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.

(part of 24 stories from 24 time zones on christmas day.
published in: blue print review, issue 24.)

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.

Every time I read a great line by another writer, I feel fear, in case I might, journeying the desert, come to a hut, knock at the door and, upon seeing eye to unseeing eye with my destiny, be required to speak my mind and need that line because no other will do.

And it wouldn’t be my own.

(published in Litsnack)

for booger who had the idea.

two writers sat down for a meal, carefully avoiding any talk of their art. they shared stories of their wives and children. of cars to let loose on the fast lane. of tech gadgets to play with as only boys play, exploring all keys and functions. they mentioned their fathers in passing and how similar they had become to them. they had a laugh, and when the pretty waitress with the blond hair bun and the wide swinging hips appeared at their table, they flirted a little in tandem, kicking gallantries back and forth until the maiden culled one and appointed a winner of their innocent game, which made their three hearts beat faster for a bit and the food that showed up on their table the better. all the while, as they were enjoying a full glass of friendship, they were secretly spinning yarns like giddy spiders. when they parted, with a manly handshake and a hug for the road, each had a good tale to tell.

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.
(published in elimae)

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.

(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’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 4, “Home”.)

The trouble was, that book had not been written yet, and perhaps would never be written. Not because Nicholas was lazy (he wasn’t), not because he had to support a large family of five (he didn’t have to), not because he didn’t have anything to say (he did), or because he’d not be able to articulate it…but because Nicholas could not see himself sufficiently entitled to write, to live inside that writer’s mind. Though, in fact, he already possessed the right mind, and it was working, working away like a pianist’s fingers on the keyboard during a Mozart piano sonata passage in Allegro molto.

Or perhaps it wasn’t the writer’s mind that he was missing. Perhaps it was his father’s beard, his father’s face, or his mother’s hand on his face. Nicholas’ parents had disappeared during a flood. It was a memorable scene, fixed in his memory anyway: how his father, then a young strapper, passed baby Nicholas to his wife, who passed it to her sister Agatha one moment before a giant wave took the couple out to sea, never to be seen again. A painless, sightless, still parting from one’s loved ones if there was any. Nothing but this scene had ever been imparted on him by his uncle and aunt, and it weighed heavy on Nicholas’ chest like an entire ocean.

By now, he’d gotten used to both the longing to write and to the absence of it. What he called his inability to do what he most wanted to do defined his character more than anything else apart from his loneliness, which was only interrupted by weekly dinners with his surviving family. This family was as small as one could imagine, since both his uncle and aunt had no other siblings and had not had children. Nicholas often felt, under his breath, under the flap of his heart, that they were just waiting for another wave that would reunite them with those who had already gone out there, wherever.

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.

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