Back at the Blog Again: One of my Newer Stories and a Return to the Old

Yogini deep in practice

A blog is something you want to keep going at an established pace and keep up forever. But, as with all things, life tends to intervene. I've neglected my blog for a long time, and now it's time to start it up again, rekindle the fire, and begin my practice once more. "Practice" in the vocabulary of yoga means training, doing postures, maintaining your regimen of exercise, perfecting your mastery of the discipline. I have not done yoga very much the last few years, and my joints show it. They're stiff and inflexible as a result of neglect. In the same way, I haven't published my blog for a few months, and that seems to have affected my expressiveness.  I usually write about stories I have published, and my blog is subtitled, "My History as a Writer." This one, the kick-starter, will be a discussion of what I have published recently, and after this one, I will go back to a weekly post on what I've published in the past. 

The reasons I've neglected my blog:  mainly, my job teaching as an adjunct professor at a local university. I like teaching. I've done it all my working life and was once a full professor. A series of circumstances led me to resign from my professorship and begin teaching part-time. It was by choice and not by choice--a story I don't care to share. At any rate, preparation for two sections of African-American literature, a class I had not taught before, and one I was asked to fill in for, took up a lot of my time. I regularly teach a class called Literature of American Minorities, which always features a section of African-American Literature, and so, when the regular teacher of the class (who is African-American) could not teach it, I was the likely candidate to fill in.

And it was a wonderful class. Like most readers, I had encountered the African-American literature that gets anthologized a lot:  "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden, "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Gilded Six-Bits" by Zora Neale Hurston. But the Norton Anthologies of Early and Modern African-American Literature presented works I had never read and authors I had not encountered. I read the poetry of Melvin Tolson (whom I had never heard of) and Ethridge Knight (whom I had heard of but never read). Both were magnificent poets, but they were new to me. I had read Gwendolyn Brooks, but never her novella, Maud Martha. A lot of new literature kept me busy. For another class I taught, I picked out some new books:  H Is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr—excellent books but reading them was time-consuming. 

So the blog suffered. Now it’s summer and I can get back to blogging. I’m going to talk about a recent publication and then next week I’ll get back to my anatomy as a writer. 

My latest publication is a story called “Azalea,” and it appears in the April issue of Amarillo Bay. That journal is special to me because my first-ever story, “The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake,” appeared there, when I first began writing fiction back in 2006.

Erina

It is the story of a Japanese-American graphic designer who is attracted to the CEO of his company. The social gap between them, however, is insurmountable—until one of his friends, the CEO’s cousin, asks if he would like to meet her. Jeremy and Erina meet. He mentions his love for Japanese poetry and quotes a line by the great haiku master Basho:  Cold, white azalea / lone nun / under a thatched roof. Erina reacts to this, they talk, Jeremy invites her to an exhibit of his art, and is astonished she accepts. 

Their romance develops. He learns, too, that Erina’s mother wanted her to be a Buddhist nun. She would not consider it, they quarreled, she went to college in the US to get away from her mother, and her mother died, the two of them unreconciled. He is surprised to find out that Erina—despite her beauty, wealth, and the glamor of her role—hardly dates and is still a virgin.  

As their relationship develops, he asks if she will pose for him. He wants to use her as a model for a painting representing the poem by Basho. The painting enables her to put the disagreement with her mother behind her. Art can bring healing through revelation of the soul. 

Here is a link to the story "Azalea." And since I mentioned the first story I ever published, “The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake,” here is a link to that. They’re both good, stories, long ones, and reading them will enhance your lives. 

More to come. Next week I’ll talk about an old story, “The Gaia Proposition.”

Dave's Anatomy #118: My History as a Writer: “The Girl Who Was Like Ruby Tuesday."

The song “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones always intrigued me. The Rolling Stones were known for high-energy bluesy songs. “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” were signature hits, but “Ruby Tuesday,” a song about an enigmatic girl with a unique philosophy of life, was slow and lyrical. You heard piano, bowed bass, and odd, haunting recorder that almost sounded like a human voice (played by Brian Jones). Those instruments, along with Charlie Watts’ drumming and Mick Jagger’s vocal, made the song as mysterious as the focus of the song, the woman with the odd name.

