It’s impossible to write a love poem Without sounding like a dick Without sounding like you’ve had a lobotomy Without sounding like cliché words written on mediocre art at a small midwestern art festival Somewhere in bumfuck Michigan
The unspecificity of your own stupid romance The general uninterestingness of happiness
It’s so much easier to write about abandonment Disillusionment, self-harm, separateness
The specificity of getting fucked three times in one night By a stranger from Bumble who wants you to be his girl Who thinks it sounds glamorous or exotic to date a writer Who can’t possibly know the loneliness of said endeavor Until the fourth time he asks if he can come over, the fourth time you tell him no
Has anyone ever written a truly great poem about love? If so, I haven’t read it Better to wait til after the disappointment seeps in, honey: My (unsolicited) advice to you.
Disappointment in yourself, I mean For all the times you insecurely hid your phone (from yourself) All the times you drove right past him on your way to a reading All the times and ways you failed to be the right woman (for him/for yourself)
Failure is so much more interesting, honey
The irony of coming so many times in one night for this stranger When you couldn’t come for him When you wouldn’t allow yourself that vulnerability When standing next to him because you loved him too much Because you admired him Because you’re a fucking coward and scared and afraid
Is this a love poem, honey? I wrote it in ten minutes Without anyone editing it for me
This is my greatest failure (as a woman): my independence My self-alienation, my inability or unwillingness to Let go my own hand/throat/heart In order to hold someone else’s.
My unwillingness to come for a man I love (dependence!) And instead to come for a man I never will (freedom!)
My unwantingness My wanting and unwanting and wanting again
My stupidity And my Self-protection
My liberation And my defeat.
I can only kill things in with my poems. (I told you love poems are stupid)
You’re welcome. (this poem is my gift to you)
Snitches.
MGK
for Colson
I felt dead inside all the time Unless I was looking at Machine Gun Kelly online And then I felt alive
(Alive in the way that makes you want to get a bunch of tattoos, I mean)
I did everything in life backwards I figured getting tattoos was just one more example of this
(getting tattoos underground during quarantine, I mean)
I felt dead inside Reading other ppl’s poems Abt leaves and the sky and rain and mammals who roam the earth Idgaf abt nature Like that Idgaf abt nature in general I couldn’t imagine writing a poem Abt nature
I only felt alive watching MGK videos While drunk in my basement Sitting on my basement floor
I only felt alive reading poems that didn’t fuck w Nature
I went for a walk I was listening to the new song by Megan thee Stallion and Beyonce I saw someone (a feminist) had tweeted something about Beyonce’s rapping skills I heard on the radio Jay Z and The-Dream had helped Beyonce write her rap lyrics I wanted to believe Beyonce could write her own lyrics I misheard one of the lyrics as “now watch me sweep up these earrings” I liked the line so much I was going to use it as an epigraph Until I got home and googled it and it wasn’t anything abt Sweeping up earrings at all
I only feel alive reading/listening to Ppl from Ohio I googled MGK and saw he did an annual concert In the small town in Ohio where I’d grown up surrounded by Amish ppl and regular ppl who had icicles in their bedrooms in winter
I only felt alive while thinking abt Driving around the rural Ohio shitholes where I’d grown up All the hills and streams and cows and manure … Shit, man, I just wrote a poem abt nature
Fuck, I don’t know how to not feel dead inside I guess this is why/when ppl start getting tatted up I guess this is why/when ppl start listening to/fucking w MGK
I guess this is my life now
Drinking in my basement And thinking of what new tattoo I’ll get next While fucking w MGK
KELLY BUNDY,for NMS
A few days after our first date you sent me a text You were the first guy I’d dated in eighteen years
who wasn’t a writer
The text said, “I just read one of your poems on the internet And I liked it!!!”
You sent me another text after that one that said, “I don’t know why you didn’t want me to read your writing on the internet!!”
(Later, you confessed to being very conscious of using proper punctuation, of spelling all words out, in texts to me, on account of my being a writer)
Earlier I’d sent you a picture of my picture on the back of one of my books And you’d said, “I’m going to need a lot more pictures like that!!”
I liked you because you weren’t a writer Or I liked a lot of things about you and one was that you weren’t a writer
(another was you gave good head)
I didn’t like to think too much about writing anymore I didn’t like feeling like a member of a cult anymore
(I didn’t use proper punctuation or spell words all the way out in my texts to you or anyone else anymore)
I said I’d write a poem for you So you could google me and read about yourself
I said I’d wear the fishnets like in the author photo The next time you came over I told you I had a leather jacket, Leather motorcycle boots, The wholeshebang.
(I didn’t really say shebang.)
You said, “Hot, you’ll look like Kelly Bundy.”
I liked how easy it was to please you; How easily you fucked me – How easy it was to come.
I didn’t have to wait and wait and wait. Weeks or months or years.
I said the poem I’m writing about you is going to be called Kelly Bundy.
Some people didn’t like to be written about But you didn’t seem to mind
You seemed to think it was cool or glamorous
— or some shit —
Dating a writer
Mostly we watched videos on YouTube of exotic animals – the insane tatted men who bought and sold them – Between fucking
Sometimes we stood on my balcony watching the deer you’d be behind me you’d wrap your arm around me Cover my mouth with your hand “Shhhhhh,” you’d tell me
and I’d laugh and ask, “Did you just shhhhhush me?” and you’d nod and say, “Shhuuuush.” And cover my mouth back up again with your hand
I really liked this about you most How you weren’t afraid to shush me How you covered my mouth with your hand.
I liked this and I liked how you fucked me; Even though I kept forgetting to wear the damn fishnets. Even though I didn’t look anything like Kelly Bundy. Even though, even though.
Elizabeth Ellen is the author of a new story collection, Her Lesser Work, and a new play, Exit, Carefully (both SF/LD books), among other titles. She has a short story in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine.
Breadcrumbs to Home
by Michele Zimmerman
17. Jenn sits at yellow Formica table and eats a deli sandwich with turkey, ham, salami, and provolone cheese. Her daughter, Chrysanthemum, is on a camping trip. Her wife, Sadie, is out of town visiting her mother. The car is at an auto body shop about ten minutes of a walk away. Jenn is left to herself with nothing to do in this new, increasingly strange, town they have recently made their home. Jenn eats her snack and thinks of buying the two chocolate chip cookies wrapped in cellophane she noticed up at the counter. She watches her neighbors drift in and out of view through the storefront window.
16. The shape of the creamsicle-colored moving truck parked in front of her new home, reminds Jenn of vintage ice cream trucks. When the truck is emptied and the house made full, she immediately goes out to a grocery store. She picks two flavors of ice cream, grabs a box of sugar cones, and returns home. At the kitchen table, surrounded by labeled cardboard boxes, Jenn smiles as her daughter wipes a dab of chocolate ice cream from the tip of her nose.
15. For too many nights in a row, they share cans of store-brand vegetable soup for dinner. Jenn hopes the offer on the house upstate is accepted. Nothing from her recent collection Honeycomb sells at the art gallery; city life becomes unsustainable.
14. Jenn wakes to hear Sadie screaming in her sleep. Sadie tells her of the nightmares she has: old women drifting above their beds, their daughter gobbled up by gigantic catlike creatures. Jenn boils water, pours some into a white mug with lemon juice, and brings it to Sadie’s nightstand. She tries to remind Sadie that sometimes nightmares are only nightmares, nothing more.
13. Jenn doodles dancing cutlery with thought bubbles onto small, squared notes. Have a good day! Enjoy! You’re great! She places the notes gently inside her daughter’s lunch box, keeping in mind all the times her daughter has come home from school saying the other girls in her class were mean.
12. At her daughter’s third birthday party, Jenn swears she can smell her father’s cologne on her hands. But Jenn’s father is long gone and Jenn doesn’t wear cologne. She avoids looking at her wife, who she knows is watching, and cuts a thick slice of cake with pink frosting.
