Wallstrait

I'D HATE FOR THIS to get out, but I fear my writing is devouring me. Once upon a time, I made a name for myself in the world of short stories. I worked without limits in those days, writing everything from cultured to kitschy. If I needed five thousand words to tell a story, I was done at five thousand words. Or I could go three thousand, or seven, or ten, whatever it took. The freedom invigorated me, but eventually I needed more of a challenge. So I experimented, becoming an easy mark for any new literary vogue.

 

Short-shorts they called them. Tell a complete story, with rich characters and a layered plot, in fewer than two thousand words. Although my first attempts were disastrous, it seemed like harmless fun. I treated this writing like a race to the finish line, the clock always running, hurry, hurry. I cut corners with the plot, relied on clichés. The prose grew choppy and sparse. A jumbled mess. The challenge was finding ways to make these messes full and complete without raising the word count.

 

The process felt healthy because it forced me to examine every word, every choice. As my stories continued to shrink, they got better, and I challenged myself with each new piece. Fifteen hundred words, max. Then a thousand. Once I got the knack, short-short anthologies traded on my reputation as a short story writer because I, Jack McPherson, had become one of them.

 

The stories poured out, so when the trend turned to flash fiction – word counts in the hundreds instead of the thousands – I jumped in. Publishing a story at five hundred words was a breakthrough for me. I jonesed on the rush of extreme fiction, all the time yearning for less. The challenge consumed me, like when I’m at a slot machine in Vegas telling myself I’ll play just ten more minutes, until next thing I know the sun is coming up.

 

Winning the One Hundred Word contest sponsored by the Boise Arts Council made me a madman. What started as a novelty became an addiction, to make each story shorter than the one before. I’m not talking fifty-eight words of babbling incoherency, designed for nothing more than to get the word count down. I’m not talking poetry. It had to be a whole story. Conflict. Crisis. Resolution. Three-dimensional characters and writing that resonated.

 

As if that wasn’t challenging enough, I had to do this while my agent hassled me to go back to my old ways. “Why don’t you write real stories anymore?” he’d ask. “You’re good at it, you know.”

 

“Real” stories, he called them. He just didn’t get it.

 

—

 

There’s something about Fifth Avenue that feels like the center of the universe, so I didn’t mind my agent, Ed Tavish, calling me in to chat. “Jack,” he said, “we need to talk about this latest piece.”

 

He had been grumbling about not knowing how to sell whatever it was I was writing, but he had my best interest at heart, so I tried to work with him, convince him that at forty-four years old, I felt like an artist for the first time in my life. But I also had to hold my ground.

 

“I don’t care what that reviewer thought,” I said, “my cowboy smoked Newports.”

 

“That’s not the piece I meant.”

 

“Oh,” I said, taking a seat at his desk. “You mean my ‘ultimate short story?’”

 

“You wrote twenty-one words.”

 

“Yeah, but that includes the title. The story itself is only fifteen.”

 

Ed turned to his computer screen and read out loud. “‘Why I Feel Like a Boarder,’ by Jack McPherson: ‘She’s not pushy or greedy or vulgar. Obstinate, maybe. I live with an obstinate woman.’”  He smirked. “What do I do with this?”

 

“Nothing. I’d like you to spike it.”

 

“Just chuck it?”

 

“Yeah. I was naive when I wrote that. I already have a better one, a shorter one. Just eight words.”

 

“You wrote an eight-word story?”

 

“I call it ‘Retina Burn.’ I memorized the whole thing if you’d like to hear.”

 

He smiled and nodded. “By all means.”

 

I had to sell it, so I gave one of my best dramatic readings, slow and with passion. “Retina Burn: I choose the sun over their anguished faces.”

 

“The retina – it blinds you if you stare at the sun. Is that it?” Ed asked.

 

“People make choices.”

 

“So your protagonist chooses to go blind instead of facing his loved ones. That’s rather trite, don’t you think? A little overly clever?”

 

“It’s all there. Drama. Emotion. Powerful stuff that lingers. But this is only the start. I have a vision for the shortest stories ever written. One word each.”

 

“You’re gimmicking, Jack. Half the students that flush through an MFA program have tried something like that. Why so desperate? Just get back to writing.”

 

I shifted to the edge of my chair. I get edgy discussing work. “I’m envisioning a collection, a serious collection. Say, ten linked stories.”

 

“Of one word each? I can’t sell a ten-word book, Jack.”

