Alexander The Mate - Chapter 3
The baton is taken sleekly by the next author in our 'Tag Team Tale' about a would-be-great-enough, if lovelorn young Alexander. Rather like a panther... no... hm... a coypu?
By now you might be getting the hang of what what we are up to? If not, please see our attempt to explain it all at the end, and a link back to Chapter 2.
Chapter 3 brought to you by Dan Brotzel
It’s embarrassing, really, how Roxy hangs on his every word.
Xandy sits on his bed and relates the latest twists and turns of the emotional roller-coaster that is his epic crush. Roxy sits at his feet on the carpet, silently venerating him and hugging the radiator, as if she is a stranger to central heating. (Perhaps she is. There is something… deprived about her, he has always felt.)
‘Andy is the whole world and I will conquer him,’ he hears himself say. ‘I feel sorry for him, in a way. For once he sees me and comes to know me, he will be irresistibly overcome.’
He feels a terrible compassion for Roxy. Can her imagination even take in the magnitude of the future world he is painting? Roxy looks down at her toes, doubtless shamed by the grandeur of his vision.
She has so little in her life. He wishes he had a suitable fridge magnet or furbie to gift her. But really he can’t be expected to come up with yet another figurine every single time she comes round. It’s so sad, this obsession of hers with South American camelids prized as pack animals.
He notices suddenly that Roxy is staring at him. Gone is the usual look of unabashed admiration. Instead she seems quizzical, almost sceptical.
‘When you say conquer, what do you mean exactly?’ she asks.
Xandy is taken aback. Roxy is an acolyte. One does not expect scepticism from acolytes.
She presses on, oblivious. ‘I mean, are you planning to execute some sort of psychic possession of Andy?’
Xandy says nothing.
‘Or… do you mean to physically capture him and keep him as your house slave?’
Xandy gulps. He means, of course, that Andy will be haunted by desire for him within every fibre of his being. Xandy will stamp his essence all over Andy’s, tantalise and titillate his most extreme territories, found cities in his armpits and behind his eyes, establish an empire of the senses that brooks no opposition.
But something about Roxy’s features, which are now arranged into what one might almost call a sneer, causes him to hold back.
She says: ‘Or do you just mean you want to fuck him?’
There is an indecent pause. Xandy catches sudden sight of himself in the long, faux gilt-edged mirror set into his wardrobe door. Remnants of a set of Disney cartoon transfers lingering around the edges. Something about the thin, mousy, pallid figure that stares anxiously back between scratchy fragments of Nemo and Moana displeases, even surprises him. It does not do to dwell on what one actually looks like.
‘Both, obviously.’ There seems nothing else he can say.
‘Only… Andy’s really hot.’
‘I know!’
‘I mean, he’s objectively, exceptionally hot. The sort of person that appeals to all tribes and persuasions.’
‘Yes! And so his fall will be all the more spectacular. The fall into my arms, I mean.’ Xandy is starting to feel that he has to explain or paraphrase everything he says. This, too, is not something an acolyte should make you feel.
‘Whereas you…’ says Roxy, and here she pauses, though whether from delicacy or an almost overwhelming choice of epithets, he isn’t sure.
‘Yes.’
‘You are… more of an acquired taste.’
‘I see.’
‘Andy is like a mustang. Or a dolphin. A panther.’
‘Yes! Ooh yes.’
‘Whereas you are more of…’
She looks at Xandy. The die is cast. The Rubicon is more than half-crossed already.
‘More of?’
‘I don’t know. A marmoset. A coypu. A… llama?’
‘Oh my God, Roxy, you’re obsessed.’
The retort comes easily, but he does not meet her eye. Roxy is not who he thought she was.
Twenty minutes later, she is gone, back to her pale, hopeless life. Her words still sting, but he will put them to good use. He will take all the tears and the agonies, and forge of them invincible arms and indestructible armour.
He does not, as yet, have a plan. But he has a goal and a purpose and a mission, all of which can be distilled into that deceptively brief, disyllabic name that rhymes so delectably with his. Andy.
It is just after 4pm in the seventeenth year of his life. There is world enough, after all, and time. And nothing is impossible to him who would try.
(link back to Chapter 2 - and from there to 1. Link forward to Chapter 4 here)
For more about Dan Brotzel, please below the notes.
The next instalment will come to you from Valeria Vescina.
Tag Team Tales: Welcome to a special kind of serialised short (well, quite longish actually) story, in which 10 authors from The Breakthrough Book Collective have collaborated to compose a chapter of between 500 and 2000 words and then pass the narrative along.
Each author had a free hand — within certain guidelines — to let their imaginations run, in their voice and style, from any character’s point of view and introducing new characters and plot twists if so inspired. Each contributor had one week to add their chapter (circumstances permitting) and could also share input when it came to the final edit.
The story was kicked off by an initial prompt drawn from a non-fiction book, opened at a random on a page which happened to mention Alexander The Great in the context of modern neuroscience and, bizarrely, jet fuel.
We will be posting a chapter a day over 11 days (one author who was holding the story thread topped and tailed).
Dan Brotzel is the author of Thank you for the Days, Work in Progress, The Wolf in the Woods, Hotel du Jack: And Other Stories. His new novel, The Earth Husband, will be published by Breakthrough Books in 2026.
Dan is definitely more of a panther than a coypu.