…After having published more than one hundred and fifty stories on his finely wrought and yet incorporeal blog, after having negotiated precious terms of endearment with hundreds of reading and writing strangers and after having created a virtual, almost fleshly creature – more than a character but a creator of characters himself, the serious writer felt the need again to touch something real and be touched by it.

He grazed his chin with the index finger of his left hand while still hovering over the keyboard with all fingers of his right hand and retraced the small dimple that separated the point of his chin from his lower lip and which he had come to think of as one of the centres of his creative powers. Whenever he lost his confidence he put pressure on this spot. He slowly moved his attention away from his face to his pants and to the white napkin stowed in his back pocket for a single purpose: he took the paper towel out, felt its thickness with the same care which he had earlier given to his small facial dent, opened and put it on the table in front of him. He reached for his fountain pen, a burgundy Mont Blanc that had belonged to his mother, whose small fingers the pen had fitted perfectly, underlining her natural grace. The same instrument looked like a lost memory in his hands, which seemed knotty to him and too unwieldy for small tasks that required tact. When he put the pen on the tissue, a rill of ink trickled down the golden nib as if it had a mind of its own and created a minute black lake on the paper so that the serious writer felt forced to turn it over and start afresh. He quickly wrote the word ‘faith’ in capital letters before the ink could inadvertently blotch his canvas once again, sheathed his pen and let the fertile loneliness he knew so well take possession of him so that he could continue to write.

He was aware that none of his previous work meant anything anymore to him though it meant something to someone somewhere, which was a comfort anyways. In the nascent light of a new novel, which had begun to stir inside him like a newborn begotten in an act of poignant paternal love, all his old stories were just that: old stories. Joie de vivre was to be found in things undone, unwritten and unread.

The new novel might begin thus:

Once upon a time there was a cantankerous curmudgeon of a writer who lived his life by one rule only: to calmly move on to the next thing whenever it was time to do so. This man’s best friend was an ancient cetacean from a colony swimming off Capitola whose sorrow was that he loved movies more than anything. Fortunately, the writer had come up with a way for his friend the whale to indulge in its alien obsession with celluloid, which was not any stranger than the man’s preoccupation with mermaids and other magical sea folk.

See, everything flowed nicely: the serious writer could go on scrivening like that for a long time, turning trivial tattle into bewitching tassle and squeezing blood from the banal, like his character, who never died but jumped from story to story growing from a spring seed into a summer tree whose leaves gave shade to the uncanny and the unanswered, taking its water from the deepest depths of the telling well.

But to change water to wine, ‘nice’ wouldn’t do. It was cold comfort where a hot heart was required. To chafe his poetic protrusions, to make words like warm bread rather than to sneeze pleasantries onto the page, the serious writer culled inspiration from:

… his wife’s valiant calves, which held her head high and which helped to ground him when he watched her muscles work their magic on top of a pair of stilettos;

… the indistinguishable chatter from the sidewalk café opposite their apartment, where he imagined street musicians didn’t busk for fear they’d interrupt the permanent conversation which might eventually resolve some issues;

… the buzz of gnats at night before they bit, the feeling vulnerable under air attack, and the peculiar compromise negotiated between insect, skin and soul that echoed other equally ancient deals made with nature;

… all things and relationships that require a year and a day rather than a minute and a half to be understood, crafted, ingested, and committed to one’s flames.

“What’re you writing these days”, said his wife after they went to bed.

“I don’t know yet, my sweet, I’ve only just got the cauldron heated up”, said the serious writer and held out his arm so that she could cuddle up to him.

And then the curtain dropped. And it was good.

first published in > kill author issue seven

(published in kill author issue seven)

you know the strangest thing? the other day i met a truculently obsolete whale for tea.  he turned out to be a budding writer himself. he actually had written a few scholarly works, mostly on the blowhole, and one fat novel. about what, i asked. about the last gullible whale in the ocean, he said with a dystopian smile from gill to gill. you don’t even have gills, i said and told him that i didn’t believe in whale extinction. neither do i, he said, but ever since melville we whales have been projecting human morality onto our species like crazed fish. during our entire discussion, whaling ships were  circling us like vultures but the whale said not to worry, whalers were very open to negotiation. really, i said. yes, he said, that’s what i’ve heard. when we parted, he added something that i would like to quote in full:

i’ve very much enjoyed swimming with metazen, a literary submarine with a creative, international, irreverent crew lead by its builder the canadian frank hinton, friend and writer, who would never harm a whale.

