Use the transcripts of your online chats to inspire dialogue. Speculate how he may have behaved had this conversation been face to face. Would he reach out to touch you? Would his green eyes flash with lust? He is not yet yours, but you are free to assign him whatever desires you wish. Create a narrative from what was once uninspired chatter. But he can never know, he is not like you. You are free to submerge yourself in his words, in him, but you must do so alone.

Remember the hot stab of jealousy you felt when you saw him trolling for sex on one of those coldly accommodating websites. You gazed at the photograph on his member profile and the low, purring voices of all the men who would pursue him flooded your mind. You wrote to him just to make sure in that moment he was not writing another man. Use that pitiful desperation! Spread it across the page like thick, dark jam. Punish your readers with the sickening realization that if he indeed found another man to fuck, he wasn’t thinking about you.

Recall with numbing shame all those senseless, endless, merciless messages you wrote him while you flip-flopped from one sham reality to the next after gorging on speed. Accept that your memories of his increasingly bewildered replies are forever dim and toneless. His repulsion at you exists in a vacuum. It’s a junkyard walled in glass—there’s no way in or out. You wasted so many words on him, manufactured mere noise. But you will not make that mistake now.

Of all the transcripts you’ve saved, there is one you believe mimics the structure of a story without any desecration from you. Your final “real” chat. You messaged him impulsively that night, before the speed had shattered your personality completely. He demanded you be honest with him. He spoke of the one time the two of you met in person and compelled you to revert to that same boy you were then. You succumbed. You confessed your pain and your loss, feverishly pounding the keys, a junkie for whatever he wrote next. Yes, this combat of wills makes a perfect story: opening hook, rising conflict, unexpected climax. When he confided that your openness aroused him sexually, gratitude bloomed inside you like a cancer.

Coincidence! The scourge of all fiction! Your chance encounter with him, and it is lost to you. How to tell this story without including the mad, mad randomness of it? Impossible! You cannot use this anecdote. You cannot tell your readers how he grabbed you as you sped past him, oblivious. You cannot tell your readers how you gaped dumbly at him, he was so much more handsome than his photo had promised. You cannot tell your readers how he seemed almost shy to finally speak with you. You cannot tell your readers how stupid, stupid, stupid you feel (still feel!) for letting him retreat into the flesh-ridden halls of the bathhouse after you foolishly let a prior commitment whisk you away from him. You cannot tell your readers any of this. Try if you wish. You will fail, your story will fail.

You can only tell one person how this absurdly brief encounter touched you. You could perhaps call him. Maybe write him a message. But he is weary of your words. You wrote in haste, you wrote in panic. And now he wishes you to write no more.

This is not a story but this is the end.

END

---

Thomas Kearnes is a 31 year old writer from East Texas. His fiction has appeared previously in Night Train, Pindeldyboz, Blithe House Quarterly, Parting Gifts, Thieves Jargon, The Pedestal, 3 AM Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly and Bound Off, among other journals.

In his bookshop, a small store stuck in the side of a bluff, he catalogued and ordered books as he thought they should be ordered. Loras received his books with solicitation slips titled “Non-Fiction” or “Fiction” or “Biography” or “Children’s Books” or “Pornography” or “History” or “History of Sports” or “Sports” or some other such nonsense; he’d then throw the slip away and read the book himself. He decided that a bookstore’s owner should be the final arbitrator of how a book, in fact, should be listed. If it was solicited as Non-Fiction and wasn’t really Non-Fiction, he would decide what it’s intent really seemed to be and then catalog it correctly. If it attempted to be Non-Fiction, he would put it under “Attempted Non-Fiction.” If it masqueraded as Non-Fiction and was really the bullocks of the beltway, he would put it under “Marginally Correct Works of Argumentation.” This section, in particular, had recently grown pretty full. And, ultimately, things were fine, until one day they weren’t.

Sometime in the last few weeks or so, his books began to be shifted about. He’d started to find things out of order, like bound editions of Playboy had gotten mixed in with the pornography and such. He’d fix it and then fix another one the next day. The shop seemed to be having steady convulsions.

As he put the books back, he couldn’t help but think about his father. His dad was a man of integrity. His dad, at least from what he remembered, was a jerk. While shoving the books into their appropriately awkward places, one memory in particular made him smile. He was visiting his father’s candy shop just off of Main Street, around the corner of the more respectable businesses in Galena, when his father, he recalled, got into an argument with a customer over where the taffy apples were sitting. The annoyed man started the argument because he thought they were sitting in a strange place and couldn’t find them when he’d first walked into the store.

His dad told the customer to fuck off. It was the first time he’d heard his father cuss, and the memory made Loras’s chest tingle. Cursing, no matter the situation, no matter who was doing it, was never allowed at home. After the customer left, Loras’s father came around the register and sat down beside his son.

“Look,” his dad said, as he stared upwards at the plastic-coated register, “I know we’re not supposed to use those words, not at home anyways, but sometimes you have to use ‘em. You can’t let people bully you around. This is my shop, and I’ll do things the way they should be done … fuck ‘em. Candy apples go beside the chocolate bars, in the back, because they both have wax in them. They’re both waxy, so let ‘em sit together.”

“Okay, Dad.” Loras replied, pleased with his father.

“I could probably sell more of ‘em if I set them in the front window, easier to see and everything, but you know what, our store window points southeast. The friggin’ sun would be beating down on them all day and would probably spoil ‘em. I’d have to replace more apples than I’d sell, so where would the store be after that? People don’t think, Loras. Don’t be those people, okay?”

“Okay, Dad.”

The older man stood up and grabbed a purple-coated apple from the back and gave it to his son. As Loras grabbed for it, he saw the dark creamy coating, shiny as his mother’s crystal glasses at home, start to slide off of its sides. Loras noticed, as he looked behind his dad, that the apples were sitting beside the fudge oven.

***

“Kim, have you noticed any books out of order lately?” Loras asked. “Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been finding books in the strangest places … I know that I haven’t been putting them there so …” The thought dangled with inferred blame.
Kim, a short oafish girl, was hired to work the register about a year ago. He liked her and thought she was sweet, if not bright. Lately, he began to worry that she’d been taking some initiative with the books. Occasionally, customers came in and read a few paragraphs at a time and then sat the books down on a chair or something; he’d told her not to put the books back, but to pick them up and put them near the back end of the store. Every few hours, he’d go and clean up the books and place them into their proper spots. Of all things, Loras was concerned that she was trying to be thoughtful. He didn’t want her to be thoughtful; he wanted her to work the register.

“Really, I hadn’t noticed, certainly a possibility.” She answered with a blank look on her face, a look that Loras thought endemic to her part of the population. “Don’t you think that, maybe, customers have been putting them, well, in the wrong place after they’re done?”

“No, no, I don’t think it’s that … at least I don’t think it is. How hard is it for a person to put the book, the book they pulled out, back into the empty slot they originally found it in?”

“You put a lot of faith into our customers, don’t you?” A small grin crossed her face. “You know, what with all of these books out of order or, at least, in your order and everything. You know? I’m just saying.”

“Actually, I don’t put hardly any faith into them. I’m pretty sure you’ve noticed that every book is logged into the computer … they can search our system like they could at the library. It’s just our books are listed under slightly more accurate headings …”
He paused, hearing the doorbell ring a customer into the shop, “just keep your brain open to what’s going on. I can’t have books out of order; the place would fall apart.”

