Saturday 6/15/24
We can do this indefinitely--and with the nearest piece to hand--so let's do it again. But first allow me to dedicate this prose off to Jonathan Hutchison. How's that water carrying going now?
I'd do this five more times today if I hadn't used up my allotment of free articles from The Sun. I think you get the two. Which also tells you that these prose offs--this one now, and the one yesterday--feature the first and only two stories I could access at present. There was no search, no "Let's find the bad one." They're all that. Sorry. That's not my fault.
Nor is the crying thing me being mean. It's what I was told by a senior editor at The Sun, as we've covered. I'm not making this up. I was given information, as impossible as it would seem that it could be true unless someone was not in the right way mentally.
This morning I've been working on There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, the volume that begins with "Fitty," which I'll be returning to shortly. The second story is "Dot." That was completed this year, I believe--I'm sure that's documented in this record--and was gone over many times, so I've jumped over that for the time being as I work on making sure there isn't so much as a single word that ought to be different in this book, and am focusing right now on "Dead Thomas," which was offered to Safransky, and also our friend J. Robert Lennon at Epoch, who instead told me to pay him money so that someone there could form reject it.
I feel like that was a bad choice. Have the great story, essentially for free, that the person with the alarmingly, historically expansive publishing track record was good enough to offer you--again, for basically no money and a couple contributor copies, at a journal read by maybe four people outside of this subculture and perhaps fourteen people in it--or try to debase that person because they're so different than you and you think you can get away with it, which it turns out you can't, and then you go up on here, and you never know when the next entry is coming exposing you for the terrible writer you are, and how operate, what you're all about. Like I said, bad choice. It's never going to go away.
"Dead Thomas" is a story narrated by a high school girl about a classmate of hers who is a deda boy. They're in English class one day and he knocks at the door with a note from the principal--or so it seems--and he's a part of the school. For the time being, until he gets to wherever he's going. The narrator has a friend named Rachel, who falls for Thomas, though it's somewhat more complicated than that. We think the story is about Thomas--and it is, sure--and Rachel--and again, yes--but what we end up finding out is that it's most about the narrator, who is named Bonita.
I've said that I can do this with any story in these places. The prose off beat down thing. I don't get to them all, obviously, but any one will do and make for the same result. I'm not leaving aside the good ones.
In that spirit, knowing this morning that I had but the one free article left for now, I picked the latest work of fiction from The Sun, which is in the June issue and which you can read in full. It's called "Charity," by Cybil Smith, and is one her nearly thirty pieces from The Sun over the years.
Want to think about that for a second? Want to think about that in connection with my twenty-five years of offering things to Safransky?
The bigotry is so blatant it's hard to imagine what could be more so. Are we meant to believe that I've never written anything as good as these things we're seeing? We talk about Granta and Motorollah, but "The Donkey at the Gates of Heaven" was kind of The Sun version of that, right? Just so bad that you can't believe that there it is.
If one had a sort of death wish to be exposed as incredibly stupid and fueled by agenda, then they might suggest that I do a certain thing and that thing is not an ideal fit, but we all know that I do everything, every which way, and there's so much of all of those things.
And here, by the way, is the mission statement as such when it comes to fiction with The Sun:
"We're looking for short stories in any genre of fiction that take risks to tell us something true about ourselves."
How willingly, forcefully stupid would I have to be not to know what was happening here? Think of the leaps of illogic I'd have had to perform to try and force myself not to know? Should I have done that? How far could I have gotten with it anyway? So what was I supposed to do? Accept the bigotry? Be a silent victim? Isn't that what a bigot wants from you?
Nor can you be like, "It's just one place," because here, in publishing, it's never one place. It's the way these people are and operate. So one place is practically every other other. If you say it's okay with one of them, you might as well do it with all the rest and then you're just done. These people are the same, by and large. What's happening is the same. Their motivations are the same. You either roll over, give in, and die--which, again, is what they want, so you'd be helping them out that way--or you do something about it.
I feel like this is very basic. We know what's happening. Anyone would. All of the parties involved here do and did, and all of the people who see this record do. I gave it like almost a quarter of a century in this particular case. Would you have? Quarter of a century and this guy never did anything good enough? Really? Not one thing? But we have these other things from these other people. And more than two dozen by one Sybil Smith. I guess this means we're about to see something awesome from her, right?
