Algernon (illustrated by Max Rugers)

In 1962 Lizzie and her husband travel by train with a young poet named Algernon. They planned to have a picnic in the English countryside.

The three share a car and are visited by another passenger. The other passenger has tawny yellow eyes. Algernon is immediately taken with the passenger and asks their name. They reply “It begins with a D.” He calls her Delores.

After exiting the train, the other passenger directs them to a field where the weather is more desirable where they can have their picnic and meet their true loves. Lizzie comments to her husband that he was flirting with the young man. He replies that he knows a lady when he sees one. Algernon says that he doesn’t care….he asks the artist if he can imagine “to be tied to a wall by her—him and then lashed with a birch until the flesh on your back and buttocks is but a fretwork of bleeding welts.” Lizzie’s husband scolds Algernon for saying such things in front of his wife.

As they sit for their picnic, Algernon composes a poem for his muse…his Delores. The poem composed is “Delores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs).”

Algernon is Algernon Charles Swinburne and you can read the entire poem of Delores here

Algernon appears in “How They Met Themselves,” which originally appeared in Vertigo Winter’s Edge # 3.