(photo/caption reposted from metazen blog – “whale song”, 14 may 2010)

Nicholas immediately knew what he was supposed to do and not to do, in his new office.

He was supposed to work at the desk on his laptop. He was not supposed to look out the window. He was supposed to hold meetings with one or two executives or colleagues at the small table. He was supposed to put some books in the shelf, books that made him look informed, reading, smart. He was not supposed to shag a female staff member on either his desk or on the small table. He was supposed to keep his door closed during confidential meetings. He was not supposed to open the windows and scream his anger out or jump from them to a certain death. He was supposed to take his coffee from the hallway where the company provided machines with fourteen different types of caffeinated drink into his office. He was not supposed to leave the paper cups standing around anywhere. He was supposed to throw them in the wet waste basket next to the machine. He was not supposed to put art or posters he liked up on the wall, either instead or in addition to the choice made for him by the corporation. He was supposed to place photographs of his family, if he had them, on the desk. He was not supposed to leave a pair of handcuffs or a butt plug, if he had them, laying around on that desk.

It was a small world with many rules, every thing signifying an action or the suppression of an action, and quite possibly also the thought leading to such an action. It was an environment that denied the existence or necessity of personal creativity and expression, because his day was meant to be mindlessly busy, and keep him busy, in the name of the company, not his muse.

This office was more or less like any other he’d ever worked in, and it confirmed Nicholas’ belief that he could predict the next few years, apart from the human relationships, which also filled this place and brought it to life, against the odds prescribed by the catalog of commandments.

Whoever had designed this place and drawn up the rules wasn’t just kidding.

Nicholas sat down at the desk. He put his hands on it and slowly slid forward, elbows at an odd angle, back curved like a panther ready to charge – not a comfortable, but a position engineered to be effectual. He lifted one bun by twisting his hip, grimaced, let out a long groan of delight and farted loudly.

This was going to be good.

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 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.

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 found this among the papers of the serious writer that were passed to me after his death. I offer it without an agenda, like a pair of well-worn gloves for your dashboard compartment. Do with it as you wish. I think he might have liked for you to read it closely. As always, his writing throws up more questions than answers. Some might call this a condition of modern man. Others call it inferior insight. I call it common.

The serious writer always knew there would be a last story but when the time was near, he felt ill-prepared.

One day, after settling in his favourite chair by the window but turned away from it, he told a visiting friend: “It’s well arranged that you don’t know which of the many will be your last: your last piss, your last time being touched by someone, the last warm cup of coffee in the morning. The last chat with a friend. The last supper. You enjoy all of these in the most present of tenses, carried by the hope that there may be another one, and then another and so on. And since we are an ingeniously lazy and trusting species, we take the routine to be a principle and we shrink it on the occasion of its repeated occurrence without further thought.”

The friend lit a pipe and said: “I think I see where you’re coming from. I understand death is on your mind.”

The serious writer shifted his weight in his chair and looked at the pipe with longing. Having stopped smoking years ago, he now afforded himself only the second hand experience. He made a mental note regarding the loss of certain pleasures over time.

“The older I get”, he said, “the less I appreciate the fact that one of my stories will come round and not leave, (like a hot beverage going entropically from scorching to lukewarm to cold), and then what? Become an epitaph?” He chuckled.

“You know that Koschinsky has begun to write your obituary already, I hear. That’s outstanding”, his friend said and found himself obliged to clarify: “Given Koschinsky’s reputation as a critic these days, of course.”

“I have not only heard it, I suggested it to Koschinsky”, said the serious writer. “I thought: why not take the initiative in final affairs while I can?” He crossed his legs, laid one hand on top of the other, rubbing them so as to feel the knobbly bits.

“I have recently disregarded my bodily needs terribly. Come to think of it, I also have not listened to my inner voice lately. I don’t know why. Perhaps because otherwise I won’t write that last story ― I’m afraid to leave an unfinished opus behind, you know?”, he said and his friend nodded, churning out blueish clouds.

The serious writer said lightly, “I have always been a great fan of the auto-da-fé as a way of maintaining a certain degree of control beyond the grave while at the same time keeping your fans giddy and guessing until Judgement Day: ‘Did he or did he not…?’, ‘What if he had…?’, ‘Could this have been…?’, ‘We wonder if he…’, and so on – it keeps me young I think. But the difficulty with burning your stuff in reference to the possibility of your death is two-fold: you don’t know if you’re wasting your time because you might be alive for another X years; and it makes you think of your own death”.

“It would be a terrible crime to do that. I don’t think your readers or your critics could ever forgive you after your death,” said his friend. He didn’t seem to notice his own tactlessness.

