the green hour: free story literary erotica

Today is my birthday, and to celebrate, I’ve posted my favorite short story. The Green Hour is available at Pen Flourish, the Drollerie Press erotica blog.

The Green Hour has not been previously published. Although the editor for whom I wrote it liked it, she didn’t think the venue’s audience would “get” the literary nature of the piece. This is why I love Drollerie Press, where you’ll find more of my stories in the coming year.

The Green Hour is literary erotica that confounds bad choices with good liquor, and offers a nice helping of Rimbaud on the side. Hence, the interesting video of a traditional “green hour” that I’ve embedded here, with Chopin’s Nocturne no. 8 performed by Lang Lang — for those who like the whole media experience.

While I analyzed business strategies on my laptop, she made a diet of black coffee and Rimbaud, sometimes at my table and sometimes alone. As she read, she sipped from a steaming cup, her moist lips forming words in silence.

I recognized some of the words she mouthed but didn’t know French well enough to recognize the poem. Je regrette les temps de l’antique jeunesse, Des satyres lascifs, des faunes animaux. Watching her so absorbed in a libertine’s fantasies made me wonder what her marriage was like.

She was the only daughter of a philistine who made it rich with thoroughbreds and an actress who left the stage to become the old man’s trophy. She was married to a trust fund baby, a marriage over in all but name. Because she was Catholic, she stayed with a man more interested in screwing his caddy than his wife, despite the successful union of cigarettes and self-abuse that kept her own figure boyish.

Some days, I preferred to watch her from across the coffee shop rather than my table. We smiled and nodded and went about our business. She would glance at me and let me know she saw me. My appreciation, my desire, was nothing I could hide, nothing I wanted to hide.

When she finally shared her portfolio with me, her cryptographic allusions returned. A well-groomed cadet in yellow boots looking through a sheet of rain. She said this was her husband. An orange sun eating away the edges of a prosecutor’s silhouette. This was her mother. A fat priest in a worn cassock gazing at a crumbling brick church. This was her father. Two children in snowsuits waiting on the curb of a busy street. These, she said, were us.

After translating a poem for me one Friday, she invited me into her limousine and introduced me to her “green hour.” With ice water and a sugar cube, she performed the louching of a glass of absinthe, which turned the spirit milky green. A sip of the licorice-laced liquor, banned for nearly a century, infected me with uncanny lucidity.

“The most luminous geniuses used absinthe to liberate their art,” she told me. “Baudelaire, Van Gogh, and, of course, my dear Rimbaud.”

The elixir had helped generations abandon their gritty reality in favor of symbol, imagination, and dreams. It was no less for us. She was a camera seeking scenes. I was a widow at a grave. Like Percival avoiding the healing questions, we talked and read, and our days together were a collage of impersonations.