C Is for Conjoined Twins

In the early 2000s, I was working on a project I called The Fetish Alphabet. It was a series of flash fictions, all named for the letters of the alphabet, each letter representing a fetish. Over time, I had various of those stories published on various literary platforms. In 2003, Born Magazine published one: “C Is for Conjoined Twins.” I don’t quite recall how it worked, but the idea was the site was coupling texts by writers with multimedia creators, and the text and multimedia were combined into one cool result. My story was turned into a Flash-based (I believe) … I don’t know what to call it but artwork sounds about right … by the French artist Rolito. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can see the interactive, animated original story here. (This interactive work is also cited in Donna Leishman’s “The Flash Community: Implications for Post-Conceptualism.”)

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E Is for Eunuch

I wrote this short story, “E Is for Eunuch,” in the early 2000s. Originally, it was published in 3:AM Magazine. The story was part of a larger project I was doing: The Fetish Alphabet. This story also appears in my 2003 short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? In any case, I’m resharing / republishing it here.

You could call him nullified, or orchidectomized, or emasculated, or a eunuch, but he was simply the possessor of a penectomy, a person who no longer bore his penis, a man undeniably lacking in what he had previously carried in his lower basket, and he had, therefore, since become the ingestor of a multitude of hormone-filled pharmaceuticals, and turned into the personal curator of his own Johnson in a jar, and resultingly realized that he was now the type of individual who could silence an entire dinner-party full of people at the mere drop of a hat with the mere drop of his pants, and yet what he had discovered since this rather sudden change of life events was that while he had fantasized rapturously as a young man of chemical castration, and spent several years seriously considering moving to India to linger amongst the third-sexed there by the banks of the Katni River, it was actually only one year ago that his brain had become wholly overrun by words like “Elastrator,” and “Burdizzo,” and “Underground Doctors,” and it was only rather recently that he had found himself lying quite awake, because he had wanted it that way, on a cold kitchen table, because they had wanted it that way, praying to whomever looked over poor souls like him that someday someone would lean over him in some dark bed somewhere and be happy to find him so wonderfully smooth, but the problem was that now, today, at this very moment, in that imaginary bed he was truly lying, and he knew without a doubt, even with the lights off, that the person lying next to him was doing nothing but snoring, and coming down the back alleyways of his mind for him was his own terrible penis, and it was angry, and it was carrying at its side an entire suitcase filled to overflowing with his whole, long, lonely life that he had lived thus far, and, already, the suitcase was falling open and spilling its whole horrible mess out all over the floor of his mind, and he knew, with no reservations needed, thank you very much, that he would slip in it, and that this new smoothness of his, which had been intended to lubricate his life, would make it impossible for him to ever get back up again.

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Z Is for Zombie Sex

I finished The Fetish Alphabet 12 years after I started it, and the final installment is online today: "Z Is for Zombies" (because obviously). It's about a couple who build a McMansion underground (inspired by these nuclear-proof luxury condos, I suppose), and a zombie apocalypse, and a weird sex game they play involving the undead.

"'I have no heart,' she moaned seductively. The front of her peach silk robe fell open, and her mouth gaped. As he watched, she slid on to the floor and waved her arms up and down like she was making snow angels in weather about which they’d forgotten. 'I am undead,' she called and spread apart her legs."

I based the "no heart" comment off a series of heart tests that I had done a few years ago, during one of which I told the tech that he may not be able to find my heart because I was a zombie. I have a video of my heart beating around here somewhere.

It's nice to be done with the alphabet. Finishing things is always a good thing.

[The Fetish Alphabet]

The Alien Women Are Here

Today on 3:AM Magazine, you can read the latest installment of The Fetish Alphabet: X Is for Xenophilia.

"We looked on with slack jaws as they revealed themselves to us: their ability to switch faces at the drop of an astronaut’s helmet, the way the skin stretched taut across their alarmingly symmetrical bodies changed colors under duress, the mysterious orifices that, we swore, relocated themselves on a near nightly basis."

[The Fetish Alphabet]

The 12-Year Deadline

I've never been great with deadlines, but when I set out to write The Fetish Alphabet, I had no idea it would take me 12 years to finish it. But, it did.

In 2002 (as I recall it, and since this story covers many years, it's possible I'm misremembering parts of it), I reached out to Andrew Gallix at 3:AM Magazine. Andrew teaches at the Sorbonne, and 3:AM's slogan is "Whatever it is, we're against it," a phrase I wouldn't mind having pounded into my gravestone. (You can read more about 3:AM's illustrious history here.) I believe I pitched him the idea of a fetish alphabet. An alphabet. Of fetishes. A series of flash fictions exploring erotic derangements. He must've said yes because at some point off we went. A Google search reveals I wrote six installments -- A through F -- which were published between August and November of 2002. And then, for reasons I can no longer recall, I stopped.

A year later, I published You're a Bad Man, Aren't You? with Future Tense Books. It was a collection of short stories I'd written and included a few of the fetish stories. That same year, I worked with artist Anthony Ventura on an illustrated version of The Fetish Alphabet. He beautifully illustrated the stories I'd written, and I wrote some more. I mean, look at this illustration for "A Is for Anthropophagy." Amazing. Some recent poking about online indicates I rewrote some of the letters -- for example, I changed "B Is for Bestiality" to "B Is for Bukkake" -- and I believe we got as far as O. And then, for reasons I can no longer recall, I stopped.

Of course, this always bugged me -- the whole lot of it. That I had started it and not finished it. That it had been one thing and then another thing but never a finished thing. That I had said I would do it, yet in the end I had not. Over the following years, life happened. I moved, and I was broke, and I got sideswiped by Hurricane Katrina, and I moved again, and I worked as a waitress, and I moved again, and I got married, and I had cancer, and I got better, and we moved, and so on and so on. Buffeted by the waves, I suppose, or perhaps more like a drunk weaving back and forth across the road of life. Depends on how you look at it.

One day this year, I woke up, and I wasn't moving anymore, and I wasn't broke anymore, and I wasn't single anymore, and I wasn't sick anymore, and I wasn't in the eye of a storm anymore. Still, I had spent a lot of this year feeling like I was failing at things. Or at least not particularly succeeding at things. I wanted to do one thing and finish it. One. Thing. For fuck's sake. So I would know that I could. In that spirit, in November, I undertook a 30-day yoga challenge, and, to my quasi-surprise, I finished it. And then I set out to write 30 fictions in 30 days on my blog, and I did that, too. And after the former and during the latter, I emailed Andrew again, 12 years after the fact, and I asked if he would be interested in me finishing The Fetish Alphabet, and, luckily enough, he was kind enough and generous enough to give me the space to do it. The subject of my email to him on November 21: "An indecent proposal."

Today, the alphabet is done through W. I found a few of the ones I'd written along the way -- H, M, and O -- and the rest were lost. As of this writing, you can read The Fetish Alphabet through Q at 3:AM. A lovely woman named Emma posts them. That means X, Y, and Z are the only ones left. I told Andrew I'd do one every day, and for a while I did, but I ended up missing a few days here and there. Right now, that 12-year deadline is so close I can taste it, and you know what it tastes like? It tastes like rich New Orleans soil and bloody surgical gloves, aviation fuel perfume and prickly south Texas cacti, plastic bags filled with lavender air and the inside of an over-worn wedding ring. Surely, there are fetishes for all these things, including finishing things.

[The Fetish Alphabet]