As he walked away to greet the customer, a few words fell out under her breath in response. It was sad, he felt, that she just couldn’t seem to get it. He just asks people to think a little bit when they come into the shop. It is, after all, a bookstore.
Kim came from Chicago, maybe that’s why she didn’t get it. She’s too in a rush to get everything. In Galena, the pace of the place lent itself toward reflection and tourists-turned-townies didn’t seem to grasp that aspect of it.

He walked to the front, sliding his fingers along the bookshelf that hid the register, thinking about her lack of adjustment. She fell out of his view, though, and was forgotten as soon as he turned the corner.

“How are the slopes today?” He asked the small man wearing a ski jacket.

“What? Oh, this? This is just my jacket. I don’t ski.” The man said as he stared around the front of the shop. “I just like the jacket.”

“You know we have a ski resort just outside of town; it’s on a slope hanging over the Mississippi.” Loras said, while trying to be friendly. “I hear it’s very nice, and they even set up fake snow for the fall.”

“Yeah, I heard it’s nice. But, you know what, snow skiing in Illinois just sorta sits funny with me. I’d rather go someplace west for that … you know?”

“But you don’t ski.”

“No, I don’t … but if it did, I wouldn’t do it in Illinois.”

“But you don’t ski, so what does it matter?” Loras, perhaps stuck in a bit of stunted thought, kept saying. “You’re from Chicago, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, so, everyone outside your storefront’s probably from Chicago. It’s kinda what this place does, doesn’t it?”

“Not this place … maybe the town, but not necessarily, at least, this place.” Loras replied, while moving forward, sliding into the man’s personal space. He could smell cigarette caked over the guy’s ski jacket.

The Chicagoan paused and with an inverted Southside accent said, “…you’re a strange duck, aren’t you?” Loras had learned the mouths of these people a few years ago; the Northsiders were buyers, and the Southsiders were complainers. The man’s mouth fell somewhere in the middle. “How about I buy this place off of you, so you can go be strange off of the main strip? I’d make a nice offer, but only if I get you outta here.”

He grinned. Loras asked him to leave and told him to fuck himself as he left.

“Loras, I’m not sure if you’re supposed to treat and/or talk to customers that way.” Kim yelled through the bookshelf. “Of course, it’s not my store.” He could hear her still grinning on the other side, as if her mouth and jaw muscles were contracting with delight.

“Kim, you have to stop putting books back yourself.” Loras said a few days later. “I know you’re trying to be helpful, and I appreciate that, but it’s not helpful if you can’t get them in the right place.”

“I don’t put them back … I do put them in the back though.” She giggled at using the word back in two different ways; Loras thought she was a strange girl. “… I don’t even do that very often, not many people come in here on a regular basis … you know with that whole not being able to find the book they want thing goin’ on in the store. It kind of keeps people from coming in here very often, you know?” Her shoulders went up for a shrug, but stopped halfway through the movement.

“Thank you for that …” Loras responded, standing beside the counter he’d sat behind when he was a child. Kim was oafish, but he noticed that she managed to be accidentally pretty once and awhile. He grabbed a lollipop out of a jar on the counter and gave it to her. “Maybe you’re right, but maybe it’s the new store in town. Did that cross your mind? It’s a huge bookstore; I’m sure it’s hitting our business. Why wouldn’t it? If you think about it, it makes sense.”

He smiled at his answer. She mumbled something about the two stores being in different markets, but he ignored the mumble and began cleaning the shop. The store, for some reason, collected dust on the bookshelves and countertops like cotton candy on a paper stick. He cleaned and he thought; he thought that the new store in town should be seen by its main competition in town; he thought the two should meet and stop waiting to meet, and he decided that he’d be the one to abridge the wait.

“I’m going to go to their store.” He said, while still dusting a bookshelf near the front. “Start closing up the shop for the night, okay?”

“You probably should do that …” Kim yelled over the bookshelf. He heard her, but ignored the call.

***

It was late autumn when Loras decided to have the meeting. The streets were packed with different sorts of luxury cars, cars that this season seemed give birth to, and people that the seasonal winds seemed to blow into town; it was strange, he thought, the winds were always blowing eastward, but these people always came from the east. It was somewhat of a conflicted stance for autumn to take, but it was, nevertheless, the stance that the season took.

He found his car jammed between some black German thing and another silver Japanese thing. Until about fifteen years ago, he hadn’t been a very good parallel parker. Once the onslaught of tourists started to flood the town, he mastered it pretty quickly. He was adjustable in that way. Once he wedged out, he drove down the main strip and, for once, glanced at all of its foliage, clustered buildings and people as he went. He realized, for a moment anyway, why the Chicagoans visited the town; it was quaint looking; it seemed nice; it looked to be everything that everyone thought the turn of the 19th century should be.

It looked that way, pretty much, until you caught the hook at the end of Main Street. The hook threw you up over the bluff and into the strip malls of the less talked about part of Galena; the place where people actually lived. Kim lived out there too. After she moved here, believing that all things beautiful resided and collected in the downtown of this town, she found out that the storefronts were just stylized hollowed-out old buildings; people worked out of them, but nobody lived out of them. She checked the realty papers for Georgian homes, but found out most weren’t homes anymore. They were little colloquial motels, little B&Bs, little places to sleep for a night, but not for a life. The Chicagoans that moved here, ironically, often found themselves completely lost in Loras’ little town.

The twisting bits of the place pushed her into a track house behind a line of track businesses, which were squished in between a WalMart and the new bookstore. Her dream of Galena, like most tourists turned townies, was smashed once she settled into it. Kim, perhaps, wasn’t representative of every Chicago native, she thought a little less than most, but her story was similar enough.

Loras made it out to the West End an hour or two before the new store closed for the night. It actually had a pleasant look to it, he thought, as he gazed around its cream coated plastic pillars. It had this beautiful blue hue, and the front doors, he swore, looked like real oak. It was almost the perfect imitation of the generic homey style coffee-bookshop, only it was five times the normal size.

He pushed through the doors and immediately walked to one of the eight registers. “Would it be too much to ask,” he paused, as he stared at the young boy, “for me to speak to the owner of the store?”

“The store owner isn’t here … I don’t think he even lives here.” The boy, with pepper behind his eyes, quickly put one finger up to Loras. “Hold on, just one sec’, let me ask the manager.” He ran off.

“Of course he doesn’t live here,” Loras said to another clerk, one register down, “that would be silly.”

“Yes, it would.” She said, while refocusing back on her own customer. He noticed her eyes roll a bit, reminding him of Kim, which made him feel somewhat empathetic to this bookstore and all bookstores’ hiring deficiencies.

Loras waited at the register for the young boy to come back with an answer. He could see him petitioning an older woman for it, but none seemed to be forthcoming; the boy, nonetheless, continued to ask. A line started to form behind Loras, so he walked away from the counter. He didn’t want to be blamed for the hold up, especially since it wasn’t his fault. The boy was the one who’d left; Loras didn’t ask him to leave.