Many years later, when I was teaching about social commentary in popular music, one of the songs we examined in class was “Ruby Tuesday.” We talked about the personality of the main character of the song and her philosophy of life. This got me to thinking about what the projected character represented. What would such a woman, if one met her in real life, be like. 

Various stories exist about the composition of the song. Keith Richards claims to have written the music and lyrics (usually Jagger wrote the lyrics). Marianne Faithful, however, said that Brian Jones came up with the original tune and lyrics and Richards helped him complete the song. The inspiration for the number was said to be Linda Keith, a groupie girl Richards knew. I decide to take the idea into the realm of fiction.

The story takes place in 1969. Belinda Palmer and Clinton Pierce meet at a pot party which is busted by the police. They flee. Belinda helps Clinton get away. After the danger of arrest has passed, they talk. She says she lives in a small apartment and is a musician. Clinton is house-sitting for an uncle who owns a lake-side condo that has a piano. He asks Belinda to come to his place. She agrees. She ends up living with him there. 

She is enigmatic. This dialogue, early in the story, expresses as much:

“ … Do you work?”

“Sort of. I live with guys. They pay me.”

“You’re a hooker?” this came out of his mouth before he could stop it. He blushed. She did not look offended, though he hoped she would smile to assure him of as much.

“I guess I could be. I don’t like working regular jobs. Living with guys gives me time to do what I liked to do.”

“Which is?”

“Music. I love to play music.” 

Over the summer, their relationship develops. Belinda’s behavior, her reading habits, her philosophy on how to live, her tastes in music, the pronouncements she makes puzzle and delight Clinton. She challenges the things he has been taught about responsibility, goals, and vision.  

Clinton works at a country club as a golf caddie. When he invites Belinda eat with him at the restaurant, they encounter a man he knows just slightly, Raymond Miller, who begins to berate Belinda. Their argument escalates. He slaps her. He and Clinton get into a scuffle, though the staff at the country club and diners at the café break it up quickly. 

Miller is wealthy and a longstanding member of the country club. The owner tells Clinton he needs to take a few days off. Belinda, though, gets a lawyer and files a lawsuit against Miller, who caught Belinda and his daughter smoking a joint once and, like the father of the boy who commits suicide in Dead Poets Society, tries to assuage his guilt for his failure to relate to his daughter by blaming Belinda for the heavy drug use she engages in. Soon he learns he is out of job. Miller continues to use his influence to harass Clinton. Not wanting the bad publicly, he settles out of court with Belinda, paying her considerable amount of money. Clinton, though is out of a job. He works as a waiter in a local restaurant. Even there, Miller uses his clout in the city make Clinton’s life miserable. 

Clinton’s old girlfriend, Betsy, asks him how much he knows about Belinda. When he says he doesn’t know a great deal, she chimes in: “She’s a drop-out. Did you know that? I mean, she graduated from high school but she ran track in school and was in the dance troupe; music too and she was good—sang in the choir and played piano for us sometimes. Then she just quit all that and started doing weird stuff.” 

He remains loyal and begins to fall in love. But Belinda decides to use the money she received in the settlement to go on and follow her dreams. Clinton tries to dissuade her, but nothing works. Though she says she loves him, she goes her way. 

He later hears the song by the Rolling Stones and wonders if she too heard it and tried to live like the girl mentioned in the lyrics. He does not hear from her again. When the internet comes on the scene, he tries to find her with a net search, but to avail. Clinton marries Betsy, goes into business, accrues wealth, has a family. Yet he still thinks of Belinda—especially when he hears

                                                Good-bye. Ruby Tuesday.

                                                Who could hang a name on you,

                                                When you change with every new day?

                                                Still, I’m gonna miss you. 

“The Girl Who Was Like Ruby Tuesday” appeared in Wild Violet. You can read it here.