“Well”, said the serious writer, serious again, “as you know, I abhor both waste and thoughts of death. Hence I only carry the idea of an auto-da-fé around with me, together with a small canister of gasoline and a matchbox. Rather like the plan for a certain prayer and a rosary, which I never touch. I don’t know if I fantasise that I might burn not only my work but myself, but I am certainly stocked up just in case.”

The friend shook his head gently, trying to disperse the thought, and waved his hands, or so it seemed to the writer, because the fumes had become so thick now that he was separated from his visitor by a grey wall of smoke. He went on voicing his thoughts aloud, as was his habit even when he was alone.

“The stories I will write before that last one will be as prayerful as anything I have ever penned: the characters will be mild and philosophical, apt to hold life’s whole in appropriate balance, with an even demeanour gracing my own age, like a study of butterflies at the end of their long, ardous journey. These not quite last stories shall, I think, test my very existence by throwing up many questions that had plagued me for a lifetime of serious writing, like the question of whether we determine our fate or are determined by it.”

He heard his friend mumble something across from him and took it as approval to continue.

“One of these stories will be about a man who sat across me once on an underground train: his right arm hung limply as if he’d had a stroke and he looked at me open-eyed and yet guarding his self behind his condition. He had to lurch forward three times (as if performing a secret ritual) in order to shift his centre of mass and get up at all, ignoring me throughout this maneuver and finally smiling – unless it was not a smile but a strained grimace. I wonder: did this man feel that he chose his partial paralysis by making a silent wish between clenched teeth, or by dreaming it in advance? Perhaps he felt that he’d been dealt a bad card, not quite the last one, by some god not merciful, overlooking him, with respect only for the fabric of everything but not this particular man’s happiness?”

The serious writer realised in that moment how the word ‘happiness’ betrayed its own meaning, because in reality it boiled down to mundane things like chicken soup, which he then dressed up as something less plain than farts and farewells. But he was not ready to interrupt himself quite yet and continued:

“Or is this man, let us call him Max (a good, solid, reliable name for this type of man) like me, refusing to take sides on this question of questions, perhaps, again like me, writing for his passage between the Scylla of providence and the Charybdis of randomness? A passage not to anywhere, a time filler, an artful avoidance?”

“You tell me, my friend,“ he invited the other. There was no answer, only the sound of the floor boards creaking.

“Here’s another question that bothers me – no less than the first: how much of us is unique and how much part of a grand collective of souls? When we breathe in and out, do we choose our own rhythm or do we enact an unconscious concert? Do we only imagine that we create our own thoughts but actually just sculpt an identity out of one and the same shared material? Is our whole concept of individuality just nonsense?”

He broke off because he felt exhausted all of a sudden. His ideas, his questions all seemed unclear and somehow impure to him. As if there was a truth behind the words, but the more words he piled upon one another, the less visible was this truth. He put his hands over his face and felt their soft insides now on his temples and the bones around his eye socket. On his cheeks, the palms pressed down on his the beard. He felt himself.

“What a powerful illusion the self is, especially for me, with my oeuvre, my life’s work, which I, in the hubris of the great individualist who also happens to be a snob (a most convenient combination against the power of the collective) trace back to myself: me, me again, me also, me-me, meee – these are only some of the variations on the person at the centre of my consciousness, who is really only a persona and does not contain my soul, though the fingerprints of my soul are certainly all over it.”

He felt himself to be alone. Sometimes, for some people, the Me broke down almost completely, very close to disappearing without dying altogether, he thought and closed his eyes.

He wanted to write another story in this one-of-the-last-stories category about a man, always only called ‘the patient’, who emerged from a car accident as a vegetable, his brain shut down until, after five long years, he suddenly began to respond to questions again and finally awoke, but as a different person. Perhaps his coma had been a form of cocoon, a phase he had to undergo in deep sleep in order to become who he needed to be. Perhaps he wasn’t really asleep but communicated with non-human beings differently throughout those years. Perhaps he forgot all about it and, having rejoined humanity in its customary upright shape, could no longer understand the language of trees and interpret the trembling of the sides of his intensive care bed as he had when comatose – as the thought pattern of Earth itself.

The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.

“But my last story will not be about art or finding myself”, the serious writer said and opened his eyes. The air was clear again but his friend had left and robbed the writer of his audience.

“My last story will be about love”, he said bravely.

(Possibly inspired by the death of J.D. Salinger and David Lodge’s novel “therapy“. Comments on Fictionaut.)

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.

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.