He lingered further into the store, and almost immediately he ran into a rack of comic books stored completely out of place. He didn’t see where they kept the bound editions of these books, so he picked up the circular rack and carried it around looking for the Graphic Novels section. Putting the rack beside the shelf wouldn’t totally fix the problem, but it would get things somewhat closer to how they should be setup. In reality, Marvel comics should be subdivided away from DC comics, and then, after this is done, everything should be further subdivided by genre, character, and, possibly, character’s powers. The sub-genre stories, like all underground comics, should be condensed into one section and be ordered by the year of its publication. These comics, in particular, are very much affected by the growth of the art form through the years and their section should underscore it.

“What are you doing?” Someone asked him.

“Huh?” He peered around the side of the rack to see who it was, but his arms were unable to keep the rack steady. A few comics fell off of it as the rack plummeted to the floor. “Look what you made me do. Do you realized I could have damaged the merchandise? These comic book people, who, of course, and you may not realize this, are very careful about how a book is handled, may not buy a damaged book. You could’ve cost this store quite a bit of money for frightening me like that … I hope you realize.”

“Do you work here or something?”

“No. I’m just fixing this rack; it was up beside the periodicals.” He leaned over and started picking the issues up off the floor. “I’m just trying to put it where it’s supposed to be.”

“Friggin’ comic book guys,” The person said, as he walked away, “… Jesus.”

Loras found the proper area and placed the rack down beside it. It made him feel better about the store, even if it was trying to put him out of business. There was no sense, he felt, in having them do things so poorly. After setting down the rack, he started to notice all sorts of problems with the place. Fiction was mixed up with Literature. Memoirs were mixed up with Biographies. History books were not subdivided by their theories of historical analysis. The store, the shelves, everything was beautiful, but he knew this much… it was all a mess.

“I got your answer.” The young clerk said, as he found Loras. The boy’s checkout line, Loras saw, had spilled over like a six-headed snake into the other lines. Kim and this boy were long lost siblings who only needed to be properly reintroduced in order to restore their fidelity of siblinghood. Loras sighed.

“Good, let’s have it then.”

“Was that comic book rack always there?” The boy asked, “Never mind, probably … anyway, so I got the answer. I found out the owner lives in California and has never been to our store. The manager said that it isn’t likely that the owner will ever visit our store either. In fact,” the boy proudly paused, “my manager didn’t even know the name of the store’s owner. I only found out because I went over to the internet café and found it online.”

“You did this, while you were supposed to be checking people out?”

“Yes.”

Loras sighed again, “Well, that answer doesn’t help me very much does it?”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t. Has that rack always been there, I thought for sure it was beside the magazine shelf? Anyway, I got to get back to the front of the store. My boss is gonna get annoyed with me if I stay here too long talking to you.”

“Yes, I imagine she will.”

“My father used to own this store. Well, not this store exactly, but he used to run a candy store out of this building.” Loras, lately, had gotten into the habit of talking to Kim during the slow hours of the day. She was behind the register, of course, and he was sitting on a stool beside the front bookshelf. “Were you aware of that?”

“Um, yeah … you told me last week about it.” She answered in a familiar airy tone. “You make the lollipops out of one of the old machines in the back, right?”

“Exactly.” He paused. “You know, Dad wanted me to keep running it as candy shop because of the big influx of tourists … he thought it’d be a good business decision and all that. Fuck Dad though, it’s my store and I like books.” He grinned at the memory, but not at the conversation; they’d become too regular lately, which somewhat frustrated him. The chats were almost always, almost uncontrollably, started by Loras. And In the dead space of the bookstore any sound was welcomed, even a nonsensical one. “I think that I’m going to go back to their store, I have some ideas for it. Were you aware, I’m sure you weren’t, but nonetheless, were you aware that they put the Playboy magazine beside the other pornography? This shouldn’t be done; it’s a literate magazine. It’s not like the store is some gas station; I can forgive a gas station for not knowing any better, but a bookstore demeaning Playboy. At the very least, even if they can’t put it beside The New Yorker, please put it in a spot alienated from the rest of the trash.”

“So you’re going to fix their place?” Kim tiredly responded, as she got up to pick up some books. “I’m going to go set these in the back, but just think about whether that’s a good idea or not. Okay?”

“Why not do something? Someone thinks they have the right to do it here, obviously. Why don’t I have the right to do it somewhere else?” Loras reasoned.

“You know, Dad was strict about how a shop should be run. He demanded things to be correct.” Loras smiled, remembering his father’s dirty mouth. “And I’m betting he’d be fully on board with fixing up someone else’s store who’s messing up your own.”

“Well, I’m not sure …”

He put his hand up. “You’re going to say that you’re not sure about whether they’re the ones destroying our business, putting books out of place and such …” He walked over to her, as she was picking up a book, to touch her on arm. He then whispered, “Who knows, maybe they aren’t doing it, probably not doing it, but let’s pretend that they are and pretend that we didn’t know that they weren’t … have a lollipop.”

He winked and walked out of the store again.

He was fortunate that it was such a cold day. He knew he was going to need to wear his largest winter coat to the store, but he worried that he’d look sort of strange if the weather was nice. The wind was biting and the leaves had finally hit the ground. Fall, for the most part, had left, which meant he would be able to wear a big enough jacket to hide his signs in.

And as he entered the store, pushing those seemingly astute oak doors to the side, he pulled out a list of probable book sections and correctable book sections. He didn’t know how much time he’d have till the manager came and stopped him, so he knew he’d have to prioritize. He put his hand on his chest to make sure the cardboard signs were still inside; he’d already written up a few of the probable section headings.

“What’re you doing here?” An old woman yelled across the room; she immediately pounded over toward him.

“What.” Surprised by the immediacy of her assault, Loras backed up to the doors.

“What’s in your hands?” She grabbed the list. “Give me that, you’re the one who dropped all of those comics on the floor and put the rack out of place.”

“In place, might be more apt.” He trembled out in pseudo-response.

“What? Did you realize, while you were going about fixing things the other night, we had some twenty customers walk out the door without buying something.”

While she was scolding him, she started reading through the list. “You cost us quite a bit of money the other night, you know, and it looks like you’ve decided to cost us some more. What’s wrong with you? Jesus.”

The vast the store, somehow, suddenly, became quite dense to Loras. The front counter seemed to wrap around him from behind, while the bookshelves and woman closed and pushed in on him from the front. The large jacket and signs didn’t help either; he was sweating underneath them. “The boy was the one who took the initiative to leave the counter. I didn’t ask him to leave; I just asked him to speak with the proprietor of the store.”

“Get out of the store. You’re not buying, so leave … just leave.”

“Are you from Chicago?” He could hear the whiff of her old accent coming through her voice.

“Originally, yes.”

“Southside, right?”

“That’s really not the issue here, you know.” Many of them ended their sentences with you know, but it never really seemed like a question. He wondered, while she was pushing him out, whether she came to Galena for a quaint retirement or to run a bookstore.

“I’m going back.”

“Of course you are, why wouldn’t you?” Kim responded, now seemingly enjoying the game. “By the way, someone must’ve recognized you while you were there last time. You got a restraining order in the mail. It’s with the other nonsense in your office.”

“Wonderful, but I’m still going back.”

“Wouldn’t expect anything different, you know …”

“Are you still finding books out of place?” He asked her; he’d given her the job of reviewing things lately. The new store had become a bit of a distraction, and he couldn’t focus right then on the mess in his own shop. “You’re using the ordering printoff I gave you, right?”

“Absolutely …”

“Great, have a lollipop …”

“Wonderful.” She responded, while drawing out a few vowels of the word.

