> The belt is made from the leaves of the bup tree, and very ingeniously braided, to which is attached the tassels, which are made of coarser material, being the bark of a small vine, in their language called aht-aht. When the dress is worn, one of the tassels hang before and the other behind.

William Lay, Cyrus M. Hussey

A Narrative of the Great Mutiny on Board the Ship Globe... (1828)

After abruptly ending the City Heiress before any further ruination of characters carved by Aphra Behn, I had an opportunity to listen for the first time to a legend told by a narrator full of Scotch and not rum. As far as I know, there have been no scholarly papers on the effect of different alcohol brands on storytelling, if any. So, based only on the two subjects I have closely observed, I promise to one day write a scholarly paper ardently following the ten Aristotelian principles in grammatically correct English by bravely imitating the style and tone of some of the German and Italian academics from the pre-mid-seventeenth-century known for using their brand of divine Latin (i.e., vulgarly challenging some dissenter's or their decedent's manhood as many times as possible rather than offering a plausible opposing viewpoint). I make this bold promise knowing well such a scholarly paper will never see the daylight in our modern era since sincere poor imps with low intelligence quotient scores are purposely not allowed to enter any institute ending with demic or logical suffixes. With Mapa, demonically being my other Satyr subject, any fabula after a few glasses of Barcardi white rum would have many offbeat ballads before and after his many urination breaks.

As a self-proclaimed bad lad from Allentown with eight years of experience prowling the six mean streets of Hamilton district but only before sunset, I was all set to corrupt the innocent youths of New York with my knowledge of many bawdy ballads with bladder rhymes. On my first day in New York, as a sixteen-year-old apprentice, I looked forward to finally roaming the streets at night in a city with a downtown of more than six small blocks. But the naive kind-hearted Bakers treated me like a country bumpkin waiting to be preyed on by the monsters of New York. So, my sole movements had daily limits of only a few steps, limping my torso with a sleepy head from the fake castle to the old shack and back, with my mindless soul. For a while, to be alert before work, I would daily count the steps it took to walk from the more than two-century-old home named Baker Castle to Bup. Since the walk took less than a minute, I had to add a few mundane tasks to stretch the time I needed to count myself to alertness. The only thing separating the two buildings is a few feet of open space between an odd-shaped tree planted less than a century ago by Mr.Baker's grandfather. So to stretch my counting time to reach two hundred, I had to limp, hop back a few times, and even stop to admire the strange fruits hanging on the tree, all while still counting.

Naming your home and then boldly engraving it on the space above your door may have been a tradition that ceased a little before I was born. I grew up in a two-bedroom picket fenceless small house with only a number on the door, but Mama's wooden fenced house had a name and a number above the door. I prefer Baker Castle over the name that is on top of Mama's door. Revealing that name now would also mean reliving the many canings I received, which needs a long chapter, even when abridged. So, for now, let that also be a mystery-in-waiting. Before you curse, I hope reading my list of mystery-in-waiting will assure you that this is not a Diderot's cat-and-mouse game. So far, I have the following items:

* My first minor literary crime with cause and aftermath.

* Bup Myths with many superstitions over one street number.

* History of Bup with many hysterical characters.

* Mr.Baker's reason for writing his novel.

* Mr.Baker's obsession with the novelist Dorthy Baker.

* Blacksheep Legend

* Mama's Careless Caning.

Now, back to the fake castle.

The Baker Castle is a brick-walled two-story-four-bedroom house without any curtain walls, portcullises, or other features to justify the Castle part of the name. But it does have a large kitchen with a beehive oven as Mr.Baker's great-grandfather was once a famous New York baker. The beehive oven now functions only as an inefficient fireplace during winter. Over the years, this house has gone through several renovations, but one stood out to me.

After the Great New York City Fire of 1845, Mr. Baker's grandfather spent all his savings on fireproof renovation, even though the fire never came close to Baker Castle. Under normal circumstances, such a renovation would seem like measures taken by a person who had to live through two devasting fires within a decade. But after hearing the Blacksheep legend, fire seems like an immortal villainous comic book character picking different members from the Baker family tree to torture them mentally.

Over the past eight years, I have read a few books about devastating city fires in different parts of the world and then pondered over the cause. New York City had three great fires in less than a century, but I think the first one may need an asterisk.

