Without a Wife

A lantern-jawed misogynist-in-chief, sworn to perpetual bachelorhood, drafts a sadistic charter for his fraternal order: any defector who dares utter matrimonial vows must be hounded by hooded White Caps, shoe-horned into suffocating woolens and crippling patent-leather brogues, then dragged back to the clubhouse in ritual disgrace. Irony, that fickle jester, uncorks the first bottle of champagne: the very scribe of this draconian pact becomes the first to tumble, helpless, into the iris-blue gaze of an ingénue whose laughter flickers like nitrate catching fire. His gavel still warm from ratifying the bylaws, he now scrambles through moonlit orange-groves and Edwardian ballrooms, dodging the gleeful vendetta he once authored, while the fraternity—equal parts mummers’ chorus and kangaroo court—brandish lanterns, blunderbusses, and a child’s giddy malice. The chase balloons—literally—into the slate-gray dawn when the fugitive groom discovers that only a drifting, hydrogen-filled airship offers sanctuary; there, among billowing silk and the perfume of burnt rope, a sky-parson knots the paradoxical noose of wedlock, turning the club’s cruel jest into a vertiginous farce suspended between terra firma and the void.