He was able to get to the rear of the new store without being noticed by the manager. The back, like much of the store, was a huge maze of books and shelves; the area, he thought, would be able to give him enough cover to start cleaning the wretched place up. It even sat one level above the front. It was hard enough just to get to the store as it was, he didn’t want to get kicked out as soon as he got there. An ice storm had just hit, and he’d barely made up it up the bluff to make it to this side of town; the beginnings of winter tended to make the hilly life of Galena a bit more eccentric. Even the Chicagoans, the one’s not skiing at least, tended to leave the area.

The store was almost empty. Hardly anyone, except Loras, thought it was a good idea to go out and drive on the newly iced over roads. He glanced around and then sat out the signs he’d made and the new list he’d thrown together; it wasn’t a simple list, no book listing ever is, but his list, in particular, was precise in it’s complexities. He predicated the list on the assumption that the back of the store would be the first to be reordered and corrected. Some sections would be condensed, others would be expanded, and then, in one final go around, the new signage would be put up to make sure everyone knew where to find they’re books.

He began pulling them out, setting each one of the sofas near the shelving. The store was unusually quiet, so he could hear the dustcovers of the books slide away from each other, sounding as if they were unzipping rather than peeling away, as he pulled them out. One by one, he grabbed them and partitioned them off on the sofa.

Time nervously passed. He pressed forward.

“Hey,” Her voice came from blank air, “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m reordering things.” He answered to the voice behind him. He didn’t want to turn around because he knew it was going to be the manager. “I noticed quite a few book groupings needed a better fit, so I decided to put some time in to help the store out.”

He smiled a nervous smile. She couldn’t see it. Her dusky tone only held old hate and demands in it, so he kept staring at the lower shelf. As he sat there, trying his best to ignore the voice behind him, he realized how close he was to finishing this section. He just needed a few more books, just a couple off of the ground. His fingers crept over to a C.S. Lewis book, “The Screwtape Letters,” and grabbed it quickly, throwing it into the shelf before the woman could get at it.

“I suppose you didn’t get the restraining order in the mail?”

He grabbed at another book.

“No, I got it, but I thought it was a mistake. Aren’t the police supposed to personally hand those things to you?” Loras asked. “It seems to me that a mailing isn’t normal procedure …”

As he said this, she grabbed him by the hood of his jacket and pulled him back from the shelf. “Do not put that book away.” He turned too abruptly and they both fell down the stairs that lead up to the rear of the store. He’d never beaten up an old woman before, but she wasn’t very nice. “Are you attacking me?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think so.” Loras replied, while he stared down at the manager. He was spread over the top of her like taffy during its stretching cycle. “I’m going to leave now …”

“No, you’re not.” She started grabbing at him as he stood up. He placed a small kick into her stomach, and after that, he realized, he was actually beating up an old woman. She was clingy though. He couldn’t get her off of his leg, until the store went pitch black. “What the hell …” She said and Loras took the opportunity to place one more foot into her stomach.

“I’m sorry. I hoped that that didn’t hurt too much, but I do have to leave. I think it might be the ice storm, you might want to check your generators and your emergency lights.” After giving his last bit of help to the store, Loras ran out to his car.

As his car slid downtown, the excitement started to drip out of him. He honestly didn’t know what he was doing anymore and maybe, he felt, that that was good. The car had plowed into an open spot on the barren street, when he realized kicking an old woman might not’ve been the nicest thing to do. Dad, he realized, probably wouldn’t have even done it, but Loras bet he would’ve at least thought about it.

“I imagine the police will be visiting us later today Kim.”

“Why?” Kim asked from behind the stacks.

“Possibly for assault or, maybe, breaking a restraining order or even breaking and entering. I’m not sure to be honest. It could be a number of things, come to think of it.” He was trying to be earnest about the whole matter. “How are things here?”

“Fine, I suppose.” She paused for a moment, setting down her flashlight, as she spoke. “We do have a problem though. After the power went out, I’m thinking the ice must’ve thrown a couple power lines’ down, I haven’t been able to get the computer started. We have a generator, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem … but here it is, the screen is as black as the night is long.”

“That is a problem … I’m not sure if I have a back up for our ordering system. Did you keep that printoff I gave you?”

“No, I threw it away after I was done with it.” In the dim glow of the safety lights, Loras could tell she was frustrated. “It shouldn’t matter though, should it? You know how each of these books should be placed, right, you know …”

“No, not really … I read them, make my decision, then I set them up in the computer. Set it and forget it.” He chuckled at the reference.

“Why aren’t you more upset about this? The whole store is going to be a mess in a matter of days.”

“Kim, once the police have finished up the mess of the storm, the power lines and the car wrecks and things, I figure I’ll be going away for awhile.” He moved away from the dingy bookshelf and sat behind the counter. As he did it, he started picking at the old register and said, “I’m figuring that the mess won’t really matter, if I’m not here worry about it at least. If you want, we can start reading some of the books that are already sitting out and refigure out where they’re suppose to go. Does that sound good?”

“Not really because the more time that passes the more the books are going to get out of place; it’s kind of a lost cause now, especially if the police are comin’.” Her dirty accent pounded the last consonant of the sentence. “… anyway, books should be the last thing we should be worried about.”

Loras looked away from the register and started to stare at the beguiling oaf in front of him; he asked her one final time, “Seriously, were you the one putting the books in the wrong place? It’s okay, just let me know?”

“How would you know anyway?”

END

Jeffrey Ford’s short story “The Drowned Life” is the story of a bailout gone wrong. It first appeared in the Night Shade Books anthology “Eclipse,” is now the title story of Ford’s 2008 collection, and it is a story that is firmly of its moment. The protagonist, an HMO bureaucrat named Hatch, is weary from enduring the “steady rain of increasing gas prices, grocery prices, medical costs…wars, AIDs, desperate millions in migration, …and stone-cold bullshit” and, at the outset, lets himself get pulled under. His bailing technique is rusty and he’s dragged under by a shark, a stainless-steel beauty named Financial Ruin. Hatch is pulled down to a town where bloated corpses frequent run down bars with wood paneling, broken pay-phones, and martinis with pellets of shit instead of olives.

This is a story for the end of the zero years. It may well be a story for the tens as well.

There isn’t anything in Jeffrey Ford’s story that wasn’t in your head already in 2007. Only an economist, broker, or congressman could reasonably claim to have been taken unaware by our collapse, and while Ford’s nightmare vision may be no worse than workaday reality, it is the expression of the vision, Ford’s clarity and commitment to following each metaphor to its conclusion, that makes the Drowned Life a fiction that is up to the task of interpreting and commenting on the bad news of our real lives.

An example:

Two gentlemen in suits swept by but didn’t return his greeting. A drowned mother and child, bulging eyes dissolving in trails of tiny bubbles, dressed in little more than rags, didn’t acknowlege him. One old woman stopped and said, “Hello.”
“I’m new here,” he told her.
“The less you think about it the better,” she said and drifted on her way.

This is the conversation I have almost every day on my commute, over the cubicle wall, or on my cellphone. This is America and our drowned life, and while we drift we might be better off it we refuse the advice of the old hands, better off if we ignore those who have already rotted through.

“The less you think about it the better,” she said.

With the “Drowned Life” Ford proves that this sentiment is exactly wrong.