So let's do this again. Ready? Here we go with an excerpt from Smith's "Charity."
For breakfast Charity gives Stella cornflakes and cuts up an apple from the refrigerator. Stella can’t chew the skin, so she strips the rest away with her few teeth and leaves the skin in a pile. Meanwhile the girl remakes the bed, puts the dirty clothes in the wash, and tidies up.
“Do you have any kids, Stella?”
“No, I never married.”
“Why not?”
“No one asked.”
Stella’s sisters all married, and from what she saw, married life was not always to be envied. She was the eleventh child of fourteen, and not much of anything had trickled down to her, including looks. She’d learned not to harbor dreams.
“Where did you work?” Charity asks.
“In the woolen mills. Till thirty years ago Burlington had mills, you know. And Winooski, too. Anyone could get a job. I worked at Burlington Mill fifty years and never missed a day, except for my mother’s funeral.”
“Did you like it?”
Stella snorts. “Back then we didn’t think about whether or not we liked a job. We just did it. Had to. Folks nowadays think too much about pleasing theirselves.”
“I guess you’re right,” Charity says.
“You bet I am.”
“I like this job.”
“You do?” Stella asks.
“Yeah. I get to meet people like you.”
“That ain’t no thrill.”
“But it is!” the girl exclaims.
“Well, you’re sweet. Don’t ever get old and crabby, like me.”
“You’re not crabby. You just say what you mean.”
“You’re a lucky girl,” Stella tells her. “Never forget it.”
“I do sometimes,” Charity says. “Forget it, I mean.” Charity sits on the bed. Her face has grown flushed.
“You know, sweetie,” Stella says, “I don’t own a thing in the world but this old trailer, and I spend twelve hours a day in that bed and twelve hours a day in this chair. I see an aide in the morning and an aide at night. Otherwise it’s the blasted television. I’m just waiting to die.”
“Really? Is that all you want?”
“I’d like to get it over with,” Stella says. “Meanwhile I just take life as it comes. Always have.”
Charity gathers Stella’s bowl and plate with the apple skins on it and walks into the kitchen. Stella hears her doing dishes. This girl hasn’t turned on the television yet. The aide who talks about God’s work always turns it on first thing and then watches a program as she heaves Stella around like a ham.
Charity comes back sweating a little. “I’m going to take you outside,” she announces.
“My goodness, why would you do that?”
“Cause it’s something new for you.”
“Isn’t it against the rules?”
Charity shrugs. “They didn’t tell me not to.”
She retrieves Stella’s wheelchair from the spare bedroom, puts a pillow in the seat, and lifts her into it. They have a hard time getting through the trailer’s door, but with a few good jerks the girl manages it, and down they go on the handicap ramp the city installed a few years ago. At the bottom Stella gets another big bump, and her head falls back for a moment, causing her to look up.
The sky startles her: a great blue bowl with puffy clouds, like clotted cream. Stella’s chest feels wide open, and the smell of grass pours into her like sweet tea.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh my!”
A slight breeze sweeps the hair on her forehead. She is riveted by the blueness of the sky, the largeness of the world, the summer sounds of a lawn mower, a dog, some birds. She and Charity are quiet for a minute. Stella knows the other aide would say this moment is God’s work, but she does not agree. The girl did it. All by herself.
“Do you like it?” Charity asks.
“Like?” Stella says. “Oh, my Lord, I’d forgot.”
Leaden, lifeless, not earned, not real, dialogue for dialogue's sake, the forced attempt at what inevitably is this artificial voice ("theirselves"--you're not fooling us), just two stick characters reciting stock lines at each other, one of them with a stock--it's symbolic!--name.
Which made Sy Safransky cry.
Again, what can you say? What even needs saying? That's not someone right in the head. And it's someone who, when it came to the person who writes the likes of what we see below, was up to blatant, discriminatory no good.
Ready? Here we go:
During lunch he sat alone at a table with his palms facing the ceiling but like the ceiling wasn’t there and he was making an appeal to someone or something or trying to be beamed up, I honestly didn’t know.
“Should we go over and talk to him?” Rachel asked me, folding and refolding an empty sandwich bag in her hands, making it disappear under a knuckle, then popping up again on top of another, this weave pattern she did as if she practiced at home.