11. Jenn nearly misses her own daughter’s birth while she sips tea in the hospital lobby to calm her nerves.
10. On a 6 train going downtown in the middle of winter, Jenn meets her wife, before she is her wife at all. They are seated next to each other on the overwarm plastic benches. Sadie is a tall, curvaceous woman who smells of cinnamon and patchouli. Jenn notices her immediately.
Sadie leans into Jenn’s shoulder, whispers that Jenn’s father is there alongside them on the train right this very moment. Jenn leans away, and Sadie offers to take Jenn out to a café. There, Sadie fixes Jenn’s tea with milk, and too much sugar, before she pushes it towards Jenn across the table. Then, Sadie pulls a pen from her purse, and on a napkin writes the name of the secret sauce Jenn’s grandmother used to make with elbow macaroni. This is who I am, Sadie says. This is the truth of what I can do.
9. Jenn eats three quarters of a grilled cheese sandwich while sitting on the borrowed couch of the shitty rental apartment immediately upon returning home after seeing the body of her father in the hospital. The sandwich is made of toasted nine grain bread and thick cheddar cheese. She doesn’t want it, but it has been made and placed in front of her. In the days following there are: crème filled chocolate cupcakes in loud, clear plastic wrap. Cereal bowls of ice cream for dinner. Cereal bowls of ice cream for breakfast. Microwavable TV dinners. Canned chili poured over tortilla chips. Cheeseburgers. Double cheeseburgers. Cups and cups of hot, sweet tea. She consumes all of these things the way she would like to consume all of her sadness.
8. When Jenn goes home from art school for holiday meals, she looks down at her plate and tells lies about fake men she’s gone out on dates with. First she tells her father about the musician who took her to a concert. Then she tells her father about the writer who introduced her to a book club. Finally she tells him, neither of them were for her, but she’ll keep looking.
7. The girl with the shaved head drinking a can of orange soda is the first girl Jenn ever kisses. Then there is the girl who is a new vegan and has a pierced septum. Then, the girl with the undercut who is fond of foreign chocolate bars made with bits of fruit. Then, the girl with a tattoo of a bird’s nest between her breasts who is afraid to eat eggs. Later, the girl with the shaved head drinking a can of orange soda again, just for good measure.
6. During Jenn’s freshman year of art school, her father suffers his first heart attack. At night, while the school celebrates the end of the year with a dance party on the campus lawn, Jenn sits on the floor of her dorm room with a take-out hamburger from the local diner.
5. Jennie goes to a party with her roommate where she lets a stranger lop off her hair with blunt scissors and dye it purple for free. All three women drink warm, spiked cider and sit on the floor of the stranger’s dorm room. Jennie is reborn: Jenn.
4. Jennie’s father moves into a condo upstate with his girlfriend, who is also named Jennie. Other Jennie enjoys animal print boots and pop ballads on the radio. She decorates the condo with cows. Cows on throw pillows. Cows on cookie jars. Ceramic cows dangling from overhead light fixtures. Other Jennie does not enjoy eating. Jennie and Other Jennie cannot relate at the dinner table. Or anywhere else. Other Jennie watches Jennie when she eats as if she watches moving parts inside a museum exhibition. Slowly, foods Jennie knows disappear from her father’s pantry and are replaced with cow decor. Their secret treats melt away.
3. Jennie’s father moves into a bachelor pad with a water-stain blooming in the right hand-corner of his bedroom. He strings a curtain up in the middle of the living room, and makes a space specifically for Jennie. He puts together a metal shelving unit to hold painting supplies and stuffed toys. He lets Jennie pick out a tie-dye poster for the wall and a purple inflatable couch. Jennie learns that in this new space, there are no rules.
There is canned chili poured over tortilla chips for dinner. There are cereal bowls full of ice cream for dinner. There are frozen TV dinners with chicken nuggets shaped like giraffes. There are crème filled cupcakes from the late-night mini-mart. When Jennie returns to the apartment where she lives with her mother, she does not mention these details. These treats are secrets, just between her and her father.
2. For a time Jennie lives with her grandparents; they have a carpet that looks like the hexagons of a honeycomb. Her grandmother is a short woman with blue eyes, and a black canvas fanny pack full of prescription pills to keep her alive. Jennie’s grandmother is the type to push food onto her family’s plates. Eat, it’s good. A fork full of brisket from her dish onto theirs. Here, have mine. A smear of chopped liver on a cracker placed in a warm palm. Take, you’re too thin. Elbow noodles with a secret sauce only the family knows. At night, Jennie’s grandmother makes decaffeinated tea with three spoons of sugar for herself and for her granddaughter. Everything about the honeycomb home, as Jennie refers to it inside her head, is safe. No one is coming, no one is going.
1. When Jennie is six, her father moves out. She watches from her second-story window as he loads all of his belongings into a creamsicle-colored moving truck. After he says goodbye, she chases him down the dim apartment hallway holding chocolate chip cookies inside her fist. She presents them to her father before he steps into the elevator. A snack, she says. So, you won’t be hungry.
Michele Zimmerman holds a BA and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work appears in Catapult’s Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror, Lockjaw Magazine, Psychopomp, and others. She is a Sundress Publications Best of the Net 2018 nominee & a two-time Finalist for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. Find her on Instagram @m.l.zimmerman or on Twitter @m_l_zimmerman.
from Four Video Translations: Jerry Hunt (oodiscs VideoO #1 ([1994])
CHEAP NIGHT
by Garielle Lutz
I was eventually sent off to a number of different people, a second round of specialists, about everything else that was said to have still not been set right. One was a man with an office on a sliver of a street in what was left of the business district. He had me sit in an anteroom with him while he filled out the first of the forms without ever looking over at me. Then I followed him into the better room, where there was a desk. On a sheet of a tablet that had been printed to look like a prescription pad, he wrote down the name of a woman who he said cut hair in ways that helped people along.
The appointment was for seven that evening.
This was a tall, damp-looking woman in a smock. She asked no questions. She set my head backward into a narrow sink for a hurried, turbulent shampoo. Once her fingers got moving across my scalp, she barged a portion of her limited side-flesh informally against my shoulder bone. The result was maybe some useless, cradlesong warmth—nothing more, I am sorry to report. The next thing she did was seesaw a towel back and forth across my skull, then tug me toward the barber chair and wrap me in a sheet. It was a routine haircut after that, I guess, until she pressed her palm against my cheek. She kept the hand there, detained it professionally, as it were, until the skin heated up. Whether it was departing heat of mine or a transfer of hers I could not at the time decide, but here I had the handicap of a wall before me that was solid mirror, and in going wide of my own reflection, I could not help unpiecing the woman’s face into, first, a powdered-over replica of the large-pored, forthcoming nose of the specialist who had referred me there, and a chin of his own depthlessness (though here again given cosmeticized redefinition), and his wide-set, shittily brown eyes.
I muttered something about nepotism, kickbacks, etc., tore myself free of the sheet, stormed out.
At a pay phone, I called my only friend, a very good acquaintance of mine, someone I hardly knew enough to think of except at times like this. He said he had right that very instant finished ruining an hour in an adult-book store with an invalid video machine and a man suffering love-cramps of his own.
This friend said he wasn’t up for getting together.
On my way home, what the hell, I stopped off at my stepsister’s. I found her in the living room, her arms spired above her head in a shortcut rendition of an exercise some woman was enacting on the silenced TV.
My stepsister was in trunks, baggy socks, an undershirt. She struck me as no more than an enlargement of her scowly daughter on the sofa. I compiled myself onto one of the baggier side chairs. From this privileged elevation I watched my stepsister, now down on the hardwood floor, bucking around on her stomach, raising her rear to a resultful summit—not a push-up exactly.
It was the daughter’s idea that the three of us should go out for a bite to eat. “Unless you’d not rather,” she said to her mother. Her mother said she’d tag along. We drove in the daughter’s car to a below-stairs eating place she knew. Running the length of the wall facing the street was a band of windows that took detailed notice of the lower legs of passersby—skirts of coats, slow-going feet of people coping.