 

“It’s a lot more than ten words, Ed. Give me some credit. The table of contents alone would be twice that.”

 

Ed smirked again and nodded. I knew I had him. I worked with Ed Tavish for twelve years, and that smirk he gives is as good as it gets. I’d hate for this to get out, but when I’m a little blue, I’ll go to one of those Internet booksellers and type in my name. Four collections of short stories pop up. All still in print, one a New York Times bestseller. Looking at a page all about me; that’s as instant as gratification gets. The only thing better is Ed’s smirk.

 

“The first few stories would be longer,” I said. “Like the eight-word gem I gave you.”

 

“The ‘Retina’ epic.”

 

“Exactly. Maybe I follow up with a couple three-word stories. Those are the key. They set the context for the rest of the collection. It’s all about context.”

 

“And you can establish context in three words?”

 

“The second story carries context from the first. I could come in and set your desk on fire.”

 

Ed’s eyes widened for the briefest moment. “I beg your pardon?”

 

I reassured him with a flip of my hand. “I’m giving you a for-instance. Let’s say a guy comes in and burns down your desk.”

 

“‘A-guy-comes-in-and-burns-down-your-desk. Nine words.”

 

“But with context, I can tell the story in one word. The readers know from the last story you were arguing. There’s the conflict. They know the other guy has matches. There’s the crisis. So I write, ‘Whoosh!’ One word, and the desk is up in flames. Resolution.”

 

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that almost makes sense. In a warped sort of way.”

 

“Next story. One word: ‘Handcuffs.’ A story about an arsonist who sets a desk on fire. He gets nabbed by the authorities, who haul him away to the hoosegow. Plenty of implied drama.”

 

“Make it a verb. ‘Handcuffed.’ Puts more action into the piece.”

 

“Brilliant. So you’re with me?”

 

“I wouldn’t want you to presume that, but I see your point. I’m worried about you, though.”

 

“You’re a good man.”

 

“So are you, Jack. But you still worry me.”

 

Ed offered to buy me lunch, but I had to get home to write something that would show him was okay. I fretted over the way Ed fretted over me, as if I didn’t have enough to worry about. I decided to give him something new that would help him relax, a meaty story with thousands of words.

 

I stopped for Chinese takeout on the way home but I didn’t touch the food. I had to get to writing. But what? The court paperwork sitting on my desk gave me my answer. I’d hate for this to get out, but I spent a night in jail last month over a stupid traffic ticket. I’ll call the piece fiction so no one will suspect it actually happened.

 

I sat at my keyboard, cleared the screen and wrote “Green Means Go” at the top of the page. The particulars poured out. Page after page detailing my arrest. Secondary plots emerged. I was onto something sure to please Ed Tavish. But a glance out the window halted my writing.

 

When I had arrived home at high noon, the sun was directly overhead, exactly where it belonged in the sky. A little after two o’clock, I noticed the sun appeared to be moving toward the east instead of the west. I shook it off as an illusion caused by the stress of writing, but by three o’clock, there was no denying it. I craned my neck up to the window of my sixth-floor apartment. The sun definitely hung in the east.

 

Weird, I thought, but the confessional was pouring out and I didn’t want to stop. By four o’clock, I had the entire story sketched out. It would be twenty pages, easy. At least six thousand words. Something Ed could bite into. I checked the sun again and it was now well into the morning sky. I thought it must be me. I had become disoriented, or maybe my watch was running fast. In actuality, it must be late morning, and the sun dangled where it belonged.

 

Looking at my computer screen, however, I saw a full day’s work, more than eight pages already of “Green Means Go.” My Chinese food still sat on the kitchen table, the bags soggy and rank. The sun continued drifting the wrong way, nearly to the eastern horizon. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I called 9-1-1.

 

“You must be getting a lot of calls,” I said.

 

“About what, sir?”

 

“The sun.”

 

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

 

“The sun . . . going the wrong way.”

 

“Sir? Are you all right?”

 

—

 

This wasn’t the time to worry about the sun because I needed to write two versions of this new story. The original, the gluttonous feast of prose and subplots, would be something Ed could devour. Then I’d finish the real one, the short one, the one that would keep me lean and sane.

 

I printed out all I had written and began reading. By the second paragraph, I reflexively reached for my pen and started trimming. I went after the adverbs first, followed by prepositional phrases. Just punching it up, I told myself. Basic copy editing. But I couldn’t stop. Before long, I was deleting whole paragraphs. Then entire pages. My confessional was down to seven sentences, yet still it felt too long:

 

Green Means Go

 

“But the light was green,” I told the cop as he approached my window.