Dearest Reader,

My name is Jon Harahan. I was born Jonathan C. Harahan. Don’t ask what the C stands for because I am not going to tell you. Most people just call me Jon. I graduated from Shippensburg University in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in English with an emphasis in writing and a minor in History and Philosophy. My senior year the university gave me six hundred dollars to write on the subject of metafiction. So in turn I wrote five short stories all with a metafictional twist. My muses included Kurt Vonnegut, Art Spiegelman, and Italio Calvino. God bless them.

I’m not religious. Some people call me agnostic, and some say I just need proof; I’ve had proof. I’m just skeptical. If you’re going to label me religiously, call me a skeptic. Oftentimes Professors of English will tell students “show, don’t tell” in your writing. Instead of trying to show you, I’m telling you: Religious Skeptic.

***

I created many characters during my metafiction experiment. These people included, but were not limited to, Josh Kory, Adam Richards, Benny Allen, and Theo Blanton –who is not to be confused with Joe Blanton, a Philadelphia Phillies pitcher, and the first pitcher in Major League Baseball history to hit a homerun in the World Series.

Theo Blanton, in my mind, is an old writer, and philosopher, living in Denver Colorado, who enjoys hanging out and occasionally teaching at his local university. He is a famous and successful writer. He is old and smokes a lot, but his brain is sharp, and his wife is physically attractive for her age. Theo loves her because she challenges him. He pretends to be a pessimist, or perhaps he pretends to pretend, and actually is. Maybe he would like people to think that he is faking so as to not depress them more than he intends. I’m not sure. You’d have to ask him.

He has silver hair on his face and head. Most of it is curly. He usually does not wear glasses. He has bags under his eyes which are to reflective of his hard work and success.

He has not been on any fantastical adventures in any stories that I have written. He walks around a lot, smoking and drinking, and dishing out worldly advice through the Socratic Method. This sometimes makes him look like a friendly, curious old man. Other times it makes him look like a dick.

In only one of my stories do I have him actually sit down and write. And in that story he only does it to accelerate global warming, which we all know he did not need to do. We are doing that all by ourselves. He is a famous writer who steals many of his ideas from other famous writers. Good writers borrow, great writers steal, he’d say. I’d agree.

***

Often times of course I wonder what Theo Blanton would say about this or that, or how he would react to certain situations. This is to help my writing and my character development of Theo Blanton. He is essentially loosely based off the real life writer Kurt Vonnegut, who is up in heaven now. Vonnegut had a few recurring characters in his novels, the most famous being Kilgore Trout, and who was based off of the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. This is where Theo Blanton’s first name comes from. Originally I too was going to use a type of fish as Blanton’s last name, but I decided against it, mainly because I do not know many types of fish, and also because Theo Blanton’s real name is just that. Theo Blanton is in no way related to Carsie Blanton, a relatively unknown folk and blues singer who performs her music in and around the Philadelphia area.

***

In many metafictional stories the author may put him or herself into the story as a character. Rarely do the writer and character meet outside the pages. I was hired to run and manage a fitness gym a few months ago and was fired after a month. The next day I got a job at a brewery/restaurant selling kegs of beer to people and busing tables.

After about month I was still working. After about a month I was busing a table, and the man at the table behind me asked if I could get him a porter on Cast. I turned around to tell him I would. He winked at me and laughed. I wanted to take a picture of him. He honestly looked as I would picture Theo Blanton. I smiled shrugged and got him his beer.

The next day the man was back, and the day after that. I thought little of it except for his resemblance to a fictional character that I had invented out of my own mind.
I was working in the retail shop a few days later. The retail shop: where people can come to buy clothing, glassware, merchandise, and beer at almost any quantity. Fortunately though, customers are a rarity in the retail shop, and I can spend my time reading or writing, or playing online poker. The shop is away from both the brewery and the restaurant, even the bathrooms. It is down a dimly lit, well tiled, hallway leading to six unmarked doors. I’m not kidding: five are locked, and the other is the retail shop. If I’m feeling sociable, I’ll prop the retail door open with a case of beer so if anyone who gets lost and wanders down the hallway can learn of my existence. If I’m really bored, I’ll even play some music down the hallway in hopes of someone finding me.

A few days after getting the strange old man’s beer, he found himself in the retail shop. It was not a good day for me. I was still hung over from the night before and I had kept the door closed in hopes of deterring anyone from bothering me. Of course, this man found the right door at the end of my hallway and came in.

***

Now, listen: This is the point in the story where I should hint for a few pages that the old man is in fact Theo Blanton. Then, after explaining why the reader would be skeptical at such an unrealistic event occurring, but trying to prove its legitimacy regardless, I make the claim that Theo Blanton has found his way into the real world. You however are a smart reader and saw all this coming. So I am going to waste neither your time reading nor my time writing such events. It is not laziness but intelligence that guides us forward. Although this is the flaw of man, we shall embrace it. Let us assume that the details are worthless and get back to the meat and potatoes and the matter at hand. What is the matter at hand? That Theo Blanton, a once fictional character, has become unstuck from the ink and paper that I have created and bound him to.

As a well read and intelligent individual, you of course see that the pages and words you now read must be that of fiction, for it must be impossible for a fictional character to come to life. You are correct, and also would be correct in questioning my (the narrator’s) reliability as well as identity. I think that my name is Jon Harahan, right? Shall we assume that it is or that I am a liar? Is the narrator and author the same person? Who is the author? If the narrator and author is the same person then the author is either a liar or of course simply creating a work of fiction. I assure you most of what I write in this story is not fiction. Perhaps I think I am the author, when in reality the author and narrator are two very different people.
These thoughts have all gone through your mind simultaneously within a subconscious millisecond of the opening pages of this story. You are neither surprised nor impressed with the way in which this story has been going. However, you have left something out. Perhaps this is a sort of framed story, or a double framed story. Who knows, maybe it is triple framed. Yes. Maybe Theo Blanton has not become unstuck in Jon Harahan’s pages. Perhaps Theo Blanton has put Jon Harahan into his own pages. Maybe Blanton is the real author, reader. Maybe Jon is stuck. Perhaps Theo Blanton in creative enough to create himself in a character’s life, in which he created, and is fictional, as a fictional character on the pages of his own fictional character’s writing. Yes? Perhaps Jon Harahan does not realize he is a fictional character, and in fact is. Maybe the one with all the control is actually being controlled by his own creator. Maybe Theo created Jon Harahan, the retail shop, the brewery, porter beer on Cast, and the world. But to you reader, if you research any of these things, you will find to be true. Perhaps reader, you are fictional. You too maybe a creation of Theo Blanton’s or Jon Harahan’s. You don’t know and have no reason or need to know. You will continue to live your life the way you always do after reading this story. The way you were meant to.

Maybe this is the first time you’ve read this piece. It is a first date of sorts. I hope you are having an enjoyable time. I wrote this with you in mind, reader. I sincerely hope you do not feel you have wasted any time fooling around with these words.

Thanks for sticking around.

Love,
Theo Blanton

END

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the illustration for this piece is the cover illustration for the 1974 Pocket Book edition of Barry N. Malzberg’s The Destruction of the Temple. Malzberg is the best kind of self-referential or metafictional writer and the art from his fine novel is typical of the kind of art associated with 70s metafiction

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Jon Harahan was recently awarded the Mabel E. Lindner Creative Writing Award as well as $600 for an undergraduate research grant project entitled The Metafictional Aspect of Postmodernism. He has been published in The Reflector.

