Your Caius Aquilla

by Fredrick, John Andrew;

  Lora Caecillia

  P.S. If perchance I send this preposterous missive by mistake—if it gets in the post by accident somehow—know that I am in the midst of writing My First Imaginary History, husband dear. Isn’t that exciting?! Yes, exactly! I think that’s the right term for it—Imaginary History! How novel of me! How clever I am. In other words, I’ve made stuff up. I’m so bored—colossally so—& that’s why I write all this stuff & nonsense. Writing made-up stuff’s just a way to make me not feel so lonely while you’re away. At least I can be with my characters, my puppets, if I can’t be with you, dear friend, dear love. None of this sexy stuff actually happened, is what I am trying to say. Or did it? Ha! (Wink, wink.) Now you don’t know what to think, eh? Okay, fine. It’s all a lark, fabricated. Perhaps. Ha, again! Look: modern erotica (with a twist—though I’m not sure what that twist might entail) might be my literary métier & I am trying out a voice here & there. You know what a big fan I am of both Catullus & Sappho; it’s just that I don’t feel like a poet; I don’t think I could write it really, so I spin my yarns in epistles like this one. & my prodigious libido (not to mention my equally-wicked-as-yours sense of humor) seeps in to my inky plume, me thinks! What do you think? Of the scene I’ve just scribbled? Tell me. Be honest—as long as you think it’s brilliant & fine & among the most beautifully crafted & triumphantly artistic & affecting love scenes you’ve ever read.

  XXII Aprillus

  Dear Friend:

  The kids are both dead, a double suicide. They were found in the girl’s bed, holding hands, their mouths blackened with poison. The servants have set up a dreadful hue & cry. I don’t know what to say save a most sorrowful hail from

  Your Simply Devastated

  Lora Caecillia

  XXII Aprillus

  Dear Friend:

  Dear gods just as the post-fellow made away away & down the lane I realized that in my last I wrote something frightfully ambiguous & easily misleading, startlingly misleading, eminently misinterpretable, etc., & it hit me that you might think that by “the kids” I meant our Aurelian & Julia! Oh, no, no, no, no! What I should have said was the servant girl I was telling you about, Laura, & her “brother” were found this morning, their mouths filled & faces blacked with tarlike poison. In my startled state & grief-stricken one as well I didn’t edit too well. I sent one of the surviving servants a-running after the damned post-fellow, to stop my last, but to no avail. Telling ya: he’s fleet as bloody Mercury sometimes, that guy, darting down a lane, up an alley, over an aqueduct, through a tunnel, into one of the public gardens, shortcutting through an abattoir, leaping from one second story house to the next, skipping through a walkway, a thoroughfare or byway, nipping up a long flight of stone steps. It’s no good trying to tail or trail him now; & waiting down the Central Imperial Roman Post Office to try & intercept the letter won’t do any good as they all look alike anyway, those post-fellows, with their bald pates & leathern bags; & once your letter’s in the hands of the Central, well, you’d best forget about it: the forms you’ve got to fill out, the red tape & bureaucracy, the runaround & papyruswork & possible animals you have to bring in for offering—not a jot worth it, let me tell you. Damn it all! My only recourse is to write haste post haste this follow-up to tell you to discard my mine of XXII Aprillus if you get it, &/or hope that the Roman mail’s intercepted on its way to you this time & the civil servants who deliver your letters are ambushed & slain by Visigoths or Germans or something & all letters (esp. mine) scattered to the Four Winds. I’ve quite simply got, got, got to stop writing you when I’m plowed. Thing is, I like writing wasted, toasted, wrecked, smashed. There’s something…thrilling about it. Reckless & quite deliciously stupid! Nevertheless. Write drunk, edit sober, is what I always say. So (as this is serious now; serious business) let me reiterate & pray that this letter actually gets through to you (& I think I will, just for insurance’s sake, sacrifice a bird of prey today, a baby owl or grotesque kite) & the other does not. How slippery is language & Latin especially. Oh this never would have happened had I been allowed to be formally educated, take a few writing classes; that way, I’d’ve learned to edit meself, take out the vestigal bits, revise the stuff that could be taken wrongly. Viz., what I just said. Ibid. etc. We autodidacts have it rough, don’t you think? All this fretting & worrisome concern has made me sport-eat like mad, sorry to report: I just downed an entire roast chicken with boysenberry icing, & a heaping pyramid of white chocolate fudge, also with boysenberry icing (Cook’s used it on everything today—I think she made too big a batch). Well, that’s all, really. Nothing much more to add, I don’t think. Remind me to look up the word “panjandrum;” I came across it in my reading t’other night & was too tipsy to get up from the fainting couch where I reclined to consult a dictionary. What a funny-funny word. I must know its meaning. Anyway & sweet goodnight from

  Your Lora C.

