Morgan Delaney

Dark, strange and fantastic fiction

Richard Cheese

The Breath Before

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Image generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 AI system. Prompt by Morgan Delaney

Originally appeared in my newsletter from August 13th. Some bits might not make sense out of context!

Gamarjoba is hello in Georgian!

We’ve been busy with the move, but arrived last Thursday night. Pudding (cat) flew with us in the cabin and didn’t like it.

Manchee (dog) flew in the hold. He has revealed nothing, but my suspicion is that he liked it even less.

Tbilisi is very different from Nur-sultan. There are people and dogs everywhere! It’s exactly the shock therapy Manchee needs.

On the barren steppes of Kazakhstan’s capital city, it was possible to go for ages without meeting another person, which made it a big deal for him when one did turn up.

In writing news I’ve made it as far as “Chapter 27: The Mysterious Wonder Drug” in The Squared Circle, and I received my author proof copies of People Skins, Volume 2, so keep an eye out for a cover reveal and more details very soon! Out now!

I’m not the only believer in changing things up. P. G. Wodehouse did too, as you’ll discover in my selection of recommendations at the bottom of this email.

In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the main feature, which argues that it’s not a change but a fixed routine that you need.

Allow me to present

Flash Fiction: The Breath Before
You get better every day. According to the mantra from your free online therapy videos.

At least the daily repetition of it makes you less self-conscious when you tell it to reflection in the mirror.

The mirror is in your parent’s bathroom, and the body it reflects is as weedy as twenty years ago when you were sixteen, the last one in class to hit puberty.

But you get better every day. You’re now supervisor of the cleaning crew.

Of course, you can’t take days off, because the supervisor has to plug any holes in the team if someone else calls in sick, but you’re finally moving up that ladder.

In the mirror you see a black mark under the skin where your heart is. It looks like a bruise, but you don’t know from what.

It doesn’t hurt either.

In fact, you don’t feel anything at all.

It’s a hot day. Your crew sweat through their t-shirts and wipe their gloved hands on their trousers before wiping their foreheads dry with a squeak of rubber.

You don’t notice the heat, and you check everyone is adding cleaning liquid to their water, because you can’t smell it. Maybe you are sick.

You’ll be better in the morning. It’s your mantra: you get better every day.

You need to keep telling yourself that.

It’s just a bruise where your heart was. Is, you correct yourself.

You go to work.

You come home again.

In the morning, you tell yourself you’re getting better.

Every day.

The bruise doesn’t hurt.

Not when your parents die. Not when you realise that supervisor—hole plugger without extra pay—is the top of the corporate ladder for you.

Inside, you’re getting better.

You’re getting used to it.

Oh, and…
Research!

I’m reading P. G. Wodehouse’s letters, which are collected in Performing Flea.

Obviously, what I really want is more Blandings Castle and Jeeves and Wooster stories, but this is definitely the next best thing!

He wrote his letters in exactly the same style as his books and some of the stories are hilarious.

I also found out that he fancied trying out some different material, including a rather more lurid version of his early “schoolboy” stories under the name of Basil Windham.

This is from 1908 and won’t be for everyone. As a taster, try this bit of early dialogue:

“Is he dead, Master Jimmy?”

“I don’t know. He looks jolly beastly.”

🙂 If you enjoyed that, then you can read the rest of “The Luck Stone” right here!

The included letters to the editor are also worth their digital weight in gold for the inclusion of the phrase “playing the old gooseberry”.

Playing/being a gooseberry is acting as a chaperone/being a third wheel when two gentlefolk wish to spend time together.

Playing the old gooseberry, however, means making mischief or causing havoc because “the old gooseberry” was an archaic term for the devil.

Now you know, and my New Year’s Resolution is to work that expression into a story!

Listen!

The Joseph Boys have released their second album, Reflektor, and it confirms they are Germany’s pre-eminent proponents of Deutschpunk.

I’d normally link to Bandcamp, but it’s €13 there, which is a bit steep, so I’m linking to 7Digital instead, where you can get it for €10,49, if you’re happy to accept 320kbps MP3 files.

Steve Albini wouldn’t approve, but it’s good enough for me!

The album has disappeared from 7Digital, so I’m linking to Bandcamp after all.

Listen!

The Flatliners released their latest album, New Ruin, on the very same day. They’ve tried out various styles of punk over the course of their career (although never Deutschpunk).