Ears flat, the pink of the inside of his nostrils spluttering, he was drowning.

What would we do? Wait for the body to wash ashore or let it just sink, and how would I explain a missing horse? Mouse was floundering in the surf, as waves churned foam in his eyes.

Then he started to swim. Pounding the water, using tired muscle, fear moving him to live. I could feel the push and surge of the dark water pass me as we both started to cut through the sea.

We were headed out, away from land.

‘Help me!’  I held on to a frantic Mouse.

I had to turn him toward the shore. I pulled on the rein; the pressure turned the pounding barrel of the swimming horse. But a wave swung over us slowly, and like a sailboat at summer camp Mouse began to capsize. He started to slip to the right. With no yaw in his leg movements, and his rotund body, Mouse was tipping over.

Terror in his eyes and another wave coming, my cold skin prickled with fear, I had to do something. Why shouldn’t a horse work like a small sailboat? So I slipped off of the left hand side of him, held onto his mane, and used my weight to pull him straight and he completed the turn.

Now, faced toward shore he focused. He pounded for his life out of this water, and I held onto him like he was an orca whale.

Jeffrey Ford is an icon of literary science fiction and fantasy. He is the author of The Well Built City Trilogy, many terrific short stories some of which were reprinted in his collections The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and the The Empire of Ice Cream, and several novels including The Girl in the Glass. His most recent novel is The Shadow Year and his upcoming short story collection The Drowned Life is due out next month.

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Q: The name of this blog is How to Write Stories about Writers. Can you name a story about a writer that has influenced the way you work, or the way you think you ought to work?

A: The things that influenced the way I work have more been my circumstances – where I lived, what job I had, my responsibilities in raising my kids. Over the years, I developed my own way of how I work, and I don’t and never really did pay attention to what other writers are or were doing on that score. Good god, you see a lot of advice from writers on the internet to other writers about this kind of stuff. It cracks me up. Still, I can give you a title of a story about a writer that I think is good. “Guy De Maupassant” by Isaac Babel. I don’t think I’d want to used it as a model, though, for how I work.

Q: You were a student of the novelist and professor John Gardner at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Gardner’s didactic books “The Art of Fiction” and “On Becoming a Novelist” are perhaps more well known and well read than any of his novels. Do you agree with Gardner’s central thesis that fiction should be moral? Did you write fantasy or speculative fiction in his class, or did those stories come later? Do you feel you’ve fallen to the ghetto from the literary heights, or has science fiction and fantasy moved up?

A: Ask any writer who is publishing today who had Gardner as a teacher and they’ll tell you he was great at it. We didn’t bother with the Moral Fiction bullshit when he was teaching me, he was trying to show me how to edit and talking to me about irony and suspense and the things that make a good plot. I have somewhere a sheet of paper on which he wrote out for me the rules of the comma. He told me his theory of teaching writing, he said, “I can’t make you a writer, but I can show you some of the pitfalls and problems you’re going to face in writing and how to get around them. This is stuff that if you stuck with it you would probably learn, yourself, but I could save you five or ten years.” The two books you mention that are about writing, they’re definitely worth a look. The exercises in the back of The Art of Fiction are really sharp. I don’t do them, but I like to think about them. As for On Moral Fiction, I could never tell if it was merely a cunning attempt to gain notoriety or whether it was meant to be something more or both at the same time. The argument at hand never really interested me and in Gardner’s own fiction it’s pretty evident that it didn’t interest him that much either. He paid a pretty heavy price for his hubris, though. I think it got to him some after he wrote Mickelsson’s Ghosts. It’s an incredible novel – so wonderfully dark and crazy – but a lot of the reviewers ignorantly slashed it as, I believe, a kind of backlash against On Moral Fiction. As far as his writing goes, the works of his that interest me are: Grendel, The King’s Indian, Freddy’s Book, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, and “Julius Caesar and the Werewolf.”

Gardner was a big fan of Science Fiction and Fantasy. He’d entertain anything in class – Romance, Horror, Mystery… He was down with it if it was a good story, interestingly told. Beyond that, at that time, with writers like Gardner, Pynchon, Carter, Calvino, Garcia Marquez, Borges, Oats, Coover, Barth, the fantastic (or whatever you want to call it) was business as usual in the “literary” world. I wrote plenty of bad fantasy for his class.

There are no heights to fall from. All that is an illusion. If you buy into it as a writer, you’ll be driven by the belief in a legitimate hierarchy in which you’ll feel compelled to find a place, but if you ignore the illusion that struggle vanishes and what you have left is simply the writing.

Q: The world is going to hell socially and politically. To what extent do you feel pressed to be engaged by the political and social world in which you live. Is all art political?

A: I don’t feel “pressed” per say, but I am engaged by and in the political and social world. If you have kids, if you work a full-time job, if you pay taxes, have a mortgage, car payments, etc., you can’t help but be engaged by it. I look at America and see it moving with the speed of a freight train out of hell straight down the toilet. The last eight years have been a nightmare of torture, deceit, death on a grand scale, fear, and an economy run by thieves. Where’s my flag lapel pin when I need it. The grim nature of it bubbles through you and into the fiction. I’ve written a number of stories recently that I sense are colored by that nightmare – “The Drowned Life,” “The Seventh Expression of the Robot General,” “The Hag’s Peak Affair.” I do think all art is political. There is always vested interest, there is always the manipulation of power.

You do not know what slipstream is, and so you ply the net, sifting through half-remembered conversations and fine discriminations, more Fisher King than Grail Knight.

One page glows about the curious unsettling effect slipstream is supposed to have upon the reader, and so, just to keep your head off-kilter, you begin to write on upside down pages, back to front in a spiral notebook from Dollar General.

“What are you doing?” your oldest daughter asks, and suddenly you’re back in Chucky Cheese’s realm amid the electronic noise and clamor of the young devoted crusading for more of Chucky’s paper ticket manna.

“A story,” you say, hoping you have not lost the thread, fearing that it’s gone forever. You try to dive back into it, your pen a staccato flash of blue across the upside-down pages.

But now she’s interested. “Who’s it about?” she says, tongue darting out to clean tomato sauce from around her mouth.

You put your hand to your receding hairline, laughing at how that could be one of the worst possible questions she could have asked right now. “No one.”

“No one! How can a story be about no one?”

“I’m not sure,” you say, because you aren’t, or because the story is too far beneath the surface still to really explain. Or (telling the truth now) because you hate to admit that the story is about yourself, and how you have no idea what slipstream is.

She slips out from her side of the plastic booth and curls around next to you, alert eight-year-old eyes squinting at your cursive title. “You don’t know what what is?” she asks.

“I can hardly explain it to myself,” you tell her, hoping the answer will suffice to send her off to Whack-a-Mole, or whack her little sister, or whack some other cartoony thing too fresh and unjaded to be worrying over writing a story about not knowing what slipstream is while at the same time hoping that when it’s done the story happens to be just that.

***

If you give up on the story and go insert tokens into the Skee-Ball machine, proceed to section 62.

If you try to finish the thing, to really capture it once and for all right here in Chucky Cheese’s, proceed to section 101.