The daughter called our attention to a blemish on her left cheek, a little pink difference. She kept her fingers on it, twiddling at it, kneading away at her cheek, until the disturbance itself seemed to vanish into the environing complexion. Then she took her hand away, and the blemish reappeared with a renewed sickliness.
“But catch me up about you,” she said.
I guess I was a kind of handy, convenient mystery to her, and every fact I gave her had an efficient way of instantly separating itself from any larger certitude. I have never liked feeling a point of view being trained on me too sharply.
My stepsister motioned toward the arrowy sign that pointed to the restrooms, then got up, taking her handbag and jacket. The daughter mentioned having seen an old teacher of hers faking a vacation in a chaise longue one neighborhood over. She spoke of little shares of chocolate she had once arranged and rearranged until they were practically mush and had to be licked off her fingers by more than just one lonesome mouth but her boyfriend was nowhere to be found. She’d had to recruit a girl she knew from the public pool who kept perfecting more and more ways of looking marooned. And this daughter said she could no longer feel any connection to lengthier and lengthier spans of her life. They no longer seemed hers to have lived through. She claimed she did not so much crawl out of her bed in the morning as originate anew from it.
I felt threats already piling up behind everything she said.
“Blow into my life,” she said.
My stepsister returned to our table, settled in.
I was looking out of my face at the two of them. I could feel the holes I was looking out at them through. Everything looked rimmed and rounded around. My body must have been sitting behind me or just to the side. The two of me did not quite coincide.
“You have this responsibility,” she said.
Garielle Lutz’s new short-story collection, Worsted, is forthcoming from Short Flight/Long Drive Books.
Continue to Live
by Oliver Zarandi
My entire family died over one weekend. Perished. There was mom, dad, my sisters, my brothers, my aunt, my uncle, my grandma on dad’s side, a great uncle who wasn’t so great and was, in fact, a parasite, and two dogs, both called “Barney” — the quote marks being a part of their names.
So Tobias and I had plenty to be stressed about. The flesh-eating virus that had ravaged half the country was finally in our state.
He was loading the car up with the essentials. His head looked like a lasagne. It always looks like some sort of pasta dish when he’s stressed. He was basically layers of egg, cheese and beef.
I watched Tobias load blankets and clothes into the back of the car. Tobias loved me. His love was big and fat and always hard. His love made a mess and you’d have to clean it up with a rag. Jesus, I’m so sorry, he’d say, all sheepish. I gone got my love everywhere again!
He loved me so much that he bought me flowers every day for the past five years. Sometimes before bed, he’d get down on his knees and serenade me to sleep. Other times he’d leave small love poems in my pockets that I’d unearth at work — Shelley, Byron, the Romantics — then follow up with a text: Did you get my note? 🙂
He loved me with all his heart.
But before we move on, I’d like to say this: There’s something wrong with me.
I like to trace my wrongness in this little timeline of events, like the ones you get in history books. 1993, just says eating disorder. 1994, TheYear Of Hiding Food Down The Back Of Radiators. 1995 — the year I fell in love with Val Kilmer’s lips. I’d dream of his lips in Tombstone and Batman Forever, floating around my room, smooching at the air. And then there was 2006, the year I had surgery. My mom, dead now, said my surgery was a gory one, reminiscent of something in a butcher’s shop.
You were like a prized beef, Gilda, she said stroking my limp hair. Apparently they’d sliced and diced me, taken something out of me, put me back together again.
Limp-haired Gilda, said my mom, like she was soothing her beloved basset hound.
She visited me every day, and it wasn’t unpleasant, let’s put it that way. But just next to us was this porridge-skinned elderly man, arms like two limp dicks, hanging down the side of his bed.
Mom, I said, is that man okay?
Who? This one? He’s fine. He’s had his heart replaced.
The wonders of modern medicine. I wondered whose heart it was. I wanted to grab the doctors by the lapels and in my finest Jack Nicholson impression ask them: Doc, who’d ya put inside the old man? Djoo plop a cow heart in him, sew him back up? Tell me!
For days, I watched the old man continue to live, all thanks to this alien heart. Maybe it was the heart of a dead kid. Maybe the kid was murdered and the old man would get a new lease of life, from the life that’d been ripped from this kid. Wow, I thought. Humanity!
But it didn’t last. One night the old man woke me up, coughing his guts out. His body was rejecting the heart. After around 15 minutes, he had completely jettisoned all life from his vessel.
I thought about the old man for a while, about who he was, about his own heart, where that went, and the new heart, where that was from, and how unique he was. Not many of us get to have two hearts in one lifetime. But his body didn’t want that new heart.
And this is the problem I have with Tobias—I don’t love him.
In fact, I hate him.
I find that my body rejects all good things in life. When Tobias touches me, I want to vomit. Or at least, I want to scour myself thoroughly with a metal pad.
I am incapable of enjoying beautiful places, too. I’m a hog for squalor and a shit time.
Tobias loaded the last box into the crapped out station wagon and whistled for me to get in. I did.
Apparently I was making a face because when Tobias got in and put his seatbelt on, he stared over at me, sighed, slapped both hands on the steering wheel, bracing himself for what he was about to say and turned to me.
Look, it’s for a few weeks. Just until this blows over.
It won’t blow over. It’s eaten half my family.
And I’m grieving. I really am. But we need to look out for number one.
Right.
Okay?
Yeah. Okay. But…
But?
But we should be with our fellow human beings during this. Why leave the inferno, Tobias?
It was true: a part of me wanted to stay, to fight it out. But then I thought of how the virus had got my Uncle Joseph, had infected his leg and started rotting his flesh down. We saw the pictures. His leg looked like wet bread. The skin came straight off like a condom.
Tobias laughed at my comment. He shook his head, started the car, reversed out the driveway and drove into town. As we passed through, we could see people inside their homes.
I rolled down the window and shouted, GOOD LUCK, GOOD LUCK!
Hey, Tobias said, what the fuck?
I’m wishing the soon-to-be-dead good luck.
Well, don’t.
I folded my arms and slumped down into my seat. I didn’t want to reach our destination. I wanted to get to a gas station and ask somebody to kidnap me. Maybe they could take me to Las Vegas? Somewhere off Fremont Street with free HBO, free porn, drink tequila shots and shit myself, make friends with bums and junkies?
Rain started to hammer the car. Tobias leaned forward and tried to squint through the window.
I might have to pull over, you know, he said.
Don’t. We’re nearly there.
No we’re not. We’ve got another 15 hours.
I turned on the radio and watched the spermy raindrops wriggle down the window. One of the slower raindrops reminded me of Tobias and how he didn’t come to the funeral, how he painted a huge family portrait for me instead. Funerals make me so damn sad, he said. But I’ll be there for you. In spirit. And hopefully this painting will remind you of all their beautiful faces.
In spirit.
My eyes changed focus and just ahead there was a figure in the distance, standing in the rain, his thumb sticking out.
Tobias, a hitchhiker. Can we?
What? No. Who does that?
We do. He’s out in the middle of nowhere. Come on.
I don’t know.
Please. Please!
Fine, fine. But you can keep them company.
We pulled up to the side of the road. I rolled down the window and the man walked over to us. He was young and soggy.
Where you headed, amigo? said Tobias.
Why’d he say it this way? Like he was in a Western. I was humiliated.
Anywhere north of here. I just need to get down the road some. As far as you can.
Tobias looked at me. I looked at Tobias. Tobias looked at the man and nodded his fat lasagne head.
Take them clothes off first, pardner, he said.
What’s that? said the hitchhiker.
Your clothes. We need to see if you got the markings.
The hitchhiker stared at us both for a second. Then he took a breath and started peeling his clothes off. When he was completely naked, he covered his penis with his hands. His skin reminded me of a white plastic bag. Tobias told him to turn around so we could look for sores. That was one of the ways you knew early on—paisley-patterned sores that opened up all over your body.