I am excited about the release of my newest novella, In the Court of the Sovereign King. Vaguely based on the mythic construction in the old King Crimson song, “The Court of the Crimson King,” it is a story of intrigue, struggle for power, and the eventual triumph of virtue and of ethical discipline over rapacious power.  Get a copy here.

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, and happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #116. Love and Silence: "The Space Between."

Ongoing characters find their way into literature now and then. Mark Twain created Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Both characters appeared in the sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Not many people know that he wrote two novels, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective. Ian Fleming wrote fifteen novels about the now-icon figure of James Bond. W. Somerset Maugham wrote several short stories and a couple of novels featuring his ongoing character, William Ashenden. One of my ongoing characters, Sossity Chandler, has thirty-six published stories to her credit. An ongoing character about whom I wrote less, Martin Rollins, is the main character of the story for this blog, "The Space Between." 

Martin did not get as much space as Sossity. He appeared, though, in my first published story, "The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake," and in my first published novella, The Gallery; he is the main character in a few other stories, and in the "The Space Between."  Martin is a musician, a guitarist, not spectacularly famous, but with a solid fan base, a good reputation, and loyal fans. He easily makes a living as a musician.  In "The Space Between," he meets an old flame from high school, Talia Metzger, while he out on tour.

He and Talia had been intimate. The relationship was unusual to Martin because Talia was deaf. He and she are assigned a lab partners in a high school chemistry class. They become friends. He is amazed at the way she communicates. At first, she uses notes and an iPad to talk to him; and she can speak to some degree, even though she cannot hear what she is saying. Eventually, though, Martin learns to communicate with her through gestures, expressions, and through silences. She is beautiful and athletic. They are together two years. Things are going well. Then something splits them up. That is Martin's budding career as a musician. 

Talia cannot hear his music. He knows that those who have no hearing can comprehend music, but someone Tania's inability to hear drives a wedge between them and they split up. Martin makes a name for himself as a musician; he sees articles now and then on Talia, who has married, had children, manages a chain of charter schools, and is an advocate for the deaf. He is sitting in a coffee house, angry over a bad review of a performance when he gets a text message from her. She wants to see him.

Wealthy Street Bakery, in Grand Rapids, MI

She comes to the coffee house. Once, more the flame rekindles. He knows she wants him to make love to her. They arrange a meeting. After consummation, he surveys how things have changed and have not changed. What has not changed is his love for her; nor has her love for him. What has changed is that he has built a career; she has built a life. One more thing has changed:  she apparently now can understand and comprehend his music. 

He remembers a remark he once read (he thinks it was by Isaac Stern): In music is not the black notes on the page that mattes; it is the white space between them. This quote is usually understood to mean that in music timing is everything. But his love for Talia suggests to him that in music the silences are more importance than the sounds. Silence is a way of communicating. His relationship with her has taught him as much. She silently lets him know she wants to begin their relationship again. It will be an affair. She does not want to break up the life she has built. But he learns her husband could not reach one spot in her heart. It sat like an empty room, sending tiny impulses of discord into her soul. Only he could fill that empty space. Only the love he offered to her could complete and make her spirit whole. She told him this. She told him with her body. They part understanding they will see each other from time to time when Martin tours. Talia is organized and can arrange it. The story ends with Martin and Talia lying in bed together arms around each other, speaking with silence, their words more sure than any he had known before. The story, which I classify as one the ten or twelve best I have written, appeared in August 2013 in the journal Scholars and Rogues. Read it here.

To read more stories about Martin Rollins, read "The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake."

A novella featuring Martin is (a very good one, I'll add) is The Gallery.

New novellas coming soon. Stay tuned. 

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #105. Ferity and Civilization. "The Feral Girl."

Ancient statue of Romulus and Remus nursing

Stories of feral human beings—human beings who grow up without the amenities of civilization or even of human care—are something we have always found fascinating. The Romans had, as a founding myth, the story of Romulus and Remus, two baby boys who were abandoned in the woods and raised by a she-wolf. They grew up fierce as wolves, and Romulus went on to found the city of Rome, which had as its symbol, a wolf. Millennia later, Tarzan, raised by apes, would become a well-known figure in fantasy culture. And on occasion, stories of children raised by animals crop up—some dubious but some apparently confirmed.