***

62

You pour eighteen tokens into the machine, years of honing your skill at rolling balls up hills rewarded by a strip of tickets longer than you are tall. Your kids add them to their bag, excited as only girls of eight and five can be.

Trophies await them just beyond the guarded glassbound case, and they do not understand why you are so pensive, not when there are so many clearly definable prizes to pick from. They choose some things they won’t remember a week from now when their mother has snuck them all into the trash and the three of you go out into the night, the same number stamped on each of your hands in invisible ink.

THE END

***

101

Not quite satisfied with that, you decide not to get up, to keep on tugging at the thread of the tale unraveling before you. It’s leading to something graspable. But just barely.

So you never really got up, never rolled the balls. Just kept scribbling, scribbling into your upside down Dollar General notebook, smiling vacantly and nodding where you’re supposed to as the girls interject their joy into your process.

The five-year-old: “Daddy, I found tickets already on a machine!”

The eight-year-old: “I beat the Pirate Ship!”

The five-year-old: “Daddy, look how many tickets!”

Still calling yourself a Fisher King, you dig one paw into a pocket and lo, there are more tokens. Little bits of not-quite-metal made to look like coins, even minted with a date. But they are not really coins, they are not tender outside of Chucky’s border. Maybe slipstream is like that, you muse. The word just means something so long as some other rules apply. You wonder what games the slipstream coin will let you play, what prizes you can win if only you trade in enough of the right kind of paper tickets.

Number One Daughter startles you, her face so close you can see where the lady didn’t trim her bangs very evenly today. “I just won forty tickets!” she exclaims.

***
If you get up from the chair to high five her and go play at this point, you just might be able to pick this up at another time. Proceed to section 89.

***

89

You lied to yourself. You didn’t get up. You just kept writing. Someone once compared slipstream to the beautiful mortarwork between the cracks of genre. But you did not care to think of genre as so many squares of red brick, did not see how the rough glue of a million marketers and masons could be worthwhile, not to mention elevating.

“Bah,” you said. (But not out loud.) “Slipstream is simply what the pretentious and literary call work that wouldn’t otherwise sell.” And for a long time after, your ego was grounded in being correct.

You read things labeled “interstitial,” praised for their use of prose to create an experience in the reader–but not the same type of experience as magical realism would, because that’s a more easily defined genre (just barely) and so it can’t possibly be slipstream. (Or can it be, sometimes?) You try to winnow out what it is about these tales that makes them slipstream where very similar others do not earn the label.

You drive the kids home, flush with their million little victories over Chucky’s games. You wish you had maybe spent more time with them. They’re getting older so fast it scares you. You promise yourself that next time you won’t use the excuse of them being old enough finally to entertain themselves. You’ll give them your undivided attention. You really mean it. Other stories won’t be so hard, won’t swallow you up so completely. You really do mean it.

***

In the car:

“So did you finish that story, Dad?” the eight-year-old asks.

“Yes,” you say. “Just barely.” If you had stayed much longer, your wife would have sent out a search party. You picture it, a gang of khaki-clad explorers wearing monocles and jodhpurs and safari hats, crashing through Chucky Cheese’s with a train of native porters in tow, only to find their quarry in a cramped plastic booth trying to write a story about himself coming to terms with slipstream as a mode of fiction.

“So what was it about?”

You laugh.

“I still don’t know, honey.”

“What was it called again?”

“You Do Not Know What Slipstream Is.”

She wrinkles her face up behind you in the car. It doesn’t matter that it’s dark even with the streetlights flashing past, nor does it matter that you don’t actually have eyes in the back of your head (despite numerous claims to the contrary.) And it most especially doesn’t matter that you’re really still in Chucky Cheese’s writing about things that will never actually happen. You know she’ll wrinkle up her face because that’s what you’re doing right now and she’s your real imaginary daughter, so that’s what she’ll do too.

“So what is it?” the younger one pipes up. She’s just now at the great age of articulate interrogation. Life will never be so simple again.

You play dumb, hoping to buy time. “What is what?”

“Spitstream,” she says, and the older one chokes back a laugh.

“I’m not really sure, baby.”

She screams the way she’s taken to screaming out her laughter, her childish delight.

“What’s so funny?” you ask, looking back into the rear view mirror, jerking up again as she slaps another stack of tickets onto the cramped little table among the paper clutter of a long-finished Fun Saver Meal.

“You are,” she cackles. “There’s no such thing as Spitstream.”

She’s just turned five and you love to watch her laugh like that. The eight-year-old is there too, her tokens spent and now she’s anxious for her prizes. She smiles at her little sister’s flub. “It’s slip-stream,” she tells her, sounding far too much like her mom.

The little one gives her sister the look that means she knows better than to believe that. “It’s whatever I want it to be,” she insists.

And you figure this is just as good of a place to stop as anywhere else. You still don’t know what slipstream is, but it’s time to go turn in your tickets and get your prizes. Your kids hope they will have enough to get something really cool from Chucky’s stash. You just hope that whatever you get will be remembered beyond next week.

***

When you are ready, proceed to the next section.

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About the Author:

Lon Prater still doesn’t know what slipstream is, but he can sure show a skee-ball machine who’s boss. Find out more about his writing at lonprater.com. This story originally appeared in Lone Star Stories.

Paul G. Tremblay’s fiction has appeared in a great many magazines including Razor Magazine, CHIZINE, and Weird Tales. He is the author of the short speculative fiction collection Compositions for the Young and Old and the hard-boiled/dark fantasy novella City Pier: Above and Below. He served as fiction editor of CHIZINE and as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and was also the co-editor (with Sean Wallace) of the Fantasy and Bandersnatch anthologies. His first novel, The Little Sleep, is forthcoming (February 2009) from Henry Holt. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts and He is represented by Stephen Barbara of the Donald Maass agency.

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Q: You recently sold your first novel “The Little Sleep” to Henry Holt.  Tell us a little bit about the book, and how it relates to Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” if at all.

A: The protag is Mark Genevich; a Lithuanian, narcoleptic private detective eeking out an existence in South Boston. The novel’s plot and voice is very much inspired by Chandler’s The Big Sleep and many post-Chandler noir novels as well. While there is humor to be had (I hope!) in The Little Sleep, the book has fun with the usual PI conventions while poking around in the nature of reality; what’s real, what’s a construct? And I take and treat Mark’s character very seriously. He’s isn’t a joke. He’s someone who suffers a great deal.

I’m proud, excited, amazingly nervous for the book, and I hope people like it.

Q: You teach calculus for a living.   My favorite word from calculus would be scatterplot.  What is your favorite word from calculus?

 
A: I don’t have a favorite word. I have favorite symbols, like this: a double legged Z for the set of all integers. Or more obscure ones like : reversed capital E, with means “there exists (existential qualifier!) or upside down capital A, which means “for all.” One might say the knowledge and use of such symbols reaffirms my exultant standing within civilized society. Or one might not.

Q: Have you ever read Stephen King’s book Rage?  I read it while I was in high school.  If I remember correctly the calculus teacher in that book was shot and her last words were something about an equation.  What would you want your last words to be if you were a character in a Stephen King novel?

A: I did read Rage; a long time ago. I didn’t remember that a calculus teacher was shot or her last words. Now I’m depressed.

Aren’t we all characters in a Stephen King novel? I received my contract, finally, last week, and I’m supposed to do something terrible with my protractor to a local gas station attendant who doesn’t deserve it.