 

He didn’t deny it, but still he wrote the ticket. “You didn’t wait for

 

oncoming traffic to clear the intersection before proceeding,” he said.

 

“But the light was green!”

 

Okay, so I shouldn’t have added, “you fucking idiot!” And I certainly                                  shouldn’t have opened the door and lunged at the cop, especially while still                           wearing my seat belt. But still, I have to be the only driver in America arrested for                running a green light.

 

There was nothing balanced about this diet. More like bread and water. With the last of the evening light fading, I considered calling Ed to see what he made of the wayward sun. But what if I imagined the whole thing? The six o’clock news made no mention of an unexplained phenomenon, no signs of the apocalypse. Nothing on the Internet, either. So I immersed myself and worked into the night on the two versions, making one as long as I could, the other as short as possible. I wrote all night, writing and purging, writing and purging. Then I printed the two versions and ripped them both to shreds because the only thing that mattered by then was seeing which way the sun would rise in an hour.

 

No surprises there. The sun came up in the east like always, and the morning progressed as normal as any other. But by two in the afternoon, it started happening again. By four o’clock, the sun was well on its way toward the eastern horizon, toward the tall buildings I’ve been dreaming about of late.

 

Dreaming about of late.

 

I’ve been dreaming about rooftops, of peering over the edge once I hiked to the top of majestic buildings, to examine all that was wasted below me because from above, it’s all so irrelevant. What’s worse, I found myself not just dreaming of rooftops, but pulled physically toward them. And atop them.

 

I started with my building. Soon, I was taking the elevator to the top floor of any public building and climbing the stairwell to the roof. I’d go up to investigate the sun, to figure out its tricks. But the sun would see me and start behaving. It wouldn’t change directions when I paid attention.

 

Those weren’t wasted trips to the rooftops. I found the girdered heavens to be great places for philosophizing. In one of my pensive meanderings, I decided what I truly needed was a way to edit my life the way I edited my stories. To erase the clutter, to reshape the disjointed relationships, to clarify the cloudy misunderstandings, to get to the heart of what mattered. But here’s what scared me. If I found a way to wipe out all the wasted time in my past, my “meaningless adverbs of life,” would I get a chance to put that time to better use? Or would I lose that time? Because if that was the case, it would be better to waste time than to simply not have it. Which seemed rather absurd.

 

Then I wondered, could I edit the future as well? Let’s say I took all those wasted years I edited from the past, then erased all the time I would surely waste in the future – the pointless detours, the bombast, the redundancies I could never seem to do away with. Would I shorten my entire life span to less than the years I’ve already lived? To the point where I’d vanish? Could I edit myself out of existence?

 

I’m drifting in thought about editing my life when I realize I actually am on a rooftop somewhere in the city leaning at the railing. I’m standing there, not really moving, but it feels like I’m swaying in the wind. My eyes zoom in at the ground, how many stories below? The street is familiar with so many, many cars, but the view is different. I decide it’s not my street so for a moment I am disoriented. Then I realize: Fifth Avenue.

 

The wind is strong and I get that queasy roller coaster feeling where my stomach jumps into my throat and my knees turn rubbery. My feet are firmly on the steel floor yet I get a dizzying sensation of helplessness, of falling – which sends a wave of woozy panic rushing through me. I reach back and grab the railing, secure, when a voice in the wind calls my name. Jack, I hear in the wind. Jack. Perhaps that’s why I’m not entirely surprised to feel Ed Tavish’s hand on my shoulder.

 

“What are you doing up here?” I ask. He looks startled, pale. I figure I do too. I notice I’m holding my traffic ticket and I don’t know why. “Have you ever gotten a ticket for running a green light?” I ask. Ed drapes an arm around my waist and I’m thinking, what a terrific friend he is. “I’m glad you’re here,” I say as he leads me toward the stairwell. “There have been some strange things going on lately that I wanted to ask you about.”

 

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Tom McEachin earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MA in English from Texas A&M International University. His fiction has appeared in South Dakota Review, Limestone, The Dos Passos Review, The Madison Review, El Portal, and Flash Fiction Magazine. He also published the sports biography Hot Rod Hundley: You Gotta Love It, Baby, which the Los Angeles Times called, “a very funny and sometimes illuminating journey through the NBA.”