In "The Feral Girl," I exploited the old idea of children taken from civilization and becoming wild once more. The influences were many. I had written and published a story some called "Ferity," in a now-defunct magazine, Earthspeak. In that tale, a highly successful CEO spends time in a friend's cabin out in the wilderness and experiences a certain amount of ferity, which in this story is simply feeling close to nature and to natural rhythms and currents. She returns to her job more in touch with her primal instincts, more able to function effectively in the wilderness of the corporate world. This story shared some of that idea, but it dealt with a child, not an adult. I had listened to a book on tape called Outposts by British author Simon Winchester, famous for his books Krakatoa and The Professor and the Madman.

Outposts was about the remnants of the once vast British Empire. Remarkably, there still is a British Empire, but it mostly consists of small islands in remote places around the world. Winchester visits and writes on these sites. In one part of the book, he sails in a yacht to some remote islands in the Indian ocean; one, Diego Garcia, that was seized by the British. The British built a joint monitoring base there with the Americans and evicted the local population. Winchester sails there, his boat is impounded, and he has various run-ins with bureaucrats and military personnel before finally being towed out of the area and told not to return.

Island in the Chagos Archipelago

In "The Feral Girl," the main character, Geoffrey, is sailing with his girlfriend, Edith. They stop at one of the islands in the Chagos Archipelago, near Diego Garcia, knowing they are in a restricted area. Geoffrey paints and the two of them enjoy the unspoiled environment. Soon, however, they realize they are not alone. They find droppings that look human and eventually see a child, naked, furtive, and elusive, near them. Thinking she might have survived a ship wreck and is traumatized, but not wanting to call the British authorities because they are there illegally, they make a successful attempt to befriend the girl, who eventually allows them to feed and clothe her. She is particularly attracted to Edith, the basic need of a child (she looks about eight) being the love and care of a mother.

The girl, whose name is Sophia, eventually trust them and opens up to them. She begins to talk and tell her story. They learn her family was sailing about the area. Her father, she says, was "making a movie" the island. She survived (none of the others on the boat did) and, they later found out, had lived alone on the island for fourteen months. Edith, who in her teen years had gotten pregnant and given her child up for adoption, bonds with Sophia. As they expected, the British navy does show up, recognizes the girl and are astonished, and tow them to the main base on Diego Garcia.

US/British base at Diego Garcia

There they learn more.  The film father had been making a film was critical of the British government and their deportation of the native population from the islands. Their boat was caught in a storm and all of them perished save the girl, who had survived on the island. She has relatives, Geoffrey and Edith are told, who are flying out to take the girl with them.

Edith thinks of Sophia in terms of the child she bore and has never seen (she will not be allowed to contact the child for another eight years). She knows, of course, that seeing Sophia as a surrogate for the child she lost will not work. Still, her pain is apparent to Geoffrey. They meet the parents. The father is a Member of Parliament, so they know it would be pointless to make a claim of custody. The family, though, seem to be decent, compassionate people and Geoffrey realizes it would be wrong to show them rudeness or contest their claim on Edith. After a meeting, Sophia leaves. Geoffrey and Edith are escorted out of the territorial waters of the Chagos Archipelago and told not to return.

They sail off, hoping the best for Sophia. Edith aches for her loss of long ago. The sea around them quiet and stretching out in all directions.

The story was published in an online journal called The Feathered Flounder. I can now find no record of it. I wrote a blog on the story, "Ferity." Read it here, You might be able to order a copy of "Ferity" here. The link works but I'm not sure if the offer is still active.

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

Some great summer reading would include The Sorceress of Time. A warrior princess is fighting a battle with treacherous invaders and with her own fear and uncertainty. She will find the key to the future--and to her doubts--when she visits the past.

I would love to hear your comments.