Okay, fine, last words: “If it matters, if you care about such things, I didn’t try to hurt anyone on purpose.”

Sort of on topic…I invite everyone to read Jim Shepard’s PROJECT X, which is a short novel about a school shooting. Short and powerful. Read any of Jim Shepard’s brilliant work for that matter.

Q: As a writer what person do you prefer?

A: I prefer myself! Hahahaha…haha…ha…um, yeah.

When writing I use first-person, present tense a majority of time. I like the immediacy of the voice and tense, the challenge of creating characters through a singular viewpoint, the inherent unreliability of a story coming from only one point of view because all stories, while certainly informed and molded by collective experience and culture, ultimately come from one point of view.

Q: Do you consider yourself a Horror writer?  What’s the most scary thing you’ve read about in the last month?  In the last week? 

A: No, I don’t consider myself a horror writer. And I do feel, at least personally, that this distinction, what I call myself, is important. I am a writer who sometimes writes horror. When I first started, I proudly wore “horror writer” as a badge. The result, I tried to shoehorn every idea, story kernel, or character into a horror story framework, and I think much of my early work suffered because of that. Now, to the best of my ability, I serve the needs of the story first and foremost and worry about what kind of story it ends up being later.

It sounds trite, but the newspaper is the most scary thing I read every day. I really don’t like to think about it, or talk about it. Fiction-wise, reading The Watchmen recently was a terrifying and exhilarating experience.

Q: Have you ever written a story that reads the same backwards as it does forwards?

A: If you mean, you can hold it up to the mirror and read it backwards, no. If you mean literally flip the order of the words, no. That nonsense aside, I would claim that my short story “The Blog at the End of the World” (due to appear at Chizine—www.chizine.com—in October) is a story than can be read backwards. It’s in blog form, with comments and posts presented in a certain order, but could be read in whatever order the reader chooses, I hope.

Q: How many words?

A: 4 G’s, baby.

“How To Write Stories About Writers” Submission Guidelines

Christopher Lasch, the author of “The Agony of the American Left,” and “The Culture of Narcissism” condemned modern and postmodern narrative techniques, especially metafictional approaches to literature. He wrote:

“Novelists and playwrights call attention to the artificiality of their own creations and discourage the reader from identifying with their characters. By means of irony and eclecticism, the writer withdraws from his subject but at the same time becomes so conscious of these distancing techniques that he finds it more and more difficult to write about anything except the difficulty of writing.” He went on to note that in a Narcissistic Culture “even the rich lose the sense of place and historical continuity, the subjective feeling of ‘entitlement’, which takes inherited advantages for granted. This gives way to what clinicians call ‘narcissistic entitlement’ — grandoise illusions, inner emptiness.”

At “How to Write Stories About Writers” we aim to take this moralist’s objections seriously even as we continue to employ ironic, subjective, and metafictional techniques in order to expose not only the literary devices that are employed in our own short stories but also those employed at work, in the family, in the shopping mall, in schools, and finally in society at large that reinforce our passivity and perpetuate what is ultimately a corrupt social order.

We are seeking stories about stories, literature about literature, and writers writing about writers. This is this the publication for your narcissism, this is the publication for your alienation, this is the publication for your skepticism, for your fiction that is self-reflexive, ironic, dissociative, and wild.

“How to Write Stories about Writers” is an online publication at dietsoap.org. We seek stories ranging between 500-4000 words. We pay a flat $5 honorarium.

“Ye’ve got to stop running, Mick.”

“Oh, I’m not a runner. Little in this world I’m afraid of, Joe.”

“Oh, I’ll admit ye’ve not got the haunted eyes, the pallid disposition. Ye’re a fighter, sure, and not glancing over your shoulder or naught. Still, though, there’s something in how you take in a place. Almost wistful-like.”

“Is there?”

“There is. So what little is it that you’re afraid of, Mick?”

“The Author.”

“Wot, you mean, like God?”

“Yeah, sort of. But limited, like. See, you and me–we don’t exist, right? Except how he makes us.”

“How’s that limited, then?”

“I suppose for us, it’s not. But he’s only as powerful as his skills, you see. That’s how I found him.”

“A glitch in the machine?”

“Yeah, sort of. He’s just learning, you see. Creates new worlds left and right, whole cloth, disposes of them when they break. But he’s not very creative, right? Keeps reusing characters, just changes ‘em a bit.”

“So you’re remembering past lives, only they’re like different dimensions.”

“That’s it. That’s how I found him. In the cracks between the spaces, all that mystical mumbo jumbo.”

“He sounds right dull, your Author. But why are you afraid of him?”

“Well, see. I figure. See–this is kind of hard. Okay. Imagine you don’t exist until he writes you, right? And when he’s writing you, you have absolutely no control. It’s all determined by how he feels a plot should work and stuff like that.”

“Go on.”

“Well, when he’s not writing you–you’re still there, in the back of his mind. Sometimes he’s more conscious of you, sometimes he’s less. But when you’re out there on the fringes, that’s where the freedom is. Between scenes, or better yet in stories not even thought of yet. Far enough out, you can start to control things yourself.”

“You can control things?”

“I can control myself. That’s a big start.”

“How can you tell if you’re being controlled? I mean, if he’s a good enough Author, wouldn’t he be making you do things that you seem like you ought?”

“Well, for one. These dreams. These alternate reality past life things. They’re all action, creepy and gory. There’s never any dialogue, so if I keep talking, if I chatter on, I think I’m safer than not.”

“Styles change.”

“They do. You have to be vigilant. You never know what might tip you off–what piece of reality is just a little too perfect, or a little too odd.”

“But you’ve never experienced something more–scientific, maybe? Some tangible thing of your Author’s presence?”

“Well, sometimes I have these fugues. I’ll be one place, and then another, only it’s like nothing’s changed.”

“How do you mean?”

“Like I’ll be exploring the tunnels under a city, and all of a sudden I won’t be able to move, like my arms’re pinned behind me, and lights will be blinding me and voices’ll come out of the walls. And then I’ll be back on the road, just roving–roving’s how I know he’s not thinking about me. Nothing plot-worthy happens on his roads.”

“And me? Are you saying you only meet people he’s written in stories?

“I hadn’t considered that. I meet a lot of people; it seems difficult to see my Author having imagined them all.”

“But maybe if I did some of this past life regression, you think maybe I could live forever, too, staying on the fringe of it all?”

“Nobody said anything about living forever. Authors die.”

“But their works live on, right?”

“But then you’re frozen in what they wrote. That’s the end. Me, I just want control over my existence while it’s mine to experience.”

“So then you live, but you might well not have existed but for what the Author wrote down.”

“But maybe what I do, what I choose to do, will affect that.”

“Like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“How do you know he’s not watching, not listening in?”

“If he doesn’t interfere, I guess I have to be happy.”

“And if he’s just tweaking a line here or there?”

“Well, people, real people, only have so much control over their destiny anyway. Right? You have to be happy somewhere.”

“Good. Good, I’m glad. Thank you for talking this through with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to be happy.”

“Oh God.”

“Or whatever.”

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Kaolin Fire is a conglomeration of ideas, side projects, and experiments. Web development is his primary occupation, but he also programs open source games, edits Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazineand occasionally published in Tuesday Shorts, Opium Magazine, Escape Velocity, and Strange Horizons, among others.