The fire from 1776 happened during the American Revolutionary War, so the cause may not have been accidental. I could not find any books written with witness accounts, and one that came a century later was enthralling to read as literature but sounded a bit too novelistic for a history book. So I gave up pondering over this fire and instead copied a few novelistic lines from the book to my small orange-covered Words for Literary Crime notebook.

> A fresh gale was blowing from the south, and weather was dry, thus it spread with inconceivable rapidity. It coiled itself round building after building like a serpent greedy of its prey. Houses and churches disappeared like dissolving views. The panic-stricken and distracted inhabitants were almost as terrible to behold as the roaring conflagration. Blazing fire-brands leaped along in advance of the lurid column, and little fires were breaking out everywhere. People ran along the streets to see, and the fire went over their heads and flanked them. Even the red heavens seemed also on fire.

Martha Joanna Lamb, Mrs. Burton Harrison

History of the City of New York: The century of national…

Volume II (1880)

The 1835 Great Fire of New York involves coal, so I am a bit nervous writing about it as the son of a coal miner because I once sold a customized short story to one of the members of NAROCT (Nocturnal Association for Reworking Old Conspiracy Theories). The last thing I need is for one of these members to start a rumor about the story being an attempt by a propagandist of the coal industry trying to distract and cover up the cause of the fire. NAROCT members of the New York chapter frequently visit Bup at night, always searching for books with old conspiracy theories, and there are plenty of those in the secret den, but Mr.Baker is not interested in selling those books. So I try to sweet-talk these bright minds into buying the fruits of my minor literary crimes, and they often leave a few coins for my effort. But having had many conversations with them, I know members of this group do not believe in coincidences except when some information or argument weakens their theory.

According to the investigators of the 1835 fire, the cause of the fire was a coal stove igniting a burst gas pipe. Even though close to 700 buildings were destroyed, it could have been far more devastating if someone had stopped the US Marines from using gunpowder to blow up the buildings in the path of the fire. Usually, such devasting fires, even when accidental, end with a scapegoat, yet this one had none.

I feel nervous because down in the secret den of Bup, there is a carton labeled 1835 NY Fire containing reactionary newspaper articles and speculative pamphlets, the kind of material needed for a NAROCT contra. The wrath of that one NAROCT member is less likely to be fueled by my mock spooky short story with a kind cold-hearted ghost. In my silly tale with a simple nar and not Narada as narrator, in a barn across the East River and a few miles away from the fire, a cantor named John Roe Nature is singing a song with the melodious yeses of a choir, hoping the salty crowd of Hudson River haters will run toward the fire to help stop the spread. This moving song with verses about fighting fire with ice motivates some men, women, and animals to rush to the frozen Hudson River, hoping to stop the spread. Meanwhile, in the ghost world, an ahead-of-time newspaper reported this with the headline Nature Calls, Cowards Rush To Fight Fire. As soon as the Ghost of Sir Thomas Bloodworth got wind of this headline, he blissfully appeared in New York but spooked the crowd away because he came up through a craton, all muddied. On this occasion, Bloodworth appeared as a kind-hearted ghost wishing to save the city instead of money and also test the piss method, hoping to avoid being a footnote in future 17th-century London history books. For this nar, one more useless sentence is necessary to leave a paragraph composed with characters of NAROCT to end with a three double eight on syllables.

The thrilling NAROCTic effect and years of Mama scolding me not to behave like an imp may have slowly turned me into a mischievous creature. I started spending more time in the secret den searching for the imp number in the heap of Cartomancy and Necromancy books. Such a number would help me create a pseudonym appealing to NAROCT members to fetch me a few coins with my customized short stories. I was hoping for a number like 222, so I could write under the nom de plume Pim the thrice two.

Another number I had in mind was six for Pim the Sexton, with fabricated biography of a fictitious disgruntled poet. This Pim's about the Poet section would portray him as a former custodian serving sixteen years since thirteen ringing bells and digging graves. At almost thirty, he learned from a man of cloth there was a promotion coming, blessing him to start cleaning dirty vestments and even some sacred utensils. As a rare sexton scared of touching sacred utensils, he quit at thirty to invest in pen and paper. He was going to weave all the Graveyard Poems he had read over the sixteen years into an epic poem in hexameter.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Fortunately, I avoided getting into more trouble than I could handle with any man of the cloth. Thanks to a Presbyterian Reverend's habit of pulling and twisting students' ears during my preteen school years, failing to find any number for an imp seemed fortunate. So, I decided to improvise using another number from one of the Cartomancy books.

