type of man) like me, refusing to take sides on this question of questions, perhaps, again like me, writing for his passage between the Scylla of providence and the Charybdis of randomness? A passage not to anywhere, a time filler, an artful avoidance?”

“You tell me, my friend,“ he invited the other. There was no answer, only the sound of the floor boards creaking.

“Here’s another question that bothers me – no less than the first: how much of us is unique and how much part of a grand collective of souls? When we breathe in and out, do we choose our own rhythm or do we enact an unconscious concert? Do we only imagine that we create our own thoughts but actually just sculpt an identity out of one and the same shared material? Is our whole concept of individuality just nonsense?”

He broke off because he felt exhausted all of a sudden. His ideas, his questions all seemed unclear and somehow impure to him. As if there was a truth behind the words, but the more words he piled upon one another, the less visible was this truth. He put his hands over his face and felt their soft insides now on his temples and the bones around his eye socket. On his cheeks, the palms pressed down on his the beard. He felt himself.

“What a powerful illusion the self is, especially for me, with my oeuvre, my life’s work, which I, in the hubris of the great individualist who also happens to be a snob (a most convenient combination against the power of the collective) trace back to myself: me, me again, me also, me-me, meee – these are only some of the variations on the person at the centre of my consciousness, who is really only a persona and does not contain my soul, though the fingerprints of my soul are certainly all over it.”

He felt himself to be alone. Sometimes, for some people, the Me broke down almost completely, very close to disappearing without dying altogether, he thought and closed his eyes.

He wanted to write another story in this one-of-the-last-stories category about a man, always only called ‘the patient’, who emerged from a car accident as a vegetable, his brain shut down until, after five long years, he suddenly began to respond to questions again and finally awoke, but as a different person. Perhaps his coma had been a form of cocoon, a phase he had to undergo in deep sleep in order to become who he needed to be. Perhaps he wasn’t really asleep but communicated with non-human beings differently throughout those years. Perhaps he forgot all about it and, having rejoined humanity in its customary upright shape, could no longer understand the language of trees and interpret the trembling of the sides of his intensive care bed as he had when comatose – as the thought pattern of Earth itself.

The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.

“But my last story will not be about art or finding myself”, the serious writer said and opened his eyes. The air was clear again but his friend had left and robbed the writer of his audience.

“My last story will be about love”, he said bravely.

(Possibly inspired by the death of J.D. Salinger and David Lodge’s novel “therapy“. Comments on Fictionaut.)

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.

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.

Entry for a contest at Metazen – Image to Text Conversion Experiment. Picture by Metazen – an online metafiction journal edited by Frank Hinton.

The serious writer looks back on a long and distinguished career as an herbologist. Her favourite bush grows in Central Park and is called Noah’s Ark by the residents because of the myriad of animals that it shelters. The serious writer has given a name to every leaf and branch of the Ark, and when autumn comes, her heart slowly withers, pondering decay as the shrub sheds its summer splendour and returns to the raw.

The serious writer lifts his ideas like limp lychees from anywhere and anyone. Anything and anyone crossing his path becomes material. He turns silly stuff into junk and junk into art. The serious writer will defeat his demons and crush them under his ferocious foot purely by the power of observation.

In good company the serious writer uses the cognomen  Watson. In bad company, he’s known as Professor Moriarty, and in haughty company, he appears as the cool icon of logical deduction, Mr Sherlock Holmes.

The serious writer hardly writes. When he does write, he uses a glass quill and fifteen different kinds of ink. He creates without getting his hands dirty, a God in his own house.

At night, the serious writer eats steak and smokes bamboo stalks. He washes the day down with a glass of scotch. His bed is a wet concern at the bottom of an iron lake where he tells himself lies, ambivalence-stricken, looking for true feeling, alone now, a ferruginous plant, watered by the people in his life.

The serious writer is working on his first novel.

He moves his household to a deserted location called Loch Llamorgan. He buys a large shovel, which he covers with tattoos lifted from a book of Maori motives. He anticipates a journey of many moons. He drives to the local liquor store and purchases supplies. He devises a plan to shelter the house from all disturbing influences: it involves a system of trenches surrounding the house, an escape tunnel from the study, and CCTV surveillance around the perimeter. He begins to dig.

When the serious writer, weeks later, finally sits down to start writing, he is exhausted and has forgotten what he wanted to write about, or why. He dolefully looks at his tool with the strange patterns on them, and at his callused hands, and he cannot hear any voices.

He composes an e-mail for an anonymous publisher expressing his sorrow over pressing deadlines, the demands of work and family, and regrets the delay in providing a synopsis. After sending the message, he lays face down in one of the ditches criss-crossing the field in front of the house, and drinks in the scent of the soil, waiting for the book to write itself.

The serious writer makes money like other people fist fuck. He is a wild man, a beast, and a connoisseur, who spells French words forwards and backwards with ease. Most of all, he is serious.

The woman at the side of the serious writer is devoted to his cause, which he never clearly articulated to her. She is tall, but not too tall, a blonde who could, in the right light, be taken for a brunette. She has a black bushel of strong, willful pubic hair. When the serious writer needs serious stimulation, he grabs her patch down there and yanks it.

The serious writer knows about the fertile time shortly after waking up from a dream. His woman kicks him every half an hour to interrupt his REM cycle: he then gets up, creates, and goes back to sleep. Because of this arrangement, neither the serious writer nor the woman at the side of the serious writer can get enough rest.