“He seems busy,” I said. “I think he just wants to die. Finish the process.”
“Like you have to complete it?”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t know it worked like that.”
“I don’t think it normally does. Maybe, though? Or just in his case. Rare cases.”
But Rachel wasn’t listening to me and before I could come up with anything else, she had risen and was walking over to the table where Thomas sat by himself. I couldn’t leave her alone with a dead boy, and like I said, I didn’t know how it worked. Maybe at the moment of his ascension, or jetting off, or the precise second of his dissolving, he’d reach for her arm—after all, that seemed the human thing to do when a crisis was visited upon you, and I figured this qualified—and she’d be whisked away with him, take a field trip that way. In her own clothes.
Rachel sat across from him, introduced herself, adding, “This is my friend Bonita,” and Thomas said, “You’re not Spanish” and I answered, “I know, it means beautiful,” leaving out how my dad had given me the name which could make it sound like I was calling myself beautiful, and he didn’t say anything on the subject.
I hoped Rachel wouldn’t be gross or make a dumb joke but if I had to pick one I’d pick the latter so I was a little relieved but still embarrassed when she said, “Why so glum, chum?” to which Thomas answered, “I’m dead, bitch.”
It was an uncomfortable moment. Kids had followed us to the table when we walked over because someone has to go first for others to come along and it’s not like we’d ever experienced a talking dead person before let alone in the school cafeteria and it might never happen again.
Thomas looked as we did—apart from the clothes that were tattered and pebbly as if they’d been discovered in a cave where someone had gone missing—and it wasn’t like you could totally see through him or his guts, but he wavered. I guess you’d put it that way. Shimmered. Like when you’re in the car and the road is flat and the sun all but boils over the landscape in front of you and the asphalt looks like a snake’s back when it has gotten wet by the garden hose as it tried to stay hidden beneath your feet.
We learned that he didn’t have a place he lived outside of school, because why would you when you’re dead? I asked on behalf of everyone what knocked him off—trying to be folksy and casual in how I put it so as not to get Thomas depressed, which is what my mom advised with just about anyone—and he wasn’t positive but thought he’d been working on a car—which impressed all of us—and was under it when someone got nefarious with the jack. He had an alcoholic step mom who wanted to be disencumbered of him he said because she had designs on traveling, and maybe that was it.
You couldn’t help but have a lot of respect for Thomas. Working on cars and traveling through the space-time continuum and being brave and he was a top student. It was as if he somehow shook off his skull having been crushed. You have to admire fortitude. People in town talked about adopting him—there was excited chatter behind the closed doors of the yearbook committee meeting room that he could make a strong run for the title of “boy most likely to succeed”—but he couldn’t leave the school.
“Is the school, like, force field-y?” Rachel asked, and he said, sure, something like that. Suffice it to say he was early to first period every day, but we didn’t think he was a kiss ass.
“I’m going to have his babies,” Rachel declared to me, and I was like, “Don’t you do that, I know you’re trying to be nice and you’re lonely and I want to help you, but don’t lead this boy on, or yourself, because he could be gone any day, he could be gone today.”
We weren’t at school yet, just on the bus, the oldest kids who had to ride it because we weren’t popular enough to have our friends drive us as we were mostly each other’s friend.
“We’re going to fuck,” Rachel continued, unchecked, “Thomas and me,” trying to be shocking, and I said no, that is not happening, but she said he deserved happiness and a life, given all he had been through, even as a parting gesture.
My dad used to say, “Be your brother’s keeper,” and I asked him what if you don’t have a brother, because I didn’t, and he clarified that it was an expression, it meant take care of people. You’d think everyone was a nurse the way my dad spoke, and of course my mom later.
“That’s the point of life,” he’d add, “which you learn as you get older.” Why he said that to me I didn’t know for certain, given that my age ruled out what I could understand on the subject.
“Do you follow me?” he continued, which I knew was him finishing up, and I said sure, because as I was saying, sure works that way, and you like to follow people you love, it doesn’t make you not your own person who can’t abide by your own heart or conscience.
You're lucky I ran out of those free articles, or else I'd just keep rolling with these throughout the weekend. Someone did write me last night to say that they canceled their subscription to The Sun. Hard to justify having one when you see all of this. And all off the bad writing, of course.
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