#38: The Wickedest Man in the Train Car

Your monthly tiny fiction + art

Happy last day of April, mes amis! Despite the dreary grey, we’re somehow tiptoeing into the heart of spring, and smack dab into my favorite part of the month: fiction and art time!

Today we’ll…

💌 look at a real news article in Portugal reporting Crowley’s “suicide” in 1930

💌 reveal the voting results for this month’s prompt and next month’s historical topic,

💌 read some bite-sized fiction,

💌 peep the art I made my paid subscribers/patrons this month,

💌 and dish about monthly creative news.

First…I found it!

Finally, courtesy of a Portuguese blog, I found a scan of the article that Augusto Fernando Gomes (Fernando Pessoa’s pal) wrote about Crowley’s supposed suicide!

Look at this gem of a cover image:

And here’s the inside article, for anyone who knows Portuguese (or, like me, knows enough of other romance languages to power through and piece the very basic gist together):

It made my day to find this after a wild amount of searching. Finding articles written right as a big event unfolded always feels like time travel; above you’ll see references to Pessoa, Crowley, and the faux-suicide all in the present tense. It throws me right back to 1930, imagining Pessoa himself cooking up twists to make Crowley’s disappearance even juicier. Yum!

🗳 The votes are in

Patrons and subscribers voted for this month’s postcard-fiction prompt:

Action: savoring something delicious

Word: jigsaw

Inspiration: that time Pessoa helped Aleister Crowley fake his own death

Like always, the story pairs with this month’s article, so read this first (if you haven’t) to get the full context:

🚞 The story - The Wickedest Man in the Train Car

Here’s the postcard I wrote on:

lol

Here’s the back:

Aaaaand here’s the typed version:

Slumped in the smoking car as the cliff-side train lurches towards Lisbon, Jaeger shifts her shoulder away from Crowley’s. 

He was a riot at first, true – what girl doesn’t want to warm the Devil’s bed? But Jaeger does beginnings, not middles and ends. And now she’s trapped with this occult has-been who’s pawing her leg while belching his way through a fourth glass of port. Ignoring his hand, she nurses her first drink. The flavor bursts, full, on the back of her tongue, tingles racing down her scalp and across her shoulders. At least some things still conjure pleasure.

The server appears, her green attendant’s uniform hardly containing her curves. With a wink, Crowley shakes his empty glass, the universal signal for another. 

As she fetches his drink, Crowley ogles her jiggling bottom.

“You know, my little Monster,” he says to Jaeger, wielding the nickname she once loved, “you could stand to gain some weight.”

In their early days, Jaeger lived to take the bait. A screaming match with The Wickedest Man in the World? She’d felt like a giant, powerful enough to pinch this god-forsaken continent between two fingers. Now, she stays quiet, studying the passing cliffs as the server delivers Crowley’s refill. Again, he watches her leave. 

After a minute, Jaeger drains her glass, throat burning. Brushing his hand from her leg, she stands, shuffling to the bar where the jiggly-bottomed server slices lemons. It’s not that she’s jealous; Crowley can sleep with whoever he wants. It’s the comparing that stings.

At the counter, Jaeger raises her empty glass, then her eyebrows. “Port, por favor.” 

Jaeger winces at her own accent, but the server only nods. Over her shoulder, cliffs and sky race by. As the woman pours the drink, a vision flutters against Jaeger’s bare neck, so pleasurable she shudders:

Shattering the window, leaping from the moving train, and running home to the states. She may be slight now, but as she runs, she knows, she’ll grow, taller and larger and stronger, and by the time she clears the cliffs she’ll be vast enough to cross the ocean in two shakes flat. She’ll leap past New Orleans shotgun homes and Kansas cornfields, bound over orange groves, and collapse into the soft arms of home. She used to love performing for L.A., and once upon a time, the city loved her back. 

When did her life become a private show for Crowley? She can start her own occult sect – she’s good at starting things – and dance for crowds and forget all about the jigsaw of Crowley’s life and hers. 

She simply has to leap, first. 

The woman hands her the port, moment gone. Jaeger, small as ever, retreats to her seat, where Crowley’s hand finds her leg once more. 

                               ***

Beside her, Crowley regards the passing cliffs and marvels: how easy it would be to ditch Jaeger for a fresh mistress, anytime he damn well pleased.

A Boca do Inferno postcard, circa 1940.

✒️ Your turn!

Now’s my favorite part: you write a short story yourself (500 words or less) using the prompts above, then share it with me when you’re done. You can reply to this email, post it in the comments, or call me on video chat and sing me the whole thing.

(As always, if you’re feeling stuck getting started, here’s an article I wrote on microfiction fundamentals.)

💐 Next month’s theme

This was a frickin’ duke-em-out battle! Every single topic got multiple hits, but one pulled a single vote ahead of the pack:

💐Frida Kahlo’s letters to her mother💐

Just in time for Mother’s Day, too! We hear about her romantic relationships ad nauseam (the woman was more than her marriage, folks!), so I’m looking forward to talking about a really beautiful series of letters with her mama <3.

Also, the votes were so close for every other topic, so you can bet your be-hind you’ll see those baddies in future months!

If you wanna get in on next month’s voting, refer three friendos and get the ~premium~ experience.

Or, to get in on the voting for as little as $2 a month, you can always…

🪡 A month in mailed art

This past weekend I taught my very first workshop on photo embroidery. It was in French and it went well! Sure, I made grammar mistakes, but at the end of it the people who attended made beautiful pieces of art, and what’s better than that? In addition to studying French to prep for the workshop, I embroidered a shit ton. My hands are stiff but my soul is limber.

This month happened to coincide with one of my quieter postcard months. With only four patrons on the docket to get baddies in the mail, I decided to give those lucky friends a treat. Instead of a postcard, I embroidered wallet-sized vintage photos:

I am in love with every single one, so count yourselves lucky if your postcard art month was April!

🌍 Updates in my creative world

• Novel querying is going great. I’ve reached out to 32 agents and am still waiting to hear back from twenty, but four so far have requested a full read of my MS! They’re all ones I’d be honored to work with. No matter what happens re: representation, folks who rep authors I admire are reading my novel, and that makes me ecstatic.

• Rhody and I’s music duo Honeycreep played a show at our friends’ local festival. It was fucking dreamy, y’all. Playing our music live made me feel like I was at the top of a great big hill, about to bomb down it on my bike and whoop in the breeze like I was 10 again. I’m ready to nourish my musician self more, so keep a lookout for new songs/a Spotify finally.

• Like I mentioned, I taught a workshop on photo embroidery this weekend! If you know any places around Toulouse that might host a photo embroidery workshop, pleaaaase send me a message; I’m eager to teach it again and again, and can do it in English or French.

An embroidery WIP using a Virgin Mary I found on the ground on a very windy day by a flea market.

Thanks for being here, my loves! If you had a good time, tell yer friends :)

All my love and stamps into oblivion,

Nikita, your Snail Mail Sweetheart