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy #100: Revenge and the Pleasure Principle: "The Priestess and the Sorcerer"

“The Priestess and the Sorcerer” appeared in Erotique, one of those amphibious stories part sword and sorcery and part erotica. As is usual with an erotic story, it starts out with a steamy sex scene. A man and a woman are getting it on. The descriptions are explicit. The man is said to be a Norman—one of the French who invaded England in 1066 and took control of the nation. The woman, named Hegla—a non-French and more Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon name—is servicing him. After he finished, though, the second part of the hybrid story kicks in. The Norman suddenly begins to weaken. In panic, he feels the life ebb out of him, feels his frame convulse and cave in. In a moment, he is dead, his body a shrunken, shriveled leftover of what it was before—all due to his intercourse with the woman he thought to be a prostitute.

But Helga is just standing in for a genuine working girl, a friend from childhood, named Kirsi. When she sees what has happened to Helga’s customers, she is terrified and kneels down, muttering the name of the holy goddess. Helga replies, It is her work you see, and she will bless you as greatly as she has cursed this man because you helped me as you did. We begin to understand that this is a planned-out hit—vengeance—and that it involves magic. Helga leaves for the next phase of her plan. Kirsi gives her a yellow scarf and tells her to stand by a stone on the road if she wants to snag her next customer.

As Helga goes to the rendezvous place, the reader is given backstory. Helga was a priestess of the Goddess Freya, a temple maiden who had begun training and age six and was under a twenty-year vow of virginity and service. One morning, three men ride in, pull a sack over her head, sexually assault her, and abduct the acolyte she is training to be a future priestess.

She returns to her family to recover. No longer qualified to be a priestess, she slowly heals from the trauma of her experience. She learns that the men deliberately assaulted her to show the weakness of her religion. They hope to spread Christianity, the faith of the new wife of the King has taken. The King himself has not embraced the new religion. The Queen's minions seem to think that brutality is a good way to coerce people into converting.

Helga eventually finds healing with her family. She ventures out and connects with old friends. She even takes lovers, wanting to normalize her experience of sex. After a year, she goes away to meet with a sorcerer. She is willing to give anything to him, including her soul, to enact vengeance.

The Sorcerer, named Scealu, helps her, and does indeed want her soul. She willingly gives it. He has her cut herself just belong her collar bone and smear the blood from the cut on the stone inscribed with runes. The stone absorbs the blood. The wound on upper body is gone, leaving a white scar.

Helga returns. She has already killed a second man in her disguise as a whore. The third man, who is with him, sees what has happened to his comrade, and flees. Helga’s father and brother catch him and tie him to a bed. Helga stimulates him, climbs on top of him, and pleasures him. The last of the trio of her assailants is dead. But she is not finished. The men had taken her acolyte, Gwendolyn, and left her a group of nuns who had established a convent by the sea. The Normans apparently warned them. They have abandoned Gwendolyn and are in a boat; the helmsman is threading their way through a place of treacherous currents amid small, rocky islets.

Helga, who learned to hunt as a girl, takes up her old bow, lets fly an arrow, and kills the helmsman. The boat careens out of control, smashes against the rocks, and the nuns fall in the water and drown. She has exacted her revenge. She delivers Gwendolyn to the new priestess of Freya, says good-bye to her family, and returns to Scealu, who owns her soul.

Once there, he asks if she has anything to give in exchange for her soul. She is offended by the idea of offering her body to him (she did so in exchange for the magic that enabled her to kill the three Normans). She also grows angry at the thought of exchanging her dress and standing naked for him. The text continues:

Then she noticed the leather covering designed to protect the soft flesh of her wrist from the recoil of the bowstring when she let an arrow fly. She had forgotten to take it off. She untied the thong, frowned angrily, and threw it at him. He caught it and smiled.

“You are a spirited woman,” he said. “This is a very well-made arm guard. I return your soul to you in exchange for it.”

Her courage and desire for justice has impressed him. The white scar vanishes. Helga relaxes. Scealu tells her she is free of the spell and can go; the men who embrace her from now on will not be affected as the Normans were. He also tells the new religion will replace the old. This will be so in her lifetime, he says, so she will need to act wisely. He invites her to spend the night with him, and she agrees. She will make a new life back home. Whatever changes come, she will weather them with courage.