Much to my delight, there seems to be no shortage of numbers associated with Angels in Cartomancy books. As tempting as it was to pick the popular one, I ignored seeing 1814 and picked 388 to manipulate for my minor literary crimes. To avoid the wrath and any curse from tarot card readers, I need to send a crystal clear message: I did not draw 388, so all the modern positive and negative messages associated with the number are safe for you to believe, but not me.

Cards on the table, I am a bit more familiar with the use of playing cards for fortune-telling pre and post-French Revolution and the Tarochhi Series from the mid-fifteenth century. Even though I have read a few books on Gypsy and some Pseudo-Egyptian cards published from the late 19th century onwards, I prefer to leave them alone. Except for a brief thought about the following passage from the Canadian-born Manly P. Hall's book (and nothing nonsensical about how that name sounds with the middle initial) :

> The Seventeenth numbered major trump is called Les Etoiles, the Stars, and portrays a young girl kneeling with one foot in water and the other on and, her body somewhat suggesting the swastika. She has two urns, the contents of which she pours upon the land and sea. Above the girl's head are eight stars, one of which is exceptionally large and bright.

Manly Palmer Hall

The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928)

Two decades later, reading this passage feels odd, not only Hall's suggestion but also his reference source. I wonder what thoughts would be associated with the swastika in the future.

Intentionally and not coincidentally, I chose this number because 388 happens to be the year scholars have agreed, for at least the time being, as the year Magnus Maximus got executed. I doubt there is a better year to bait, tease and test a member of NAROCT with conspiracies. Not wanting to disturb the ongoing and never-ending "meaning of meaning" academic debate in journals over the term dark ages, I tend to avoid using any material between the fifth and eleventh century for bait. To end my pseudonym name convention method, I will reveal that after reading an article on the average lifespan of an octopus, I chose Pim the Tridioctopi as a pen name for short stories written exclusively for NAROCT members.

Before writing about such a sophisticated form, I would like to share the sad teen saga of my romantic French experience.

French is a language I learned by myself in less than thirty days at fifteen after falling in love for the first time with a sixteen-year-old girl who had recently moved into the speared top fenced mini mansion a block from Mama's house. I endured all the caning and kept visiting Mama's house with a smile, more frequent than before, for glances of this beautiful girl through the gaps between the sharp spears as she sat in the garden on a wooden tree swing in different sleeveless floral frocks, only rising slightly up slowly and constantly raising her legs when coming down to avoid touching the ground while reading some fantasy art covered paperback book. Gradually, this glancing romance progressed from an exchange of smiles to waves to her puzzled expressions as I uttered a few French phrases from outside and finally climaxed in minutes-long English conversations as friends between the fence as I learned yet another life lesson - never trust information from preteen spies. Those snaky spies never told me my Giulietta was wealthier than Serafina Di Dio, all her glances which kept burning my heart and making me feel like a Serafino came from a FINO (French in name only), born and raised in Greenbay without ever learning any tongue-twisters of her grand-mère but always signing her name as Chérie and pronouncing it as Sherry. After many sunlight trysts behind some sedimentary rocks of Lehigh Valley and just before executing my plan to sentimentally propose to her at sixteen with widowed Mama's on the verge of vanishing gold ring on top of a Kersenvlaai from the local Dutch bakery, I was exiled to New York to avoid a bloody feud between many sons of Allentown coal miners and the two friendless sons of an Italian Greenbay cheese factory owner. Our rocky affair was only a half-baked melodrama as Chérie never abandoned her wealthy family to start any Carmel monastery after a martyrdom-less romance. Hopefully, my excuses for learning German and Italian will be far more exciting because it involves a typewriter as a gift from an alleged spy. So, now I will get back to the cartomancy book.

