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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, I am so sorry”, the bride said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I 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.