“A thousand fucking words on stars. What the ever-living fuck! I guess I can screw around with something and stick the word star into some literary orifice where it doesn’t belong and say: ‘There. I’ve done it.’ or I can try to pull something creative out of my arse and present a thousand words of absolute shit.”
My muse sat on the opposite side of the table, sipping her coffee.
“Well! Come on! What the fuck am I going to do?”
“I’m going to sit here, sipping coffee and amuse myself by watching you rant about writing something, like you always do.” The smarmy bitch sipped again. “What about your white ship idea? Weren’t you going to cleverly twist the story and slip two hundred stars into an obliging literary orifice?”
“Shut up.” I looked around the table. “You could have at least made me one.” I nodded to the cup in muse’s hand.
“I’m not your bitch,” she scolded.
“That’s patently obvious.”
“Only to me.” She sipped again. “Tell me, what’s so exciting about this white ship story that caused you to research it for two days.”
“I’ll make my own bloody coffee then.” I stood and went to the kitchen.
“Henry the first, William the Atheling.”
I put water in the kettle and started it boiling. “Where’s the fucking coffee?”
“Two hundred members of elite families of Normandy and England.” She called. “Were they going to be the two hundred stars in the orifice?”
“Fuck off!” I abandoned my search for coffee and settled for a teabag instead.
“Were you going to have some kind of divine retribution fall onto the revellers because they told the priests who wanted to bless the boat to fuck off?”
“No!” I waited for the water to boil. For a muse, she was… I don’t know. “Does that coffee cup of yours ever run out?”
“No,” she said and sipped again. “I’ve got three more like it at home.”
“Why?”
“You tell me.” She smiled sweetly.
A pain in the arse. That’s what she was. I took my tea to the table where my computer was open on an empty document.
“Well?” she asked.
“Well what?”
“You had something in mind for that literary orifice full of stars.”
I sighed. “There was one survivor. A butcher who had only gone onto the ship to collect payment for something.”
“What about Stephen of Blois?”
“You read my notes?”
“Well, what about him?”
I sipped my tea.
“Alright, what about the butcher?”
“He was caught on the ship when it disembarked.”
“Disembarked? The ship, disembarked?”
“Whatever! I’ll look up the bloody word if I ever write it.”
“When you write it.”
“Do you want to hear this?”
She nodded as she sipped again.
“Well the ship disembarked at around midnight.”
“What’s this butcher doing on the ship at midnight?”
“That’s what I thought,” I said as I stood. The kids were bloody yelling again.
Muse was looking through my notebook when I returned. “Find anything interesting?” I asked.
“You tell me.” She smiled sweetly.
“Isn’t that your job?”
She sipped her coffee.
I went to make another tea.
“Stephen of Blois?” she asked again.
“He excused himself with a stomach upset,” I told her as I turned the kettle on again.
“So he was gone before the butcher arrived?” she said. “But you’re not sure of that, are you?”
I shook my head. “I’m thinking the butcher wasn’t what he says he is, that the debt he come to collect wasn’t payment for meat, he was somehow responsible for sending Stephen off the boat, and all this had something to do with their grandfather.”
“William the Bastard?”
“William the Conqueror, yes.”
“So you’re thinking sea-witch again?”
“Something English, something Norman, I don’t know. I want something Saxon that’s still pissed about 1066, something Norman that was responsible for Harrold’s death. The accounts of the battle I’ve read indicated that William the Bastard practically lost more than once, and if it wasn’t for an arrow going into Harrold’s eye at the end of the day the Normans would have been screwed.”
“You checked that?”
“It’s fiction.”
“Do you need English and Norman? If it’s payback for fifty-four years before…?”
“Stephen was William the Conqueror’s grandson too. I’m thinking there was a betrayal.”
“…which sets up the cluster-fuck that was Stephen’s reign as king?” She tilted her head.
“What?”
“It’s nothing,” she said as I returned with my second cup of tea.
“I’ve known you too long enough to believe that ‘it’s nothing’ shit. What’s wrong…? other than a star-full of orifices.”
Coffee spurted through her nose as she laughed.
“What?”
“Star-full of orifices?”
“You know what I meant.”
“You might have a good story here. I don’t like it yet, but I might. Beside the butcher and the future King Stephen, you’ve got the drunken captain and sailors, the ship hitting a rock they’d safely sailed past many times, the brave William who escapes then returns to rescue his drowning sister and then foiled by drowning passengers’ hands pulling him from life boat to death. Creepy as shit, that bit.”
“But?” I raised my eyebrows.
“Who’s the butcher? Who does he betray? Maybe Saxon or Norse mythology might help. What about some Celtic mythology to identify this sea-witch or whatever the hell she is?”
“I’ll just leave those details out. Makes it more mysterious.”
“And confusing as fuck.”
“Alright, what else, Jane Austin?”
She glared at me. “A thousand words?”
“That’s what I said, a thousand words.”
“You might have a good story, but I don’t think you should tell it in a thousand words. I think it should be a prologue for a larger story. Maybe the cluster fuck that comes later. Reversal of betrayal?”
I hated it when she was right, still do. “Okay, what am I going to write instead?”
“A thousand words.”
“A thousand words of what?”
She sipped her coffee, smiled sweetly and said, “You tell me.”
