(Excerpt of an in vitro novel “Bloody Management” for NaNoWriMo. Unfettered, unedited, but not dispirited. From chapter 19, “Prayer”.)

It was getting bright and the people awoke in the village, while seven black women from Nigeria kissed six stubbly men and one woman good-night. The woman had more hair between her legs than any of the men had on their faces. Of the six men, four returned to their wives, who were happy to feel them next to themselves, though they did not know this consciously, only their sleeping bodies made the appropriate signs of mild, friendly grunting and lurched tossing. When the men slipped into bed, they breathed quietly not to wake their wives and, closing their eyes, saw the shapes of the black women they had been with, faceless shapes, gyrating around a dark cauldron in which the women brewed the secret solution that made white men obsess about them. This was a hallucination of course, but a powerful one. In truth, the seven women were chatting their way through last night’s events, drinking strong herbal tea and massaging each others’ necks. Being a whore was an acrobatic emotional feat, though once you had got used to it, it became routine work, as long as you had proper boundaries. None of the women had such boundaries. They had not been brought up with them, so they left themselves completely open to their customers and fell in love, every one of them, each night. The customers returned from them believing that they had been with a hooker, a secret secretion of their sorrows as men, while their bodies were bewitched forever by sirens, who themselves were only semi-conscious of their true powers. If they’d been fully conscious of them, they’d have rented an appartement in Whitehall and taken over the country by commanding its male, love-starved politicians. But they were proud Africans and they had no interest in a small island  with lousy weather and an altogether provincial mindset as far as most things, apart from music and banking were concerned.

(I’m participating in NaNoWriMo. See also my weekly blog entries at Virtual Writers, Inc. This is an excerpt of an in vitro novel “Bloody Management” only. Unfettered, unedited, but not dispirited. From chapter 6, “Hearth”.)

As she walked through the entrance hall of her Chelsea appartement house, she glanced at herself in the mirror. This was an old movie trick, she realised, and one she cherished: the female lead, whose deeper motives would not become clear until much later in the story, needed to check in with herself, and the viewer needed to check in with her – not through one of those full-face-all-wrinkles-and-pores shots of the head, but instead by following her discreetly, as she, with the same degree of discreetness, glanced at herself in the mirror. She liked what she saw and she didn’t like it at once: a pale face looked at her framed by a black thing frazzled at the temples – this was her hair; the nose seemed to peek out of the dough-white mass like a periscope (perhaps there were little grey-uniformed men hidden behind it, who followed her around); the eyes, green marble-like eyes, were shadowed by too much mascara as if they were looking for an excuse not to shine. She held her head like a bird, slightly forward from the shoulders, at an odd angle, as if she were a bird threatened by extinction. Maybe she was. She felt intensely Napoleonic at this moment, and the mirror with its brown chiseled mahagony frame (what else!) and its glass, which had a foreboding of its coming blindness, underlined that sentiment from which it was only a tiny step towards Hestia’s secretly held, but strongly and boldly defended view that she might be the reincarnated counterdraft to Jane Austen. Jane Austen without the talent for writing, but with the soul of that most sinister sister of all women writers. That Austen had been sinister was the only rational conclusion that could be drawn from her novels: hadn’t she encouraged the females of her time to rebel against social injustice and relinquish a position that women had occupied for hundreds of years? Hestia saw herself as the keeper of the flame, the calm center of the household, the place to which the man, the hunter, could return when the elements in general, and his drive in particular, were beginning to overpower him. She viewed man as the crown of creation and herself as a willing helper and bearer of children, a heroine more like Goethe’s Lotte than Austen’s Lizzy or Emma. She moved on, past the historic magical mirror and, walking upstairs instead of taking the elevator, felt her barrenness constrict her like a tight, unadorned belt. She dreaded the emptiness of her appartement, and she wished she could stay home instead and await the arrival of her prince, no, her king, ready to bring him his slippers, take him by the hand, lead him to a set table and receive, in return, the praise and the adoration befitting a goddess of the hearth.

i have at the soul level only ever known five women if you dont count my mother: a german, a persian, an argentinian, an italian and an american. now i will talk about them & say what i need to say.

today i will talk about the german woman.

this woman is in a way the most difficult one to talk about because she was my first, and because it was a long time ago, and because there is still guilt. then again guilt comes with every one of these women & perhaps that’s what makes them worth remembering, perhaps that’s why i hold them dear in my heart.

her name was penelope.

she was two years older than me, freckled and pale, her hair toying with red without real commitment. she played the guitar and she sang like a lady of courtly love. she did not take me seriously at first – i sat at her feet: an invisible worshipper before a goddess, one of a number of young males, all of us unattractive in our own manner and unsure of ourselves, in particular of our maleness, which hung on us like a new uncomfortable coat, always the same coat in any weather, hot or cold, but we were stuck with it & we believed, with the faces of our fathers fused to our thick clumsy frames, that it would, one day, hopefully soon, fit us and feel right, no matter what temperature.

The remenant of the tale is long ynough.

throughout one of those overheated summers, penelope sang and sang herself into my heart. day by day, there were less men shuffling nervously around her, eventually they receded & became part of her audience so that she could see me as a man who wanted her & whom she wanted.

graffitti luv.

around that time a malheur happened to her and she broke her ankle so that she had to walk around in a cast. when we made love for the first time, this severely limited our acrobatic aspirations but made the moment more memorable. the cast was covered with graffiti, an artistically most promising thing it was.

moment of truth.

as i said, i had never been with a woman like this before & i went for it like a starved dog for the bone & i didnt think about taking proper precautions which in those days long gone involved carrying and using a condome: it simply had not occurred to me. neither did it occur to her until after the moment was gone (dear reader! it is difficult to write about what actually happened – i will leave it to others, braver ones, to serve you the juicy detail).

Have mercy on oure wo and oure distresse!

i recall that we sat together afterwards at candlelight (big in those days and perhaps still where hyppies live) & it suddenly dawned on both of us that we might have made a person by melting into each other. i remember the shocked expression in her eyes and my surprise at that. it made me see then and there the difference between the depth of our love for one another though i didnt realise it then and dont want to believe it now, still.

Of the bodies, and the grete honour.

her mound by the way then seemed to be as wide as the bosporus, filled with earthly delights, and for the first time i felt powers that i could not & did not want to harness. like a ship leaving the wharf after that long build, after endless dreaming of endless horizon and the swelling seas. like knowing that falling & letting yourself fall is a little death & only one of many many little deaths to come, and yet the fall is so sweet & the ground seems so near so near.

Shortly for to telle is myn entente.

penelope and i parted ways soon after when she moved to the south. got together again, briefly, years later, upon which i managed to expertly break her heart with chivalrous brutality that i had acquired in the meantime, the mean time that it took me to come into my might which penelope had shared with me as her gift.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt with a little help from Chaucer.