Midsummer Madness: Author’s Comments

‘Can they see us?’ Mel asked.

 ‘We’re moving far too quickly for that.’

She pulled her skirt up to her crotch. ‘Then what are you waiting for?’

He jumped down from his perch without another word, pulled his shirt off and threw it to the floor. The white fabric rolled itself into a tube that became a chittering ermine and scurried away under the train seats. His black leggings simply unfurled themselves into tattered wings and flew off to hang from a luggage rack. Naked, he was as brown as a hazelnut, a little too hairy about the legs and groin to be fashionable – which did not surprise Mel at all – and the hard ripples of muscle on his stomach converged toward a member that would not have shamed a young horse. Veined and dark and velvety, it strained upwards toward his belly. Mel’s breath caught in her throat. He ran his hand up its erect length once, as if tuning it, and it visibly thickened and jumped under his touch. He grinned.

Plot: Deep in the early hours of Midsummer’s Eve, Melanie is catching the overnight train from Leeds to Manchester Airport so that she can fly to China. Her boyfriend Steve is working abroad as a teacher and she is suffering badly from her enforced separation and chastity. Odd things start to happen; little tricks of the eyes that make Mel wonder if she is hallucinating. Then on the train a strange man sits nearby and addresses her by name. He is Robin Goodfellow (or Puck), a fairy, and he’s interested in Mel because she’s one of the very few people who can see him. He woos her with rather more enthusiasm than subtlety. He also reveals that Steve has a new girlfriend in China. Melanie, furious, decides to take up Puck’s offer of a good hard fuck – in an open carriage, right under the unseeing eyes of other passengers.

Sexual Themes: Straight

Notes:

I’m going to have a bit of a grouse about this one. I originally gave it the title My Gentle Puck, Come Hither, which was an excellent title for a number of reasons:

• It’s a quote from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream (Act 2: Scene 2), which is of course all about fairies.
• It tells you the name and precise nature of the person Melanie meets, which is nowhere else stated in the text.
• It plays on the word ‘come’; ho ho.
• One theme of the story is exactly how gentle Puck can be, given the prodigious size of his member.

The marketing drones at Black Lace decided to change it to Midsummer Madness because this would appeal more to their target audience (who are thick, are they? – and given that they’ll have already bought the anthology before reading my story, what difference can it make?). Midsummer Madness conveys … nothing whatsoever.

I will never ever understand Marketing.

This is my first erotic piece with a modern-day setting. It was cut down slightly from the original draft in order to conform to the anthology word-limits.

The notion of the Victorian industrial rooftops forming a mystical landscape all of their own is something that fascinates me when on train viaducts. I blame Mary Poppins.

I like traditional British fairies but they’ve been done to death in supernatural fiction - particularly by American/Canadian authors who transplant Old World folklore instead of using the native mythology of their continent. A shame really.

Mel identifies her suitor on the train quite rapidly because of her background in English literature. Puck (also Pouk, Pwca (Welsh), the pooka) is a medieval name for the devil but also used as a name for the hobgoblin Robin Goodfellow. A 1628 tract called “Robin Goodfellow; his mad prankes, and merry jests, full of honest mirth, and is a fit medicine for melancholy” is an early written source for the fairy described as the son of Oberon. He’s a mischief-making shape-changer who plays dangerous tricks on humans but is generally well-disposed to them and even does unpaid domestic work for those he likes.