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

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.

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.

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

Thornton thought the abandoned castle would make a wonderful gallery space. Its remoteness and romance differed royally from the artistic dankness of downtown and would attract the casual wanderer as well as hunters and boy scouts. He was not sure about the furry costume, but his girlfriend had convincingly argued that the splendour of the setting required a special effort on his part to establish wilderness credibility.

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

A feline predator came across a Gruiform and experienced that most fleeting of feelings, a moment of felicity between bird and mammal, ornithology and therology, beauty and beast. Their encounter was akin to the merging of two human bodies, when the phallic serenely protrudes into the spongy, bringing pleasure to both creatures. An outsider such as the  majestic grampus, who fell out of the jungle sky in that very moment merely saw a tigress roaring at a crane very shortly before its massive marine body squished both lovers.

Winner of the the Metazen “Image to Text Conversion” contest.
Picture by Metazen – an online metafiction journal edited by Frank Hinton.

That morning, four children appeared in front of the train, which was ready to depart and would carry them to an institution where they’d spend the day yawning while pondering how to begin their life in the most astonishing fashion. Their clothes were coloured flags of countries undreamed of that withstood all weathers like perennial plants and harboured machine guns, automatic rifles and grenade launchers made by the best for the boisterous. They were: a jew, a buddhist, a christian and a muslim, and they were ready for school.

My father was a writer and a great man, and his father was a writer, as was the one before him, and he was a great writer, too.

So that I got confused sometimes if greatness came from being a man, or a father, or a writer, or all of them at once, since the attribute ‘great’ seemed strewn so carelessly among my forefathers.

As for myself, I am a man most of all, then a father and a writer last, but great I am not in any of these, be it character, destiny, or occupation.

I can spell very well and I can raise a storm from a single drop of holy water.
And I sprinkle my verse with fairy dust to make it fly.

My greatness is fidelity to all things I observe from the lowliest love to the highest hatred.

My smallest word is ‘I’, which I use as an eye to look around from under my hood.

Published by Metazen, Oct 2009, with “iCarus” by ms flawnt

Crystalline sentences came out of her mouth. Elianna was an engine, a steam engine of love, and her name meant “God has answered”.

Honey-coated cashews stood next to her bedside table and her lampshade carried long-forgotten symbols that had last been seen during the first crusade. She was of mixed breeding which amounted to no breeding at all. When she thought of her ancestors, all kinds of faces emerged like a weird gallery gone into warp drive.

When she wrote, she waded through faces. She wrote and her writing seemed fertile feces to her. Faces and feces were her fecundity, the source of unfettered fabling.

She was followed by a fox. His snout was sharp and his step was light as gossamer. She liked that the fox never slept. Like her, he was a loner looking out for nobody but himself. He had once had a spouse but the spouse had been killed by a lorry:

The lorry driver came out of his cabin, the lights of the lorry illuminated the street and the fur of the dead fox seemed to glow. The lorry driver held his hips because he thought it funny: a dead fox in the road! There were five little foxes who now came out of the bushes and huddled around their dead mother, nudging her with their puny snouts, whimpering, unscared and unmothered. He thought his son might like a fox for a puppy, and he picked one up and dropped him next to the driver’s seat in a bag wet with smelly sports clothes. The dead fox mother was carried off by a road servicing angel once the truck had gone. She was elevated to fox heaven which is next to the heaven of man but greener and there are no trucks and no roads and no fences, no men but mice and meadows of daisies.

(Note: How used we are to bogey men coming out of the dark to threaten us. It is not fair since most men aren’t swines they are just like you and me, and when their mothers are crushed we children must huddle and push them with our silken noses. And we remember the smell forever.)

Elianna sat at night at her desk with no photograph on it. Nothing reminded her of the past. There were pills in her dresser, red ones to get giddy and blue ones for a walk in the dungeon. And a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World because she loved the Savage in that book and his confusion drawn out over hundreds of pages. The collision of worlds was her metier. Metier was a French word which sounded like a door closing: me-tier. It also contained the English word for an identity and the German word for animal.

