Literary Fiction

I string words together in long, layered necklaces, plucking deep, dimensional baubles shimmering with spangled sheens like ephemeral and buttress, rolling them around in between my fingers, appreciating their shapes and textures, building sentences and stories around sequences of words that buzz with possibility.

Don’t force it, Glen cautions. Keep it simple.

I hold up my spooling lengths of fragile thin simile and onomatopoeia, sagging in the middle from the weight of their own clunky construction, admire them in the light, considering the particular qualities of each. Backspace, backspace. Delicate, abundant, trifle. Things like that.

It feels kind of…tryhard. Glen says. Pretentious.

It’s literary, I spit back, and wonder why I let him try my jewels on in the first place

You gotta stop making people work so hard to understand what the fuck you’re saying.

You underestimate people, Glen, I return. Not everyone is as simple as you.

But he’s in my head already. The words shrink back from my fingertips, poised but impotent above the keys, conga lines of pretty syllables in jewel tones retreating to the peripheries of my brain. 

Glen glides around the table, smirks at the blinking cursor. Simple isn’t always bad. Things could be simple. He taps the keys a few times. ghfx. I flick his taunting fingers away. Backspace, backspace.

Now he turns his attentions from the laptop to me, trails his calloused fingertips up the nape of my neck, buries them in the base of my ponytail, prodding and kneading at my scalp.

Although, he starts, a wicked smile spreading across his lips, I kind of like how complicated you are.

The key is to choose each singular kernel of the sentence carefully, each word half a step above the obvious choice; elevated half an octave so the words set themselves to singing. Flit not flutter. Grubby not filthy. 

As in: Get your grubby hands off of me, Glen.

He smells like weed. He’s got great bushy sideburns that remind me of a Civil War general, and the whispery fingers of his last meal cling to the coarse hairs that curl down over his upper lip. His clothes are rumpled, jeans patched, wool socks paired with athletic slides. There is no chance anyone in this WeWork suspects that he is a New York Times bestselling author, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a former West Virginia poet laureate. 

I dunno, I think this sentence could use another fragment tacked on to the end, don’t you? His words are so sodden with sarcasm I wish he would just drown in them already.

The fuck is this going? He asks, and for a single tremulous moment I am worried he is not talking about the story. 

The problem with your stuff, he plunges ahead, is that you’re more worried about the words than the story. We’re 20,000 words in and I have no idea what it’s even about.

I can’t tell him that I don’t know either, that the words tumble out already paired one to another, a phrase with a certain melodic quality, a sentence that makes me feel things, and that even though it doesn’t make sense, I shoehorn it in because the words are the sinews, the gooey innards and straining tendons animating the dancing monkey, and the circus takes shape around it. The circus, itself, is immaterial. It’s the words, the primordial ooze, the guts that spill out when I am sliced open. I’m following the thread until I grasp hold of something that glimmers.

Why are you even here? I hiss. You’re not helping.

I’m telling you it sucks, he proffers. That is helping. Do better.

I don’t say that I think his work sucks. That his last piece was derivative, could’ve been crafted by anyone with a thesaurus, that alternating between “Jack said” and “said Jack” was not art. Apples to oranges, I chide myself. If he hates it, I must be moving in the right direction.

Glen is ticking off his issues with my story on his fingers. It’s boring, it drags, it’s all just pretty words and longwinded ways of explaining things we already have words for. I don’t want five lines comparing rage to an overripe orange. Just say you’re enraged!

I’m enraged, I say, not looking up from the screen. And I am.

His hand slides to the small of my back. He’s smirking again. My stomach roils. But this is where the magic is, what I’ve been waiting for. As dread leavens my insides, ever fibrous tissue of my being marinating in disgust, the story coalesces. Glen, that perfect monster, that idol I worshipped from afar, is the most loathsome, enraging cockroach I’ve ever known. But isn’t that the way it goes? Never meet your heroes. Not all that glitters is gold and all that. Glen does inspire my best work. Just not in the way I’d imagined he would.

I think the protagonist is actually the villain, I say slowly.

Glen raises his gaze from my ass and his eyes meet mine. Well, that’s something. There’s a begrudging sort of wonder in his voice, an I wish I’d thought of that.

Like a faucet slowly thawing, the words drip, crystallizing into shiny baubles. My greedy fingers gather them up, pecking each one out onto the page, stringing them pearl by precious pearl.

You know, he pops a mint into his mouth, when we first started this whole arrangement I kinda expected…he rubs the back of his head. I just didn’t think the whole thing would be so…serious. 

My fingers are flying across the keyboard.

I guess I just thought…maybe you reached out because you thought we might vibe? Or something? But it kinda seems like..you just like, hate-fuck me? But on paper?

There’s something plaintive in his voice. 

But..we don’t even have the same style, you know? I feel like you’re over here just stringing together all these words in weird new ways and hoping they come out meaning something. Like even if the story sucks, at least it’s pretty? 

I pause and look at Glen, his frustration coloring his cheeks with russet splotches. For the first time, I feel like he actually understands me.

Which is fucking dumb, he adds, and shakes his head, then saunters off.

I string words together in long, layered necklaces, semiprecious stones, handpicked from bins brimming with things like burgeoning and craven and fecund, and, coils of jeweled turns of phrase and gauzy metaphor wrapped round my knuckles like a ligature, I hope Glen chokes to death on them.