New Ruin combines the best of all of them.

Get it from Bandcamp here!

Listen!

If that’s all too angry, then check out this newly released video of Richard Cheese’s cover version of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time”.

Watch!

Aunty Donna are back! Maybe it was the stress of that Netflix special, but it looks like their relationship has never been under more pressure. Intense!

Chapter 28 of The Squared Circle was to have been called “Unfortunately Badger”, but I had to make changes and lose the badger (unfortunately).

Without knowing more about the story, can you think of any other good adverb-animal combinations?

If you made it this far, you might like to know that the title of this week’s flash fiction comes from the song of the same name by Galactic Cannibal. Wonderfully shouty!

10 Infamous Pets

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Made with photos from Pavel Churiumov and Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash

This week’s killer list is a closer look at the darker side of the human-animal relationship. Enjoy!

1. Caligula’s horse. After being appointed to the Senate, this animal became the first proponent of the theory we now know as “trickle-down economics” before a financial scandal forced him to retire.

2. Van Gogh’s duck. Because the artist was convinced the duck was lucky, he agreed to all of its demands, including the drunken request that Van Gogh pay it the tribute of an ear.

3. Poker ace Derek Barlow’s dogs. After he taught them the basics of poker, Derek became convinced that his dogs were concocting a sinister plan. He photographed and painted them obsessively in order to work out the “code” by which they worked out the details of this plan.

4. The princess’s frog. After meeting in a wood, the princess and her frog enjoyed a whirlwind romance, culminating in marriage. The rumours that the frog turned back into a man were not true, but were put about by courtiers attempting to protect the princess from the court priests, whose powers were in the ascendant at the time. The Princess seldom left her chambers after the marriage, but when she did, she was usually green. She died of suffocation, from too liberal an application of green paint over her entire skin. It is now assumed that the frog was a member of the Bufonidae family, and that the princess spent her last months in a hallucinatory state.

5. The red deer stag pictured on the front of the Irish one pound coin (before the currency switched to Euro) was from a herd of deer which roamed freely through Dublin’s Phoenix Park. On the occasion of Lady Gregory’s visit to Dublin for the opening of her play in the Abbey Theatre in 1904, she was taking a stroll through the Phoenix Park when she was accosted by a group of men of ruffianly aspect. The stage snuck up behind them and bellowed, startling the men and giving Lady Gregory time to escape. For this act it was honoured with a place on Irish currency.

It features on this list of infamous pets as research has since revealed that the stag was in fact two soldiers in a deer costume, who were attempting to molest red deer hinds.

6. McCormick’s pig. McCormick was Ireland’s most famous butcher, even supplying the Irish president himself with pork. The pork came from McCormick’s prize pig, which sliced the meat from its own living body. It is infamous because its vaunted power of regeneration came from a steady diet of human children.

7. Gandhi’s elephant. The famous pacifist was forced to give his pet away after it developed the distressing habit of slapping people in the face while its owner was talking to them.

8. Dracula’s bat is responsible for the belief that vampires can turn themselves into bats. Vampires can shrink themselves to the size of a Capuchin monkey’s thumb, but cannot change shape. Dracula devised the strategy of training his bat to sleep hanging off the back of his cape. At the first sign of danger, Dracula would shrink. The bat, woken by the sense of falling, would awaken and fly away, thus creating the illusion that Dracula had “transformed.”

9. Italian dictator Mussolini had a pet brick to which he was greatly attached, and which he named “Litle Benito.” This is the origin of the common saying that if you want a reasonable, intelligent answer you should “ask little Benny,” as it was understood among Mussolini’s entourage that the brick was the more intelligent and well-balanced of the two.

10. The Queen’s swans. It is well known that swans on the Thames belong to the Queen. It is less well-known that each swan represents a year of the Queen’s life. On her birthday the previous year is decanted into a fresh swan in a painful process which the sovereign undergoes with the aim of distributing her quintessential Englishness throughout the country.

The “infamous” swans are the Anni horribilis 1981, 1992 and 1997.

In other news: Tomorrow, Friday the 19th of November, Richard Cheese (“America’s Loudest Lounge Singer”) will be performing his first ever livestream concert! Regardless of what you thought about the rest of the film, there’s no doubt that Richard’s “Viva Las Vegas” was the best bit of Army of the Dead, so you know I’ll be shaking – but not stirring – my booty to Richard Cheese this Friday. Get your tickets here!