Foxes haunted her dreams. Islands full of foxes, truckloads of vixen. Why foxes, she wondered again but there was no answer readily available. There were no guides to explain your dreams away and out of existence.

One could always buy drugs of course as the kids did these days if one could trust the news. But who could. The most reliable source of information was still the own intuition. In Elianna’s case it only failed when it came to men that she fancied. She had a history of falling for losers. Except they didn’t seem to be losers in the first place. Only when she introduced them to her family, where academics and self-made men and uber-mothers abounded, did she realise that she had, quite possibly, once again chosen someone who couldn’t hold a candle to her candour. Do not sell yourself cheaply, her mother crackled. Why even sell myself at all, she said. This is no show and I’m no thing. I can pick and fuck who the hell I want, she said. Don’t you talk to me like to one of your loser friends little missy, her mom said. And her brother said: hear hear. And smirked. He always smirked and he seemed content with that. He never brought anyone home. Oh god, save me from this family, Elianna thought.

But the next time she went out with Tom, Dick or Harry, she looked them in the eye and asked them hard questions, questions untainted by love or lust, questions like: what’re you going to do when you grow up? How many children do you want? Do you play an instrument? Why not the trombone? Which school did you go to? What are your interests in life? And so on. God, some guy said one day — I love ya, I just wanna make love to you, do you really care about this shit? She left, riding out of the place on a high, invisible, white horse like a righteous virgin. And another, his name was Lancelot, said: I’m a writer, doesn’t that say it all? A writer of what, she asked. Of flash fiction, you know, very short pieces that hit you between the eyes before you know it. Who reads that stuff, she asked, somewhat intrigued, because this particular guy made love beautifully, seemed generous, talked well and liked the books and the music she liked. Well, only a few, he said, I’ve only just begun to go out there, he said. She puffed peevishly. That’s not very much, is it. Where do you see this going? He laughed, and his laugh went through and through. I dunno, haven’t thought about it yet, he said. I just love to write, you know. She couldn’t decide if this one was going to be the one.

Perhaps you need an accountant, her brother suggested (smirk smirk). Figgle off, she said. It was family dinner time: they all sat around the table, including grandma Clara and uncle Geoff who mumbled and it usually was some dirty joke, old as cotton knickers. Grandma didn’t say much at all, she only smiled. Elianna thought perhaps she was demented. Pass the salt, her mother said, and the potatoes too, her father added. Elianna looked like her mother, but with a smaller nose and better, bigger, green eyes like her father. She had brown hair which she had put in a bun. Mother’s fingers were reddish and puffy from doing the dishes before they sat down so that everything would look as if they had gone to a restaurant. Which they could not afford. But both her parents liked to play pretend.

I want to ask you something, Elianna said. Well? Her mother said. You’re always full of advice on whom I should date and stuff. And nobody I ever brought along was good enough for you. So I keep having all these really short relationships, and I’m 41 and I’m fed up with that, I want a man, a keeper. Who exactly did you have in mind? Somebody like dad? She asked. You know, sweetie, her grandma said, and it was the first thing she had said in a decade, almost as long as Elianna could remember, you know what I told your mother when she went out with your father? … Mum, said her mother, I don’t think the child really needs to hear those old stories. Mother giggled nervously but Elianna was dying to hear more. I said, grandma continued undeterred while Elianna’s mother was gripping her fork as if it was a deadly weapon and breathing loudly while her father was digging into a pork loin, happy to have it to himself — I said, grandma started again — and then her face fell and her head dropped straight into the potatoes making an ugly thumping sound. Awww, said Elianna’s mother. But Elianna knew instantly that grandma hadn’t just fainted but that she had died, died before she could pass on invaluable advice to her only granddaughter. Dammit, mother, Elianna cried, I really wanted to hear that. Her brother didn’t smirk then in the middle of gulping and said hold on, shouldn’t we do something for granny? Then everybody got up and they carried the light body of the grandmother over to the divan, her dad called an ambulance but it was in fact too late.

It was good that granny had died with a mouthful of potatoes the way she liked them and the way she had taught her daughter to make them.

Published by metazen on Oct 5, 2009 and reprinted with a personal review as ‘Best of Metazen‘ in January 2010.