“The Cinematographer and the Megachiropteran” was written for Le Scat Noir 227, devoted to formal constraints. You can find it in my collection The Snowman Three Doors Down.

I devised a technique similar to Raymond Roussel’s famed process, which used puns and homonyms to generate ideas. I used anagrams instead; the longest anagram pair in English, “cinematographer” and “megachiropteran,” gave me my two protagonists. Two-word anagrams of these fifteen letters provided the people and things they encountered, with further details (and the anagrams themselves) given in footnotes. So, our story begins as our hero and his pet bat come across a metric orphanage founded by a champagne rioter, stop to admire its heroic pentagram and the statue of its hermetic paragon, and listen to a ragtime chaperon play a paregoric anthem. But the institution also harbors an emigrant poacher, and there’s trouble ahead…

THE CINEMATOGRAPHER AND THE MEGACHIROPTERAN

The cinematographer¹ parted the bushes and stepped into a clearing. The morning clouds were dissipating, revealing a radiant sky. His pet megachiropteran² burrowed into her backpack carrier, away from the sunlight. A large building lay ahead of them, down a gravel path; the faint chiming of a piano and the chatter of children drifted up to them on the breeze. The bat complained of the light and noise, reminding her owner that she hated going out in the day.

The cinematographer descended the path through a thicket of shrubs, and, shading his eyes, peered down the hill. Before him sat a large square building, surrounded by spacious grounds.

The building was a school for orphans, founded by a wealthy mathematician in the early twentieth century. His motivation had been not only philanthropic, but pedagogical: he promoted a thorough mathematical education, stressing his own revised decimal system, the quindecimal, based on the number fifteen.³ After serving a short prison term for his part in the violent demonstrations in 1905 against higher taxes on sparkling wine,⁴ he had devoted himself to the institution, which was still thriving decades after his death from cirrhosis.

As the cinematographer neared the building, he stopped to admire the imposing entrance, surmounted by a massive five-pointed star, each arm set with smaller stars.⁵ To the left, atop a pentadecagonal plinth, stood a marble statue of the founder, idealized as a magus, in a long robe covered with numerals, a wand in one hand, a globe in the other.⁶ The cinematographer turned toward the music, and discovered the children’s guardian, a septuagenarian in straw hat and sleeve garters, who banged out a jaunty, syncopated tune on a spinet piano that had been wheeled onto the walkway.⁷ Around him, children of various ages danced and turned cartwheels. The megachiropteran stirred plaintively as the music became louder. 

The guardian finished his rag, and then beckoned the children to approach. They gathered around him to chant a solemn hymn praising camphorated tincture of opium.⁸ He then arose, and was starting to divide the children into opposing teams, when he noticed our hiker…