  P.S. Oh dash it all—I couldn’t sleep for not knowing that word! So I got up & fetched the dictionary from the dusty old library (nobody goes in, now you’re not here to putter round it). Here’s what I found. “Panjandrum”=one who has great knowledge or expertise in something. Used in an original sentence: “‘I am panjandrum of nothing,’ said the lonely Roman housewife whose husband, away at war, has left her far too long alone.” There’s a sentence for you. For you to stick in your bally craw or your silly helmet, valiant absent warrior.

  P.P.S. Can’t take this much longer, much more of you being away, by the way. I’m so lonely I could scream.

  P.P.P.S. Just screamed. Didn’t help one bit. Only made me feel even more lonely. Lonely, lonely, lonely.

  XX Aprillus

  Dear Friend:

  Hail. Today we had off, no attacks or recons or dangerous sweep-and-clears; hence everyone in mufti and football, football, football is the thing on almost everyone’s mind and agenda; that alone. Morning, noon, afternoon, and even early evening—footie it is, was, shall be. What a boring sport! I know it’s “universal” and everyone goes mad for it, but for Hermes’ sake, how utterly uninteresting a contest it is if you can’t use your hands, the dexter and sinister tools the gods gave you to serve and protect you. Imagine a fray without hands—a bunch of legless blighters fighting each other with their feet?! Ridiculous! Hardly manly. Football! It’s a mania, I tell you. Here’s my report on the so-called action: Play begins. Our ball. Brutus passes it over to Joc, pats it to Lt. Optio, Optio dribbling like a fiend, poncily showing off, dancing a merry jig back and forth while everyone else falls asleep or merely stands there with arms dangling or goes to Crete or Sicily or Firenze in their tiny little minds, Optio gooning, overdribbling, his fine black hair in a thin headband, the locks behind the headband peacocking prettily on his bobbing head, juking, jinking, jibing, jiving, reversing field, ball-hogging his merry little way down the proverbial lane or, neologistically, cobblestone street, now looking like chimp, now like a Pict doing the sword dance they do with the crossed swords and the hands high in the air all dandyish, now looking like someone who’s been stabbed (repeatedly) in the face. Optio, I say, gets it (the ball) stolen by the other side (big deal!), Joc steps in and dives feet first and thumps it “dramatically” away from a guy on the other team. Time out. Halt of play. I must say Joc looks great without a tunic; we all do, in fact. In again. Joc jumps up, sort of somersaults, chases it, chases it, chases it (yawn!), trips and falls, supinely stretches for it (the ball), then accidentally toes it out of bounds. Opposition’s possession. Their ball. We’ve been at this idiocy for twenty or thirty minutes and no one’s been carried off with a compound fracture, broken shin, or a gushing head wound. Boring! Boring, boring, boring. Okay. Play continues. There I am: I intercept the inbound pass from the guy on the other team, catching it in my crotch, but then I kick it out of bounds—having swung with my leg and missed it, but kicked in the julius a bloke on the other squad. My mistake. My bad. Sorry about that, mate. “Are you all right?” I
asks him, him moaning and writhing on the ground and grabbing his nuts. It’s positively awful seeing anyone like that, plus totally hilarious! I can’t stop larfing. The “universal” nine people—spectators—looking on go: “Boo! Boo! Foul play! Hisssssss!” I shrug. The umpire or referee or what-d’ye-callit’s whistling like mad and wheezing like he’s going to keel over any minute: he’s looking extra chubby in his cumbersome waistcoat of zebra skin or impala hide or whatever. He holds up a yellow card. What’s he doing with a playing card on his person? Are people betting on this foolishness? What fools! An inbound pass from one on their side to one on their side, then Brutus slyly slides in, darts in like an orange human arrow and pokes the ball (the wrapped-in-burlap human head) desperately with his instep, pokes it over to Joc, Joc taps it to me, me (miraculous surprise!) to dear swift Brutus on a clear and reckless breakaway, B bursts all crazylegging past a defender, then another one, running like a drunken thief in the night, and then he heels it back to trailing-sprinting Joc who desperately crosskicks it wide of the fisherman’s net set up as goal between two branches plunged into the grass and mud and much of whichever country we’re in. “Ohhhhhhhhhhhh,” goes the little crowd of camp boys, cooks, and slaves looking on. “Yawnnnnnnn,” goes me who is one of the players, no less! I can’t believe how popular this stupid nonsense is! A gaggle of little school girls in their best dresses and with garlands in their hair and teacups in their hands could play this game, this “beautiful game,” as enthusiasts dub it. Ha! What’s so pretty about a bunch of sweaty Roman men running after and vying to kick a severed barbarian head wrapped in a burlap sack, eh? And as for the onlookers, the ones who care (and there are many, so many the world round, I’m told), there’s such suspense for them, they say! Nothing compares, they say. Had they half the chance they’d do nothing all the livelong day but watch football, bet on football, talk about football, hear