The story appeared in the journal Erotique Volume 3.  Get a copy here. If you like erotica and sword and sorcery fantasy, you get the best of both worlds in this story.

For additional titles see my
Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your
comments. This is my 100th
blog, so you will be commenting
on a historical artifact!

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My Second Novella: Strange Brew

Strange Brew was the second novella I published. It took its title from an old song by the British rock group Cream:

  She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue.

  In her own mad mind, she’s in love with you.

 With you!  What are you gonna do?

 Strange brew, kills what’s inside of you.

I always interpreted the song to be about a relationship where the woman is just trouble for the guy. I thought of her as being as bad as a witch. But then one day the idea struck me:  What if a real, true-to-life witch with considerable magical powers fell in love with you? The line, “With you! What are you gonna do?” had creative resonance and I began working on the story.

The witch is English, she is named Lybecca, and she is the most powerful witch in England. She has lived for almost two millennia. And, she has recently followed the trend of many in the late 1960s and early 1970s and begun using drugs, which has deranged her mind a little bit. She meets Andrew Cabot, an American blues/rock singer who has recently hit it big and is establishing his career after two chart-topping singles. They meet, drop LSD, and spend the night together. Andrew plans to go his way, thinking Lybecca one more groupie girl. She tells him she is in love with him. He says they hardly know each other and they agree to go their separate ways. She tells him she is a witch, but he attributes her statement to being her being burnt out on hallucinogenic drugs. She agrees and goes off.

The next day at practice, Andrew feels ill. He has an attack of severe intestinal pain and his band members take him to the emergency room. The doctors tell him he has advanced gastro-intestinal cancer, chide him for not seeking treatment, and tell him there is nothing they can do to help him. The cancer is too advanced; he should have sought medical help when he first sensed something was wrong, which would have had to have been six months ago. They give him painkillers and send him home.

While he is waiting for his ride back to the flat he has rented, Lybecca appears:

She wore a minidress with wide horizontal stripes. She crossed her arms.

"Convinced?" she asked.

I could not answer for the pain. I nodded.

She got up, walked over, and touched my head.  The pain vainished

I knew she had healed me.

"I'll be at the Bronze Bell at 4:00.  See you there."

Then she was gone.

Thus their relationship begins. Andrew finds out, though talking to friends of hers who are witches, that she is mildly deranged but is too powerful for anyone to confront. Those who have crossed her up have suffered unpleasant fates. He is trapped. Yet as he gets to know her, travels time with her, and meets her daughter (whom he finds out he fathered when he and Lybecca made love on a trip to the past and his child is in fact older than he), he begins to see Lybecca someone who is hurting, vulnerable, and unhappy. He begins to feel something for her—not exactly love, but empathy.

Later, she tells him why she began to use drugs. Her other child was killed. She also tells him how she became a powerful witch by studying with a Hoodoo practitioner in the American South in the 1930s. They had a child together. The child had come to see her and had died in an accident. Only the Hoodoo man can cure her of her affliction. And his cure may not work. It may destroy her.

They go back in time to the 1930s. As Lybecca undergoes the cure, Andrew meets blues singer Robert Johnson and other bluesmen he has listened to and imitated. He also gets in a wrangle with local men over his willingness to associate with African-Americans (this is the time of segregation). After he beats one of them up, he is cornered by a group who mean to do him despite. It is at this point that Lybecca returns, cured by the magical spell, restored to her sanity. And even more in love with Andrew. Now he loves her as well. They return to the present to begin their relationship under more favorable conditions.

The novella is available, here is a link to it: Strange Brew.

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments. Happy reading.

Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #96. Writing from Long-Held Questions: “The Slave Girl and the Angel Israfel.”

