Looking down I spy a mosquito.
It is, by far and away, a good dozen times larger than any other of its kind I've ever seen. More like the size of a House Sparrow than the normal size for such an insect. With wings a-hum it lands and stick its probe into my ink, sucking up the blood. Fascinated that anything could seek sustenance in something as vile as a putrid fluid of mine, I watch it drink its fill.
When it flies away, I feel suddenly the echoing emptiness of this place. Never much one for companionship, I look none the less over to the jutted slab of moss blackened stone that stick phallic like into the river Styx. The Ferry man just departed with his passengers, souls as lost as mine.
No. Not as lost as me.
I look down at the still almost blank tome before me, its pages marred by nothing but a simple intro I've just penned. In truth hardly worth the sanguine sacrifice to write it into the journal. Certainly not worth the waste of paper, since it will only be read by the peasant born like yourselves. Jacobite, scum that will seek a expulsion of lust in its words. Seek and not find. Not there...perhaps here though.
Not that I care. Sate your unsophisticated, immature, unrefined lust elsewhere. I care not.
Picking back up my quill, I jab it into the ragged wound on my arm and begin to write.
Valentines day? Oh, what a waste of time and breath. Bringing dead flowers to one still living in hopes of making her cunt randy enough she might give up her modest airs and admit to herself her own lustful wish to be fucked. How avant garde.
You need only bring a huge bottle of Burgundy wine, or maybe that hellish liquid Absinth. Say enough to get two musketeers drunk, and then ply her with it till her head is a-wobble on that pale neck. Then simply take what you wish. Be it mouth, cunt or her rose-curled anus.
How much simpler a task could you hope for in this life? Fool!
Oh, you wish for romance...Oh, how silly of me. You are of course in love! You wish to give her not your pigmied prick, but rather your heart, to your lady fair. I should have known, since you have not only the look but the bearing of a mental deficient. For only a madman would trust a woman with something so delicate as the human heart.
Do you not know?
They are fiends!
From the neglected Lilith, to the besmirched Eve. From Helen the sucker of the cocks of many, to Elizabeth the Golden sucker of none. That sex is born not from a rib bone of Adam as those prayer mumbling sycophantic fools claim, nor is it from sugar and spice! No matter what delusional tripe you might read for a demented man, Robert Southey! They are caved out of the very bedrock of hell, given marrow from the spines of demons, and blood from the torn gut of Prometheus! They are taught to lie at the knee of Lucifer himself,! Then they are shoved into their mother's reeking cunts and given to the world of man to be nothing so much as the spur that drives him into debauchery, beggary, and finally hell.
And we love them.
We can not help it. It is said to be in our very nature to love them.
"Not again, my proboscian friend."
Hearing that deep hum, I drive a large steel pin from my waistcoat into the mosquito, slaying it in a manner I think so very appropriate. Bringing it to my lips I bite into it with a crunch, flooding my tongue with a coppery fluvial.
"None get to taste of me twice, without the return of the gift." I tell him as I chew.
The metallic taste though does brings back a memory to me. One that sets me to laughing. I pick up my pen, dip the quill and begin to write.
"So, you plebeians want something to do with Valentines Day? Alright. The year the strange flowers bloomed at the Palace of Versailles will do."
The royal gardener protested like a fish wife as I went through cutting his precious blooms. You might would have though I was cutting his testicles free for all his howling.
But, I had a King's writ in my doublet giving me permission to do with the exotic plants in the Potager du roi as I needed, so long as he got what he needed. A way to make his frigid, overly Catholic Queen get into their marriage bed again, so he could have an heir. So here I was hunting for the required flowers like a spice merchant hunting cinnamon.
Poppy had been easily found. Cannabis flowers not much more challenging. The gardener had taken one look at the rest of my list and flat refused to help. Nightshade, Widowsmourn, Wolfthorn, the bitter leaves of coca. He had laughed at the Saaz Hops, telling me to go seek a brewery.
By then he was making my rapier itch. Had he continued to squawk I would have used his tongue to scratch that itch. He stormed off when I yanked some of his Ginseng from the ground.
Imbecilic fool. What do you grow the damn plant for it not for its root?
A single soul has moved to stand by the end of that loathsome blood soaked pier. I watch him look about for the Ferryman. When he finds not his promised ride into Paradise, upon seeing me sitting there writing, he starts to walk towards me. He stops when he sees the look in my eyes and my smile.
That mosquito's blood-filled belly has made me hungry. Something I've not been in ages.
He retreats to the very end of the pier. I belly laugh when he slips on the moss and falls in.
The water churns a frothy red.
Mixing, stewing, and brewing the flowers took the night. Coating the sweet balls of tar-like paste in the finest chocolate was of course a work of a Master Chocolatier not myself. Luckily the King had access to just such a person. A delightfully senile old man who thought me his great-grandson and that he was coating the Queen's favorite star-anise toffees.