the town criers cry the daily football report, read about football in The Daily Papyrus or the sport section of The Eternal City Journal of News, Gossip, Foreign Domination, & Slaughter. What for?! I just don’t get it. How we Romans could have thunk up this dreck and at the same time have conceived of the glorious and mind you truly nail-bitingly exciting sports that take place in the gladiatorial rings boggles the proverbial, it does. It boggles the very. Have I not many-a-time wanted to go over to them, the people on the sidelines, the punters, and to say to them, “You never seen a Frank’s or Pict’s head kicked round a grass plot or poxy sandbox?! This your first time or somefink? You look like you’re seeing a volcano explode or a brutal crucifixion! What’s the deal with you people? For gods’s sake, go do some light reading or trim your fingernails—anything but watch this silly silliness!” The generals are smarter than that. The generals, the glorious and illustrious generals, can’t be arsed to gaze on from the tumulose landscape they perch on, look down from: eminences looking down at/on us from an eminence! Hahaha! Nice pun, eh, Lora? I know: not that good. Sort of a cheap riff. I can do better. I know I can. It’s just that I’m tired. So very. The generals: they might be up there looking but they’re not watching, they’re too busy to do so anyway—rumor is they’re mostly concentrating on palavering amongst themselves, trading compliments, and munching on the afternoon tea the cooks have specially fashioned for them: gooseberry tarts and roasted duck-on-a-stick, dipped in—yes, you guessed it—raspberry sauce, baked cinnamon and brown sugar cane apples, and tea with goats’ cream and a swizzle stick of baby sugar cane apiece. I fairly drooled, hearing what they’ve been getting for tiffin and tea of late and seeing them (from a distance, of course) in their camp chairs and wrapped up in snug fox or mink rugs for the rainy mists that swan in then lift intermittently then dissipate unpredictably as we hoof it up and down the makeshift pitch. How I wish someone would invent a game where, if it rained, everyone went inside and had a nice cup of Earl Grey and perhaps some strawberries and cream, a jam butty, some tuna sandwiches, then an ale! A game, a real sport, where there was a net, say, and one’s opponent was on the other side of it! Playing football, I keep getting kicked in the shin (sometimes left, most times right) by some fit oaf with dark hair and chiseled cheekbones above a headband rag of sea-purple and white and red (the Legion’s “team colors”). Why couldn’t there be a legitimate sport where two opponents patted a softish but still quite bouncy and hard pink, white, or yellow (for maximum visibility’s sake) ball, say, back and forth on a lined court, a rectangle on clay or tar or grass—a field of actual, demonstrable beauty: something dark green, bright blue, or light red. The two or perhaps four players would pat or bat the ball till one of them either hit the damn thing beyond a baseline or past his flailing adversary for a “winner”! What a game that would be! The weapons the foes might employ to hit the ball could be made of wood, and something like a net or flattened basket themselves, an oversized webbed spoon, say, or dried gut of cat, in string form perhaps, stretched across to make a sort of fibered or filaments-oriented bat! And women could play as well and not be thought butch or Dutch. Women playing! How could that not be beautiful—and elegant. Like dancing and competing at the same time! I envision everyone in yellow, perhaps. No! Wearing light blue! Or all-white—yes, that’s the ticket. Softest lambs’ wool. With little insignium of a devil’s horn or a mini-crocodile on their shirtsleeves. And the ball made of coarse yarn spun from the finest Roman wool. The championships once a year in the sun-dappled Coliseum—the winners gathered from other tournaments held regionally. Perhaps four major ones: Rome (of course; the championship of championships), Alexandria, and, um, two others To Be Determined. Brilliant! Carthage, maybe? Athens? I really think I have alighted upon something here, dear friend! What to call it, though?! It’s got to have a catchy name or it won’t catch on—knowing the fickle and unimaginative Roman sporting public. Netsy? Shuffleswitch? Bouncepatball? Something will come to me. I’ll come up with something. What do you think, Lora? Aren’t you marveling right now—at your husband, I hope?! He’s just invented a sport! Wholly in his mind! Quite a fellow, quite a chap, wouldn’t you say? Oh, you’d probably poke holes in it, my imaginary game—find some way to say, “You silly ass—who’d play such a bloodless thing?” I’m going to work on it some more and…what to do? Petition a senator somehow to start up a league? Do it informally? But where? And how? Oops, gotta go now, the horns have blown for mess: tea, bison, and a salted, pan-fried biscuit. Big effing deal. Not even a spot of olive oil to drip on it, the biscuit. Things are bleak these drag-along soldiering days, dear friend. Longing for home, your arms, my bed, the kids, the animals, and a goat cheese pizza. I want pizza so bad right now, dear friend: we drag everything off via wagon whilst campaigning, you know—why not a wood-fired pizza oven: makes no sense!—more than ever is