You can put them clothes back on now, pardner! said Tobias.
The young man got in the back, his wet clothes squelching on the leather seats.
What’s your name?
I’m Oates.
Well, I’m Gilda. And this is Tobias.
Thank you for, uh, stopping.
It’s no bother, pardner, said Tobias.
You’d be surprised how many people don’t stop.
Not really, I said. There’s a virus. It’s natural people aren’t stopping.
I turned around to try and engage. It’d be rude not to.
Oates nodded. He had red cheeks and yellow teeth and looked like somebody who was raised on Jesus and sex abuse. If I had to guess his occupation, it’d be fisherman. He wore a too-big striped shirt, and kept his small and pale hands folded in his lap. He caught me looking and put his hands in his pockets.
You folks running from the virus?
We’re just out getting some alone time, I said. Wait until everything blows over.
It won’t blow over.
Optimistic boy, ain’t you, Tobias said in his weird John Wayne accent. He was like this with people he thought were poor. A yokel accent or Western drawl, as if this would put them on a level playing field.
Oates just smiled, didn’t blink. He brought his small, pale hands back out, put them out on his knees and gave me a quick, yellow smile. In my mind, I hoped that Oates would murder Tobias, or at least severely injure him, and kidnap me. I hoped, I wished!
It was dark and the rain wouldn’t stop, so when Tobias saw the white cross, he pulled in. It was a “safe” motel and as we drove up, two men came out with their masks on and asked us to get out of the car. They waved guns at us and said it was all procedure, nothing to worry about. I loved it. I was about ready to come when they asked us to take our clothes off and show our bodies. Tobias looked like a sack of oranges.
We got the okay and drove on up.
The motel was cheap and simple. Oates couldn’t afford his own room, so Tobias paid for one. Oates didn’t have much on him except for a backpack, which he put on his front.
Why on your front? I asked him.
He stared at me again without blinking. It was like my words didn’t register, that I was some distant star and Oates was earth, my light reaching him years later.
Uh, it’s very important to me, he said finally. Then he walked off towards his door, and we walked towards ours. I turned around and Oates was waiting for us to enter our room first.
Tobias felt bad and called out to Oates: Say, pardner—would you like to have dinner with us?
Oates looked down at his hands, like they were cue cards or something. He only focused on his hands, caressing them. Had I angered him? Was his insecurity about his hands so acute that even by me looking at them, I’d set something off in him?
Sure, he said. Yeah, I could eat.
Great, said Tobias. We’re just going to wash. See you here in a few minutes?
Oates nodded. We came back out after thirty minutes or so and Oates looked like he hadn’t moved. The good nature of Tobias had frozen him into a statue.
We walked over in silence to a small “family owned” restaurant. There weren’t that many people in there, just a few elderly people, slowly chewing their food, staring through time. We were ushered by a lardy waitress to a small booth where we scanned the menus without talking. For some reason all language had been sucked out of the cock of us and was just swilling around in the atmosphere’s mouth.
It was only when the waitress returned that we blurted out some words. She nodded, repeated the order back to us and we nodded—yes, yes, yes, and that was that.
We ate in silence too. Oates stared at his food and started organising it into different areas on the plate. He pushed the potatoes into the top left and created a sort of moat with the sauce around it. Clearly he didn’t want the potatoes escaping or the undercooked vegetables invading their space. He put a forkful of food into his mouth and chewed in a way that wasn’t like his jaw was chewing it at all, but his entire head—temples, scalp, and ears. Like he was chewing and swallowing his own cheeks. I couldn’t stop staring.
We returned to the motel. Oates thanked us for the food and put his hand out. Were we meant to shake it? We didn’t know, and besides—he withdrew his hand within seconds.
Thanks again, he said. Thank you very much. For everything. Then he tilted his head and stared at us for a second longer without blinking.
You’re good, pardner, said Tobias, and tipped an invisible cowboy hat to him.
Tobias and I went back to our room and got into bed. We were, as he would constantly say to friends, “bushed”. I lay on top of the covers like a slab of granite as Tobias tucked himself in beside me. I turned over and thought that if my life were a novel, it’d be by As I Lay Sighing by William Faulkner. Come back from the dead, William! Write my life the way it needs to be written.
Tobias turned over and kissed my right cheek.
God, I love your cheeks, he said. Do you know I thank god for your cheeks?
That’s sweet.
He pinched my cheek and chuckled ‘Tee hee!’
And I love your jugs. I thank god for your jugs.
I know.
They’re so big and motherly. He nestled his head up to my right breast and kissed it. Then his head retreated back and he turned his face upwards to the oily ceiling and went pale. He always looked like he was dying when he fell asleep.
I kept my eyes closed too. I tried focusing on my heart, its rhythm, its beating. All that blood going around my body. Doesn’t it get bored? I guess not. Blood doesn’t get bored, but it does get agitated. Like the old man with the murdered child’s heart, or the cow heart, whatever they put in him. I had the strangest image of the old man’s arteries filling with Lemmings, those little green mop-haired fucks from that computer game, and they were all wandering around going in different directions, bumping into piles of plaque. Imagine having that inside of you! I wondered if somebody would have to give me a new heart one day. What kind of heart would it be?
My thoughts were interrupted by a small chiseling sound. Somebody is trying to break into the room, I thought. Yet I kept my eyes closed. I waited. Don’t open your eyes, I whispered. Why fight it? Why bother?
Then the door creaked open and I opened my eyes enough to see that Oates had entered the room.
He stood there in the darkness of our room, breathing in and out. It was like his lungs were horny for the air in the room. Then he took his shoes off and placed them delicately by the door. He walked around a little on the carpet to test if he was loud or not. I was ready to run, to get in the car and drive off from both of them. But I didn’t. I didn’t move. I wanted to see what Oates wanted.
He shuffled over and sat on the end of our bed. I could hear him breathing harder now. And I felt his tiny child hand on my thigh. It was clammy. Then he moved it over to Tobias. I moved my head to see what was going on, taking care to make sure Oates didn’t know I was awake. Now his hand palmed Tobias’s face. He was stroking it. Tobias didn’t wake. Of course not. Oates could’ve fired off a gun into the ceiling if he wanted. I watched his pale, milky fingers stroking Tobias’s pale waxen face—back and forth, back and forth.
Then Oates pulled his own trousers down. I couldn’t see his penis, but I could tell what he was holding. I could smell it. He was moved both hands in time, getting faster and faster. It was a feat of coordination, like those people who can pat their heads and rub their belly in a circular motion.
Oates shuddered. I shuddered too. That was his love leaving his body onto our carpet. And then he fell silent again, like he wasn’t alive at all, but just some ghoul hovering in our room.
My eyes opened and Oates was staring directly into them. He pulled out a knife from his bag on the floor, held it to Tobias’s throat and raised his creamed-on finger to his lips so I wouldn’t say a word.
I winked back at him. I felt like a new heart had been placed inside of me. It was filled with love and I wished him all the best.
Durée
by Christopher Kang
Written distantly on a Wednesday while waiting for my bed sheets to dry, this poem intends alongside failure, confluent with a version of this world that’s all categories and comfort. I once told a friend, “I never feel like I’m done with a poem. Usually, it’s done with me.” That having been said, a poem begins when my clarity about something abruptly splits, diverges, then gives itself beyond what I want. I scratch obsessively in my sleep, and wake up ashamed. Camouflaged in the loud morning light by my bed, I count how much of my own blood I have to remove.
When I was a child, I would stare stiffly at something long enough to send it to my future self. I was always more preoccupied by how well I could grasp a thing than by the thing I was grasping. I remember only one of these images. Lying in the back of my mother’s van at dusk, looking up at power lines organizing the sky into sharp shapes. A punch from an enormous fist leaving behind ominous fractures. It means nothing, and I worry that is why I remember it.
There are some things that look like they can be lit on fire but just melt. A photograph, for instance.