I had always been intrigued by the quotation Edgar Alan Poe uses as an epigraph for his poem, “Israfel.”  It is this:  And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures. —KORAN.” I got a copy of Poe’s works for Christmas when I was age thirteen, but I didn’t examine the quotation until many years later. I looked for it in the Qur’an, but could not find it. I did some searches and couldn’t find it on any of the popular search engines. I did, however, run across someone who had a much better knowledge of the Qur’an (I knew this because he used technical terms I did not know). It seems that Poe either just made the quotation up or got it from a source that misquoted it. I liked the poem, the opening stanza of which reads

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell 

   “Whose heart-strings are a lute”;   

None sing so wildly well 

As the angel Israfel, 

And the giddy stars (so legends tell),   

Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell   

   Of his voice, all mute. 

Even misquotes, however, can begin the imagination working and I came up with an erotic story, “The Slave Girl and the Angel Israfel.”

Hala

It centers on a young woman named Hala. She is sold as a slave to pay a debt and lives in a coastal city. She is a Christian, her owners are benevolent, though when she comes of age, her duties include servicing their son, a thing Hala comes to accept and eventually enjoy. She wonders if he will marry her but her world is jarred when he gets in trouble with the authorities. To pay his fine, or to perhaps pay a bribe, the family sells her. She ends up in the slave market in Baghdad. She is sold to an older man and takes up his place in his home.

As his mistress, she has privileged status in the house. Very quickly, however, she encounters a woman named Fatima, who bullies her. After her first experience in bed with her master, she is lying down, contemplating, when Fatima bustles into the room:

“Get up, you lazy whore,” she said.

Hala glared at her.

“Up, unbeliever—and don’t look at me like that or I’ll make you pay for your insolence.”

Hala got up. The woman led her to a bath chamber. Again, she pushed her along, cursing her all the way. Hala’s anger flared. She turned and again glared at the woman. She swung her hand to slap Hala, who seized her fingers and sunk her teeth in them.

She bit down as hard as she could. The woman began to scream.

“Murder!” she cried at the top of her voice. “Murder! This kaffir is trying to kill me!” She bellowed and roared as Hala clamped her teeth with all the force she could call up.

She heard scrambling and clattering. The young man she had admired earlier in the day came bursting into the room, scimitar drawn.

The young man who comes to the scene, named Suleiman, creates order. After he leaves, taking Fatima, Hala realizes she has been standing there, naked as the day she was born, all the time he was in the room. She thinks him extremely attractive.

Fatima is disciplined and reduced in rank as a servant for her behavior. Hala is assigned a servant girl who tells her Suleiman is their master Daroysh’s bodyguard. Like them, he is a Christian but is not permitted to serve in the army or the police because of his religion. Hala begins to dream of him and the two of them get to know each other. Suleiman is attracted to Hala, but does not think they should risk being found out and so will not become her lover.

Time passes. One night she dreams of the Angel Israfel, whose heartstrings are a lute. She awakes from the dream to find Suleiman in her room. He has not been able to resist the love he feel for her and she joyfully yields to his embrace. They become lovers.

During her time in the seaside town where she lived her many years, Hala had learned to play the lute from the daughter of English merchants residing there. She has asked Daroysh to purchase one for her and he does. She tells Suleiman she will be playing at a dinner tonight for Daroysh’s friend Kharki, who is highly critical of him for hiring unbelievers, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians.  Kharki will not sit with unbelievers, so Suleiman says he will listen from within the next room.

That night, Kharki makes an attempt on Daroysh’s life, hoping to take his position working for the government. Aided by Fatima, he announces he will kill Hala first. Just then Suleiman and some guards come into the banquet hall, kill Kharki, and capture his henchmen. He later tells Daroysh that he knew to come to his aid when he heard discordances from Hala’s lute. She never played discordant music. Daroysh is grateful, gives Hala her freedom and permission to marry Suleiman. They live long and happy years together. She never forgets her dream of the Angel Israfel.

The story appeared in an erotica journal called Oysters and Chocolate, which is no longer published. You can read it, however, in a special issue of Erotique that consists entirely of my erotica—“The Slave Girl and the Angel Israfel,” and a number of other stories about relations and the joy of love. Take a look at their website here.

For additional titles see my Writer's Page.

If vampire stories are your thing, a unique and unusual tale is Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute: A Vampire Chronicle, Part I.

For another multicultural story, I recommend The Sorceress of Time.

Happy reading.