The writer wants to write a story about Patsy Ann, the Bull Terrier, who was stone deaf from birth like the writer. Like the dog, the writer hears the whistles of approaching ships long before they come into sight, and like the dog, he’s never wrong. He wonders if his subject isn’t too small though. He wants to give something back to the municipality, who has treated him well even though he’s not published much, and not to great acclaim. He simply likes to write about what he sees, and even more about what he cannot see. He feels he’s linked to the terrier somehow, if only because of his unerring sense of loyalty and his love for ships, because here, near the end of the world, ships mean life will go on. He plans to get a dog like Patsy Ann and give her that name, which reminds him of a whorehouse madam with a friendly face, and over this thought he falls asleep, his large furry ears filled with ship horn sounds, distant reminders of the friendship between man and beast.

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.

[part of my story covering 24 time zones on christmas day. the title used for this piece on fictionaut, "Grapple", comes from the code name of the 1st british hydrogen bomb programme.]

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.

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 two Art Deco houses stood in a valley on Tuarangi Road next to one another, in view of the highway leading downtown. For some strange reason, one could not hear the cars near the houses. Two families of artists lived in these buildings, which were too small for their perennially expanding minds, but were loved for their almost human daintiness. Their backyards were swampy despite the occupants’ earnest attempts at draining the land. The artists’ sculptures rested on the wet grass. Whenever a new sculpture appeared like a big friendly giant, the children were the first to claim it by climbing all over it, unsupervised except by the huge eucalyptus trees by the side of the road, who curiously peeked over the fence.

24 faces of the Earth in 24 hours on Christmas Eve.
Next stop: Kiritimati, Christmas Island.

― The old man has picked his grandson up to show him the Royal Botanical Gardens. He looks at him from the side as the boy looks around for places to hide, and thinks: it will be a few more years before he’ll begin pitying me. As they walk towards the greenhouse, the man feels the holiness of the site for  his people. He looks up in the sky and sees a single bird circle. So much space, and yet he imagines it not lonely up there. He wonders if the birds have ghosts, too, and where they go when they’re dead. He wouldn’t mind joining them when the time has come. The child takes his hand and huddles under the old man’s grey heron wings.

From the new series: 24 faces of the Earth in 24 hours, Christmas Eve. Next stop: Auckland, NZ.

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.

We watched an old movie tonight, What a Wonderful Life, and we’re talking about what may come for us while we wait for Dun Che Lao Ren, the Christmas Old Man. All of us, the girls, who do not exist. I love the pretty faces, shrubbed, in clean blankets, sitting under paper lanterns and flowers. We hold hands, we sing ‘Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer’ the way we know it. Everybody’s got a voice and even if you kill them you can’t take that voice away. Even the rain flowing down the gutter and on the street and from there into the Yangtze and into the sea, knows that. Our voice goes with the rain to the ocean and touches everyone else. And if they don’t hear us because we are little, they dream us.

From the new series: 24 faces of the Earth in 24 hours, Christmas Eve