A friend asked if I would like to contribute text to an art exhibit. Sentences would be projected from a gallery window up into the night sky. I asked him how anyone would read any of it, and he said that was the point. A blinding light filled with a message that wouldn’t find a surface where it could say. I wrote, “Find it, love it, lose it, learn it, hide it, repeat.” I didn’t send it to him, and in fact haven’t called him back in months. I have a hard time distinguishing between giving something and giving it away. One time, at a party, while having a conversation with friends, he unknowingly pinned my wayward shoelace with his enormous leather boot. I couldn’t move until he finished talking about the death of god and how it changes the way we understand films.
An ex-girlfriend once told me a long story I barely listened to, then asked me what I thought she should do. Across the room, a pillow on the bed still dimpled by my sleeping head. Her parakeet perched on top of its own cage, chirping like a malfunctioning fire alarm as it stared right at us. Too embarrassed to ask her to repeat the story, I said she should sleep on it, all the while fearing that what she said was about something terrible someone did to me. She had a twin sister and often, when the three of us went out to dinner, the two of them would synchronize their exasperated sighs. Years later, I finally decipher the good reasons why she left me, embrace the blame that I could only hear myself in her voice and hear myself in my own. She said one time I turned abruptly to her in my sleep and said, “You’re getting in the way of my project.”
For years I was convinced someone was following me. The fear overruled the simple fact that I did not consider why they would do that. For some reason, it was paramount to never lose a store receipt. I burned them in a fireplace, along with any papers that I had written a single word on. Even grocery lists and doodles of endless spirals. I always started each spiral moving from the center and expanding further, endlessly out. Yesterday, I watched a movie about two men who go back into the past with a time machine only to find that it is, with each return, slowly killing them.
The first missile was created by using parts of a standard door knob, no, that’s not true.
A friend admitted to me one day that I was his best friend and I, not knowing what to say, replied, “Thank you.” Years later, I still linger on that reply, irked by the excessive accuracy of it. The last time I saw him, we both knew we would never see each other again. He took his eyes off the road and waved goodbye with an exaggerated frown as he drove his van away, a broken window patched with a flattened cardboard box, and I, terrified he would crash his car, realized how I missed him all along. Missed him, the way one misses a train.
Up until the age of thirteen, I woke up in the middle of the night, immobilized, staring at a spotlight on the wall that was spread out like fast growing moss. When it reached my feet, the bright, cold sensation was accompanied by a high pitched squeal. One night, I had a dream I was sleeping in my bed, just as I was sleeping in my bed in my waking life, except this time a man was staring blankly in my second floor window. He closed his eyes and, at the same time, opened his mouth from which big band jazz music came blaring out. Then he opened his eyes and, at the same time, closed his mouth from which muffled big band jazz music could be heard. The entire time my bedroom door was slowly, almost imperceptibly closing.
When someone holds open the door for me, I rush through and say, “Sorry.” My apologies emerge from somewhere uneven, desperate to vaccinate myself from any conflict I fear could erupt irrationally at any moment. Discomfort is more a gesture than a position, I think.
My favorite movies have almost no dialogue in them. “You would like that,” a friend said to me.
Certain oak trees weigh less in the morning than in the evening, again, this also is not true, but it could be. I could easily excavate the answer, but I have a hard time distinguishing between what is true and what is worth knowing. I remember climbing a desiccated tree by the public library and am bothered by the fact that I don’t remember ever climbing down. As if I’m still up there.
I wrote a long paper in high school about the feasibility of time machines, and concluded they are feasible but we wouldn’t ever be able to do it. One would have to move incredibly fast to revisit the past, but the faster one moves the heavier one gets. That I know is true.
Christopher Kang earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from the University of California-Irvine. His first book of stories, When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other, was selected by Sarah Manguso for the 2016 GMR Book Prize. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in LitHub, Epiphany, Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Open City, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Wooster. www.christopherkang.com
The House
Guillermo Stitch
Raindrops spattered here and there as Will crossed the street on a diagonal, eyes on the house numbers but unable to read any till he’d reached the other side and found one within range of his short sight. A few leaves blew about in flurries as the street lamps came on. It had been a long tube ride and the carriage had been packed with Christmas shoppers, taking up more room than usual with their heavy coats, umbrellas and bags full of seasonal tat. The black windows had glittered with condensation from their bad-tempered breath.
Forty-three. The rain more insistent now. Will needed number ninety-seven. He raised the hood of his duffle coat and walked on, keeping his head down against the wind—it was bitter, especially since his skin still felt clammy from the crammed train. Forty-three happened to be his age. He probably should have been somewhere else—anywhere else—doing something he got paid for. Severance pay had helped him scrape through the last couple of years, but it wasn’t going to last much longer.
“Meet?” his agent had asked. “I suppose we could. I might have deduced from your treatment of falling action that you’d be unorthodox. My office?”
He had to hand it to her—she’d gotten him the book deal after just a couple of months representing him. It hadn’t seemed possible, and yet here he was. Abook deal. He couldn’t wait to wave it in Tony Miller’s face, the condescending little shit. The horrible, horrible tiny man. Tony had kept in touch since Will had walked out of the brokerage two years ago, and since Milly had walked out on Will a week later, he’d made a point of coming round to the flat once a week to check that his former employee was “doing OK”, pronouncing the words with a discernible Mid-Atlantic drawl despite being from Portsmouth. The flat was on the first floor of an old Georgian townhouse and Will supposed that Milly had given his ex-boss the front door key. The nasty goblin would bring a food parcel each time and when Will didn’t answer—which was often—he’d leave it on the stairs.
Food parcels. The condescending littleshit.
Ninety-seven turned out to be commercial premises in a little row of them along the main street. The front window was enormous—much larger than would be required to meet the needs of a literary agent, he imagined—and dirty, and through the dirt revealed a charmless office, almost completely stripped except for two desks and a grubby looking, royal blue carpet. The bare walls bore marks where pictures and posters had hung.
He would have liked a moment to steel himself before pressing the bell. To gird himself for this potentially life-changing encounter. These people could push you around if you let them. That’s what he’d read, anyway. He wasn’t having any of it. There was nowhere to hide though, on either side of that window, and he’d been spotted—she pulled the door open before he’d reached the button.
“There you are. Almost late. Melanie Phillips.”
He followed her inside to where the smells of damp and his agent’s perfume were fighting it out. She was wearing a business suit the same color as the carpet, if a little cleaner, heels that left divots with every step, and gestured now toward the desk nearest the window.
“You could have this, I suppose, and we might look at getting you a phone line. You’d have to use your own laptop, obviously.”
“Oh,” said Will, looking from the desk to Melanie Phillips and back again. “I didn’t imagine actually working here. Physically, I mean.”
“Really? I just thought, since you were so keen to come along…” She sat down at the other desk, also bare apart from a laptop and a router.
“Never mind. Although I’ll admit I was warming to the idea. So much more convenient for appraisals and so on. We do have to keep an eye on you people.”
She flashed him a smile.
“We’ve only just moved in. Very excited about having a high street presence now—should do oodles for our footfall.”
Will was looking for a chair.
“There isn’t one, I’m afraid,” said Melanie from hers, “but don’t be shy—why don’t you pop yourself on the edge of the desk there while I get this going?”
She was at the laptop. Will tried to effect an acceptable stance on a corner of the desk but found his back was to her any way he tried it. He got up again and began to pace, fingernails digging into his palms. He felt alarmingly close to distraught just a minute or so into this meeting. He’d imagined dust and leather and perhaps a hard drink in a nearby hotel bar—a posh hotel, not perched on the corner of a desk in a derelict office. He sat on the other one in the end, concentrating hard to stop himself swinging his feet like a schoolboy.
Melanie peered at him over the top of her machine while it emitted a ring tone.
“We’re very excited about your book, Will.”
“Oh, thank you very mu–”
“No. Thank you so much for responding to the open call. I dread doing them—God, the guff I have to wade through—but once in a while I have the great thrill of uncovering a real gem.” Her long fingernails made an unnerving, chitinous noise as she tapped the desk and flashed him another smile. All her smiles were to be that way—deliberate, and very brief.
