Sunday 3/2/25
Portions of three letters, the first two from Wednesday, the third from today.
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"One of them I wrote yesterday, worked on it more today, and no better work of political fiction has been composed. Timeless. It will blow your mind. It's called 'Comes a Day, Comes a Man.'
"...Saturday I worked on 'Five Blocks,' Sunday I worked on 'Hero of Mine,' Monday I worked on 'Finder of Views,' and then yesterday I wrote this new one in full and have been working on it for much of the morning..."
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"Regarding this story, 'Comes a Day, Comes a Man': I've been upset about it all day because not only is it a masterpiece, it's a story the world needs right now and there's nothing I can do with it when everyone should be seeing this. And that eats me up. This story is special."
***
So much work on this story, brother. Every day, at all hours of the day--hours and hours and hours.
Having written down the percentage of his brain that he’d be able to give up and still know his name and what rain was, the man slid the piece of paper across the table between himself and the tyrant.
“No,” the tyrant said, pushing the paper back without looking at it. “It’s not enough.”
The tyrant made as if to clap—but stopped short of submitting to the task of actually bringing his hands together—and the man was ushered from the room by underlings and detained within another space until he could figure out something suitable.
Whenever he had an idea, he rang a bell, effectively summoning himself.
Time and again he was brought in front of the tyrant to make an offer that was rejected before being returned to where they kept him.
He brainstormed. He got creative. He offered his heart (symbolically), his dreams (actually), his hopes (desperately).
But the tyrant wouldn’t budge.
Then came a day when the man was placed upon the carpet in front of the tyrant despite not having rung the bell, because there honestly wasn’t a single thing he could think of anymore.
His final effort had concerned a silver filling in a tooth at the back of his mouth. He’d offered it in part as a joke of madness and defiance resulting from his ordeal and some kind of commentary on what it had done to him, but also as if this were all a riddle that might be solved with a drop of precious metal from the very recess where his voice originated.
But the filling didn’t double as a solution, and once more the tyrant—who at least paused, as if he might say something else, before laughing—concluded, “It’s not enough.”
And now there he was, despite laying off the bell.
“I can’t think of anything new,” the man told the tyrant, his words darkened by the knowledge that they won’t really be heard. “I have suggested all.”
“Not all,” the tyrant corrected. “There’s more. There is always more.”
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