When I opened the book, for some unknown reason, there was an undated newspaper article pasted on the inside of the book cover with the headline GAMBETTA ET LA PROPHETIE DE LA TZIGANE De la Revue hebdomadire. I wish I could have had a wye conversation with the previous owner of this book before it landed in the secret den. For a moment, I also wished there was a less controversial French Literary magazine called La Roue, silently edited by Abel Gance weekly in between editing his masterpiece with thirty-two reels, which I think would yield little over eight hours of soundless moving images.

After reading that undated pasted article, I could card-lessly foresee a challenge coming, even before flipping to the table of contents in the French cartomancy book. I had mentally drawn a card with an imaginary coal train without a caboose, hauling a few vigorously shaking open carriages filled with limestones engraved with morsels of knowledge extracted from various old textbooks and academic journals instead of coal, all set to derail. Even though there is no such idiotic idiom as Don't judge a book by a pasted article inside its cover, I was committed to reading all three hundred-odd pages of figures with some text. As a subject-wise less judgemental reader, the challenge for me was not cartomancy but suppressing my preconceived notion that an ancient satyr may have pasted this article to bring out the imp in me. To avoid a chaotic state of mind, I hoped my train of linear thought would not end up at Stella di Inversione (reversing star or convoluted Wye) in Carbonia. After almost making it through the table of content with seven chapter titles without any historical obstacles, dashing my hope were these final few lines:

LE TOUT RECUEILLI ET MIS DANS UN NOUVEL ORDRE

par Julia ORSINI

Sibylle du faubourg Saint-Germain

D'APRÈS LA MÉTHODE

de Mademoiselle LENORMAND

I knew Julia Orsini was one of many nom de plume of Simon-François Blocquel, an orphan adopted as a nine-year-old by his aunt in 1789 (either the wife of Charles-Joseph Panckoucke or Jean-Louis de Boubers, the history of l'imprimeur-libraire lillois is a bit fuzzy to me, but they did take a risk providing the light and ink for some of the works of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and many others). After a decade or so of being an apprentice, Monsieur Blocquel decided to open a small printing press in 1805, relying on creative pen names and the allure of having access to rare works. When all was said and done, he died in 1863 with the following titles: Author, Editor, Publisher, Lithograph Printer, Member of la loge des Amis réunis (Freemasons before the merger), Lille Municipal Council Member (1820-57), Member of the Municipal Library Commission, Administrator of Charity Office, Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, President of la Société typographique lilloise, and probably many more.

Bloquel's cartomancy book does not have a publication date, but my guess is after the death of Marie Anne Lenormand in 1843, based loosely on his claim of using her methods. The account of Mademoiselle Lenormand not having an heir and leaving all her fortunes to her soldier nephew, who decides to burn all her occult materials due to his Catholic beliefs but keeps the money made using those materials, is riveting enough without adding Bloquel into the mix. Wait! I am getting another itch about leaving wills but will not scratch. So, to avoid overkill, I prefer only to tease you now with one of the characters for my Major Literary Crime titled S_x Creatures on a Manless Island. The following passing reference from Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities should be more than enough:

> It was the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at the favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster.

Chapter I The Period

BOOK THE FIRST. - RECALLED TO LIFE

> Among the lookers-on there was the same expression in all quarters of the court; insomuch, that a great majority them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy and traitor, an unblushing trafficker in blood, and one of the greatest scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas - which he certainly did look like.

Chapter III A Disappointment

BOOK THE SECOND. - THE GOLDEN THREAD

Misquoting a passage from a rarely-read book does not require an excuse, but a famous novel must have one to please the experts. Well! I do have an excurse excuse.

At Bup, we do have a lot of used copies of A Tale of Two Cities combined with Dicken's other works, but the one I prefer lies in our secret den. The book has a crafty combination in this order:

* A Tale of Two Cities

* The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

* The Uncommercial Traveller

* No Thoroughfare

The source of the misquote from Chapter III - A Disappointment is what used booksellers and collectors refer to as "poor copy." These are often books with coffee stains, pen-inked comments, missing pages, and other defects. A missing page is my excuse for the misquote.

Since she is a character in my novel that is now on hold and knowing she would never hire an imp or even speak to one, I still need to make a statement as her unsolicited defense lawyer about the claims made by Dicken's narrator. So, now I will start working on a plausible statement on behalf of Joanna Southcott. How hard could that be?