“This time it’s you, Will.”
“Oh, thank yo–”
“Where is he? Wait, he’s come online. I’ll call again.”
She’d kicked her shoes off under the desk.
“I know that Rupert’s just as excited as I am, Will. He’s in New York this week but he’s made time for the call especially.”
“Hello? Mel–”
“Hello Rupert, can you see me?”
“I can’t see you.”
“Oh. Can you see me now?”
“No.”
“But you can hear me?”
“I can hear you but I can’t see you. Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you very well. Can you see me now?
“No, there’s no…wait a minute…yes, I can see you now. Hello, Melanie.”
“Hello, Rupert. How’s New York?”
“You’re very quiet though.”
“Am I? Just a minute. How about now?”
“No, you’re still too quiet.”
“Maybe you need to change something at your end, Rupert.”
“What?”
“I said maybe there’s a volume control at your end.”
“Maybe I need to… wait a minute…OK, say something.”
“How’s that?”
“That’s better.”
“And you’ll want to switch your video on, Rupert.”
“It isn’t on? You can’t see me?”
“No, I can’t see you, but I can hear you very well.”
“Can you see me now?”
“No.”
“And now?”
“No, I still can’t see you, Rupert. There should be a video button.”
“Button? I don’t know…hang on, Julia’s arrived. Julia, can you get this bloody thing to work? They can hear me perfectly, apparently, but they can’t see a thing.”
The sound of tapping on a keyboard.
“That’s it, Rupert—it’s just come on.”
It occurred to Will that some of the amiability had faded from his agent’s facial expression.
“Hello, Julia.”
“Hello, Melanie.”
“Right, well here we all are,” said Melanie, taking a packet of cigarettes and an ashtray from a drawer in her desk and lighting up.
“Thanks so much for making the time. I’ve been telling Mr Roper how excited we all are about his wonderful book.”
“Very excited,” said Rupert.
“Incredible book. Very excited,” said Julia.
“Where is Mr Roper?” asked Rupert.
“He’s here. He can hear you. Bit of a furniture drought at this end.”
At the mention of his name, Will turned around. He’d been looking out of the window at the Café Apollo across the street—their americano was watery but they did do a very passable macchiato, and a warm muffin with little pockets of soft caramel. No one had offered him a coffee.
“Thank you for coming in, Mr Roper. We really are very, very excited to work with you on your wonderful book.”
“Oh, well…that’s very…I mean, thank—”
“What did he say?”
“He said thank you,” said Melanie. “That’s Julia Funt, Will. We’ve asked her to join us as she’s the one who’ll be working her magic on your manuscript.”
“Ah yes? Well I’m no prima donna, I can assure you. I do believe the final draft I sent you is very honed, but I assumed I’d be working with an editor. It’ll be—”
“Julia’s actually our content strategist, Will. We would rather expect you to take care of the editing side of things. Mustn’t shirk our responsibilities, must we?” Her teeth were ice white. “Julia currently oversees all of our online content. No small feat I can tell you—we publish a large number of high quality articles on a daily basis. A whole team of writers. This’ll be her first foray into fiction and yours into publishing. Exciting, yes?”
“OK. Eh—”
“So, Julia, perhaps you’d like to kick off by clarifying for Mr Roper exactly what you’re going to need from him.”
“Sure. First things first though—I’ve only had a plain text manuscript, Melanie. Actually it’s a PDF but it looks like scanned plain text to me—so I don’t really know what I’m dealing with here. To be honest, I was surprised to be called in at this stage. Mr Roper’s story is so compelling, of course, but I don’t really give a tuppenny fuck about that. I need to see some optimization. Get an idea of how much work I have ahead of me.”
“Yes of course. Fair point.”
Melanie’s eyes flicked upwards to look over the edge of the laptop.
“How quickly do you think you can get your optimised manuscript over to Julia, Will?”
Will felt his skin flush and knew it was about to become blotchy.
“How do you mean? The PDF I sent is definitely the final draft. I’ve been working on it for—”
“The story is fine, Will. Really very good. I’m talking about the text itself. Julia’s role here is to guide you through the process of optimizing it. We would have expected you to have done a considerable part of that work yourself. I must say this is a little disappointing. Did you say scanned, Julia? Then there aren’t even any links yet?”
“Yes it is scanned,” said Will. “I normally work with an old typewriter, you see.”
Something slapped against the window, a piece of cardboard or a newspaper, before blowing away in the breeze.
“Wow,” said Julia.
“How wonderful, Mr Roper!” said Rupert. “An old typewriter! I quite understand. I think. I have a vinyl collection, you know. I like the crackle; it brings me back to…it is a craft after all, writing, isn’t it? Quite a tradition to it, really. Leather on willow, roaring log fire—that kind of thing?”
Since Will could see neither Julia nor Rupert, it was difficult to gauge their tone.
“Well…no, not really,” he said. “I mean, I wouldn’t like to think it was nostalgia…I’m quite, eh…I mean it is a work of science fiction after all…”
He shifted a little.
“I’m quite forward-looking, I think. No, it’s more of a technique. I find with an old machine and the old font that I can…that there’s a distancing effect. I find it easier somehow, to cold read my own work back to myself. Do you see? To be critical…”
“I understand completely, Mr Roper,” said Rupert. “However we are going to need you to go ahead and make some changes to your work flow.”
“I mean, just,” said Julia, “wow.”
“Yes, a gentle reminder,” said Melanie, “that Mr Roper is actually here, Julia.” She shot Will an apologetic look.
“Well he’s a big boy, isn’t he? How can he not have…? Turn me round, will you?”
Melanie swivelled her laptop around. In the darkening office, inadequately lit by a single, stammering fluorescent strip over a fire exit at the rear, Will found himself bathed in a cone of cold blue light from the screen. Julia sat at a conference table next to Rupert and he could see, through the window behind them, some kind of industrial park. It certainly didn’t look like Manhattan. He’d been once, with Milly. He was used to wrestling with reality a little, but so far not even his most basic expectations of this encounter had been met. Something wasn’t right, and being able to see Julia didn’t help—despite her interjections, her smile was ludicrously cheerful, her face friendly almost to the point of menace. He felt an urge to scrawl the word “vivacious” all over it in permanent marker.
“Well,” she said, “we really are beginning at the beginning here, aren’t we? Mr Roper, I wonder if you could talk to me a little about what you want from all of this. Hm? First principles. What’s your book for? What do you expect it to do for us? You, I mean. Let’s talk functionality. That’s really where I come in.”
“Do? Hm..I hadn’t really…I suppose…”
“I think it’s so important we be crystal clear about this from the outset, don’t you? Why did you write this book, Will?”
She made a bridge of her hands and rested her chin on it.
“I see,” said Will. “Yes. Well, I don’t know—I’ve always…since as long as I can remember really, I’ve wanted… for example, the Dickens volumes my father kept on a high shelf—perhaps that’s where it began. You know? Eh…and then of course the classics…the Bible…the Arabian Nights and so on…I just want to…I think it might be the only contribution, if you will, that I’m truly capable of. Do you see? I mean, they’re repositories, aren’t they? Stories. What dreams are to waking life, so stories are to truth, or so I’ve always thought…”
“Yes. I’m not quite following, Will. Let me put it to you in a different way. What good is this book of yours? Why should I be excited? I mean, I am excited of course, but why should I be?”
“Right. Well, I suppose the hope is…that my work might be…well I’ve said it, haven’t I? A contribution. That it might be…good, you know? That it might, in some modest way, have some literary merit. There’s nothing else, really.”
He thought of his self-administered pep talk and sat up a little straighter.
“And actually, I do, to be honest. I do believe it has merit.”
Julia Funt lowered her hands and, for just a moment, withheld eye contact, looking down at her fingernails.
“Jesus,” she said in a low but perfectly audible whisper, before looking up again.
“Literary merit,” she said. “Your book has literary merit.” She wasn’t smiling anymore. “So fucking what? You know what literary merit is? You know the little heart shape they draw on the foam of your cappuccino? That’s literary fucking merit, my friend. You know what the cappuccino is?”
“I’m afraid I don’t much like capp–”
“Traffic,” said Julia. “Sales.”
She was tapping her desktop with long red nails and, even though it was happening on the other side of the Atlantic, the hairs bristled on the back of Will’s neck.
“Cappuccino is traffic, Mr Roper,” she said. “And sales. Literary merit is the little heart shape they draw in the foam on top of the cappuccino. It isn’t even the foam. The foam is marketing.” She sat back in her chair and gave the screen a pitying look. “You’ve got it all ass-backwards.”
The exchange hadn’t made much sense to Will and consequently he didn’t have anything to say, but it didn’t matter because nobody was listening to him.
“Melanie, turn us around again, would you? Plan of action.”
The stuttering gloom enveloped him again. Talk of cappuccino had reminded him of the coffee he didn’t have and, as the others conferred, his attention wandered back across the road to Café Apollo. It was dark outside now and the café was lit up, golden and cosy. He squinted a little. The window was misted but he could make out the young woman who had taken the table next to it. She had rubbed away a little circle on the glass and was looking right back at him and he suddenly felt very self-conscious, sitting on the desk in his coat and exposed in the enormous window.
She was framed by the clearing she’d made, her red head backlit and radiant. Will couldn’t take his eyes away as the voices around him became muffled and the whole world contracted till there was only the clean circle on the glass and the girl inside it. She looked a bit like Milly, but then all girls seemed to look like Milly these days. God, he missed her. She’d been his muse. She’d gotten him started on the book and when she left he’d been afraid he wouldn’t be able to carry on. He had carried on, though. He’d finished the bloody thing.
Still, he missed her. Tony brought him news of her now and then: her new job, little details about her new flat and so on. How cruel it was to hear about her from that supercilious gnome. And yet whenever Tony spoke of her it felt like a kindness—that she would have the odious fool in her home, knowing Will would get word of her that way.
In the café, the girl’s hair tumbled in waves and framed a pretty face: grey-green eyes and full pink lips that curled upward in a smirk as she gazed haughtily out at the man in the empty office, not bothering to disguise her contempt. And then the strangest thing—the lips moved, and she knew his name. She shook her head slowly and repeated it. Oh Will, she whispered, and he could hear her. Will, Will…
“Will?”
He turned away from the window.
“Do please let’s have your attention, Will. It’s you we’re here to help after all. Go ahead, Rupert.”
Melanie turned her laptop around and Will found himself back in the blue glow. Julia had her eyes on something out of shot. Rupert looked earnest.
“We’re going to get your manuscript up on our in-house system, Mr Roper,” he said. “We have the perfect system—you’re going to love it. Very powerful. And we’re particularly excited about it right now because we’re about to improve it.”
“OK,” said Will.
“Complete overhaul. I’ll take you through it, get you up and running. No shame in that—we all need our hand held once in a while, right? We’re going to need you to go over the manuscript, for starters, and google map all the place names. That’s going to be really key for the reader. After that we’ll look at outbound links; I’ll oversee that, if you don’t mind. We need them but they’re risky, and I’m best placed to make sure we aren’t just handing it to our competitors on a plate.” He winked. “After that it’s inbound. The real fairy dust, Mr Roper. We absolutely need you to push this with all your might through your social networks. Of course, we’ll do whatever we can. Let’s get those links coming in, eh?”
“Wait,” said Will, one hand to his collar. “You’re losing me. Why would we…I mean, what good is mapping? Why do I need links?”
“For heaven’s sake, Mr Roper,” said Julia, “have you been listening to a word I’ve said? Traffic. We are here to drive traffic. That is our function.”
“Yes, but…but…I suppose you think I’m awfully…I understand of course, with your articles. Share buttons and all that—I get it, really I do. I have a tweet account; I’d be glad to help out on that front. I will like anything you want me to. But with ebooks—”
“Ebooks,” said the content strategist. “Where did you get this guy?”
“The ebook is a dead format, Mr Roper,” said Rupert. “In as much as they can be read offline, we have no interest in them whatsoever. It would not be our intention, as your publisher, to make your work available for offline reading of any kind. Rather defeats the purpose, in our view.”
“Right…well, this is…”
“It might be helpful if you begin to think of it less as a book and more as a website, Will,” said Melanie. “You are at the forefront of a whole new archetype, actually. It’s something that you should be very excited about.”
“We want reading your fiction to be a completely hooked up experience, Mr Roper.” Rupert had his hands clasped. “Totally integrated, in much the same way as online shopping has become, for example. You’re already aware of the kind of joined-up thinking I’m talking about—you just won’t have seen it applied in the same way. Think about it for a minute: readers who laughed at the drunk scene in David Copperfield also enjoyed the wooden horse chapter in Don Quixote. You see? We wouldn’t merely be mapping out purchasing behavior like online retailers do—this would be tapping right into the readers emotional reactions, page by page, word by word. The potential is mind-boggling.”
“Of course!” said Will. “I see it now. Now I see what you mean by functionality. This could give the casual reader access to whole new worlds of —”
Something about Julia’s glacial expression stopped him.
“Jesus wept, Mr Roper. This isn’t about giving your readers access to anything. It’s about giving us access to your readers.”
“I think it’s fair to say we’ve reached a critical stage in our little negotiation, Mr Roper,” said Rupert, “and I would simply ask that you keep an open mind.” He took a breath. “Will, we love the house.”
“The house?”
“The house. The house in the book.”
“We adore it,” said Melanie.
“Completely won us over,” said Julia.
Will looked at each of them in turn before responding. “They do live in a house,” he said.
“Absolutely. We’d like to call it ‘The House’,” said Julia.
He should have taken his coat off first thing. He was too hot and the collar was itching him.
“You’d like to call my story ‘The House’? But the house hardly features…”
“Yes.” said Rupert. “About that…”
Melanie leaned forward.
“We’d like to see more of the house, Will. We’d like it to feature more.”
Will became aware that both his hands had gone to his mouth.
“Well that wouldn’t be difficult,” he said, removing them,“There’s just a brief mention of the stairs on page two.”
“Exactly, Mr Roper,” said Rupert. “Precisely. I think you can appreciate we’re going to need a little more than that. Hm? For example, what color are the walls painted? You don’t tell us.”
“Rookie mistake,” said Julia.
“I think it should be a bright color,” said Melanie. “You pretty much always need that on a staircase and besides, we should take advantage of the skylight.”
“Skylight?” asked Will. “I don’t understand. There is no skylight.”
“We’re going to need to put a skylight in, Mr Roper. Shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”
“OK, time out. Everybody just hold on a minute.” Will took a breath. He had the distinct impression that something was about to become very clear to him. But it hadn’t happened yet.
“Are you people publishers?”
Rupert and Julia exchanged a glance.
“I suppose it depends on what you mean, Will,” said Rupert. “Insofar as we are offering to publish and sell your book then yes, we are publishers. You didn’t take a look at our site? I would have…”
“No I didn’t. Ms Phillips didn’t tell me anything about you.” He looked at Melanie. “You’re not an agent, are you?”
“No, I am, Will. I’m just not the type of agent you might have been looking for.”
“She’s the type of agent that’s been looking for you,” said Rupert enthusiastically, jabbing his finger at the webcam.
Melanie Phillips put her cigarette out and walked around to the front of her desk, so that Will faced all three of them.
“Will, I’m an estate agent. Rupert, Julia and I run a property website that covers the UK and, as you can see, the eastern United States. We’re introducing a whole new ‘barter’ dynamic into the home acquisition equation. Cutting out the middle men. Replacing them with us. It’s the fastest growing website of its kind.”
“Very exciting,” said Rupert. “Think about it, Will. It’s totally win-win. You want your book out there and we want to sell houses. It’s a perfect marriage: call it synchronicity if you—”
“But my book isn’t about a house!”
Julia was examining her manicurist’s handiwork.
“About a house, not about a house. Aren’t we passed all this ‘about’ nonsense, Mr Roper? It is 2019, after all. Good grief.” She tutted. “It’s like Alain Robbe-Grillet never happened.”
“Let’s not steamroll the man, Julia.” Rupert had his hand on her forearm. “He’s going to need a minute to process all of this. Tell us, Will, what do you think your book’s about? Maybe we can come at it from another angle.”
It took Will a moment, in his stupefaction at the turn the conversation had taken, to register that he was being addressed.
“Well…eh…well,” he said. At least he was now being asked to talk about his work, he thought. That’s what he’d come here to do, after all. If he could just get these people to appreciate his aesthetic, perhaps something could be salvaged from all of this. Folding his arms, he put a forefinger to his chin and addressed the ceiling.
“What a question. Of course, on the surface of it…I mean, the events described concern… you know, an intergalactic…but really that’s a metaphor, I suppose. I think what I’m really trying to get at, as it were is…oh, I’m not sure how to put it…God what an awful question. Something about redemption? Christ, I sound so overblown, don’t I? Impossible to talk about these things without…you know, the power…the redemptive…” He sighed involuntarily, although it sounded more like a sob. “I suppose, in a way, my book is about the power of love.”
Melanie was writing something on a piece of paper. The strip light at the back of the office blinked off completely for a second, and when it came back on emitted a high pitched whine. Unless that was his tinnitus. Hard rain against the window. Julia was the first to speak.
“Did he just say the power of love?”
“Merciful Christ, Will,” said Melanie, looking up. “You’ve got to give us something to hang on to here.”
“Apart from anything else,” said Rupert, “wasn’t that a song? We’ll never get it past the legal people.”
Will waved his hand in the air impatiently. “No, no—I didn’t mean it should be called…not everything is a search term, you know. Anyway, isn’t it you that should give me something? A reason to go for this? I mean, we haven’t even spoken about royalties and so on.”
Melanie was on her feet again and had handed him the note. “We don’t pay our writers royalties, Will—we pay salary. That’s a ball park figure.”
Will unfolded it and read the number. “Oh. Well that’s…right.”
In New York, Julia had perked up. “Wait a second, folks. Love is very popular. We get a lot of hits on articles tagged ‘love’. I think we should hear him out.”
They all looked intently at Will. He shifted his weight on the desk.
“I think that’s it really,” he said. “Love. You know? What I want to do with my…is just cut right through all the extraneous, all the…stuff, you know? Get right to the heart of…I mean, on the face of it my premise is complex, I admit that. Incredibly complex, actually—the relentless temporal anomalies, the unreliable, alien narrator and the endless footnotes in her native language, the constantly shifting planetary alliances…but really, in the end, it’s just a story about a boy and a girl and—”
“And their lovely house,” said Melanie.
“…yes, OK…and about how their love for each other overcomes all the obstacles that they find in their way—the Solar War, the attack of the dark matter time-drones, the disgusting little troll and so on. In the end, that’s it, isn’t it? I mean, you can skip all of the spirituality and the philosophizing. In the end it all boils down to love. It’s the real, I suppose you could say, meaning of life, and that’s why—”
“Ah, now that I like,” said Rupert. “The meaning of life. I mean, you’re obviously not the first to coin the phrase, and we do have to be careful about duplicate content,” he glanced at Julia, who nodded her assent, “but it is very strong.”
“Meaning has been a really big one for us,” said Julia.
“Absolutely,” said Melanie. “Meaningful travel, the real meaning of Christmas, that kind of thing.”
“And life,” said Rupert. “Life is all over the place. It’s huge.”
“Something like this, with the right finessing, could very well go viral,” said Julia.
“Yes, people are drawn to this kind of authenticity, aren’t they?” said Rupert. “Especially at key moments in life, when emotions are running high. House moves…”
“Exactly the type of thing we’re looking for,” said Melanie. “Quality is so important.”
They were talking amongst themselves again and Will’s head turned, involuntarily, towards the other side of the street and Café Apollo. There she was, in the window, and here he was, caught in her brilliance. Once again the blackness bled in from every corner of his vision to frame her in a contracting circle of light, like the end of an old silent movie, and the office he was sitting in receded, the voices indistinct, a million miles further away from him than the girl in the warm glow of the café, behind the misty glass.
She was beautiful. She was a flaming goddess. He felt himself pouring toward her like liquid. He could see now, through the heavy rain that warped her features a little, that his myopia had deceived him; she wasn’t smirking at all but smiling the most heavenly smile. She raised her arms toward him in an embrace, reaching out to take him to her, to hold him close and safe.
He knew now he’d be going in a minute. As soon as there was a lull in the conversation and he could politely take his leave. He’d be better off over there, where he could take off his coat and sit in a comfortable chair, in the warmth with a passable macchiato and a banana caramel muffin, talking to her. He really ought to pay more attention. He should have looked at that website. If he had he’d have seen this coming, but he hadn’t; distraction had lead him astray, again, and into yet another trap. That’s what she’d come to tell him, this daughter of Mnemosyne. She’d come to get him.
Will, Will, Will…
Who was she?
Calliope, Thalia, Melpomene…
Oh no, wait a minute—it was a smirk. She was definitely smirking. And she’d been joined at the table by an intimidatingly handsome young man. He was smirking too. With his eyes on Will, he whispered something into that luscious hair while she sipped her coffee and she suddenly lurched forward, evidently trying hard not to spit it out. When she had recovered, they both smirked at him one last time before leaning into a long and lingering kiss.
Not Café Apollo then. He wasn’t sure he had enough on him for the muffin anyway. They were extortionate. He might as well just go home. Back up those stairs with their apparently unforgivable lack of a skylight and walls of…
He realized he didn’t even know what the color of the walls on the stairs was. How many years had he lived there? How could he not know that? He tried to visualise them. It must be a dark color—it was always gloomy on the stairs even when the lights were on. Melanie Phillips was right about that, in fairness to her.
Maybe he shouldn’t go home either, not just yet. How good a writer could he be, anyway, if he wasn’t even observant enough to know the color of the walls in his own house? It wasn’t the kind of deal he’d been hoping for, what these people were suggesting, but it was a deal. His story would be out there. Not to drop with grace and hope into the fabric of a magical universe and create a ripple there, it turned out, but to google map and hyperlink properties for sale and rent. But it was a deal.
Maybe it won’t matter why I’m doing it. The two in the café were kissing again. It was actually a bit much. He shook his head. Or maybe it—
“Will?”
He turned. They were all three looking at him expectantly.
“Yes?”
“Have you been listening?” said Melanie Phillips. “We think we can see a way forward here. You—”
“Peacock!” The word escaped him without his permission, like the bark of a dreaming dog. Melanie jumped.
“Sorry?” said Rupert. “Who—?”
“Peacock,” said Will. “Peacock. That’s the color. Of the walls. On the stairs.” He was taking long, deep lungfuls of air, as though he’d been holding his breath. He looked at each in turn. “You did ask.”
“Right,” said Melanie. “Well—”
“Although actually, it’s probably more of a cerulean blue, now that I think about it. It’s not a distinction I’ve ever felt I had a real command of. You know?”
“Wow,” said Julia Funt. “Either way, it won’t do. The—”
“Maybe something in a country linen?” said Melanie. “Or we could—”
“—positive here, though, is,” said Julia Funt, whose displeasure at the interruption was evident in her slow enunciation and entirely absent from the features that continued to beam at Will and made him feel, if not quite comfortable, then at least, at last, not quite unwelcome, “it would seem we’ve made a start.”
Guillermo Stitch is the author of the award-winning novella Literature™ and the acclaimed novel Lake of Urine, a New York Times Editor’s Choice recommendation. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Entropy and 3:AM Magazine. He lives in Spain.
