In Which It Should Be Aggressive And Titillating

Experience the finest moments of our Saturday fiction series at your leisure.

Yom Kippur

by MARK ARTURO

Dear Ms. Armstrong,

Please find the attached manuscript for your consideration. I'm of two minds on the title. The first is that the novel should be called something aggressive and titillating, along the lines of its tensions.

The second is the title should be maudlin and ceremonial, so as not to imply too plainly what comes ahead.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this matter.

David Larkin

Dear Mr. Larkin,

Thank you for sending along your novel "Loose Change." Norton has purchased an option to publish the work under that title. Congratulations are in order. You should receive the relevant documents by postal mail shortly, and a check for the advance we discussed.

We did feel that "Death Cum" was a provocative and possibly interesting title, but our editor at Norton preferred the other, and ultimately I saw no reason not to accommodate her wishes.

There is one change to the text the publisher requested. They asked that the phrase "demon pussy" on page 27 be changed to "demon vagina." (There's a cross promotional opportunity with Urban Outfitters.)

Warm regards and pleased to be working with you,

Ellen Armstrong

Dear Ms. Armstrong,

I have yet to receive the check you mentioned. Sometimes it's difficult to get mail here. The postman is extremely envious. You won't be surprised to learn he also fancies himself a writer. Two days ago he hit my car with the bumper on his truck. I think I may be afraid of him.

Great news about "Loose Change." I have sent my latest work, "The Fasting of the Jews" via UPS. I'm eager to receive your notes and thoughts about it.

Next time you're in Seattle I look forward to meeting you in person.

David Larkin

Dear Mr. Larkin,

We received your manuscript "The Fasting of the Jews." Norton is thrilled by how prolific you are. The editor I am in contact with there wants to release three novels by you in the next financial year. Is this feasible?

Our only concern is about the title for this sequel (?). There are no Jews and no fasting in the novel. Pls explain? Norton has pushed for "Looser Change."

UPS is fine, but be aware that sometimes they deliver their mail to the USPS under their Innovations banner. It might be returned to you via your jealous mailman. Ha!

So pleased to be working with you.

Ellen Armstrong

Dear Ms. Armstrong,

Please let this be your notice that the title "Looser Change" is not acceptable to me.

"The Fasting of the Jews" was not called such lightly. I am planning a proper sequel to "Loose Change" (credit goes to you for the original's success), which is to be titled "Godfather Clause." It is in part a reimagining of the making of The Godfather if Al Pacino were a woman... the other part is a murder mystery.

I continue to worry about my postal worker. I drove to his house (he lives only a few blocks away), and he has several plants in his garden from which toxins could easily be derived.

David Larkin

Dear Mr. Larkin,

We completely understand your preference about the title of "The Fasting of the Jews." We're prepared to go with it, but after the novel is translated for Arab countries, we'll be titling the release there "Windows 8 for Dummies." The international market can be difficult to understand.

I was incredibly thrilled to receive "Godfather Clause." It is your best work yet.

I'll be in Seattle a week from Thursday. Hoping to say hi and drop off the contracts for "Godfather Clause."

Ellen Armstrong

Dear Ms. Armstrong,

I regret I was unable to enjoy the pleasure of your company during your trip to Seattle. I am currently confined to my small (but pleasant) house. My mailman waits outside, either in my lawn or the street it faces. Yesterday I believed I saw him leave, but today when I opened the front door I could hear him in the back. I closed and locked it, and shook for hours afterwards. You cannot even imagine the damage to my new BMW.

He leaves endive, charchavinah and other bitter herbs at the end of my driveway. It may be better not to meet, at least at my home.

Hopefully you can FedEx the documents so that we can be assured they will not fall in his hands. I look forward to speaking with you when this is all over.

David Larkin

Dear Mr. Larkin,

When I left the restaurant in the hotel, I found I was angry, which doesn't happen very often, I can assure you. You're a valued client. I don't want to trade on your good nature, and I'm sure you would not want to trade on mine.

I placed the documents in your mailbox myself. Again, I offer my congratulations on your third published work in the past nine months.

Ellen Armstrong

Dear Ms. Armstrong,

I am the real David Larkin, the true author of "Loose Change." Whatever arrangements you seem to have made with my mailman after he wrote you under my name are unfortunate. Identify theft is a serious crime. But on to new business.

I have completed a followup to "Loose Change" which I have titled "Authorial Intent." Would you consider shopping the ms around to publishers?

I have decided to go by the pen name Mark Arturo.

You know in your heart who this is.

Mark Arturo is a writer living in Seattle.

In Which We Relax At Home For The Evening

by Liu Chenyang

Chimney

by DARLA ROSENSTEIN

One bone of contention was the fireplace. Mark worried she would light a log and walk away. A spark could catch on the fabric. This was all that came to mind when he thought of it.

He wrote in his journal, "The lark is many featured bird. Caring for it presents a number of difficulties," and laughed like a maniac.

+

She found his laugh grating, distasteful, somewhat hysterical in its intonation. When he emitted it, she curled her fingers in on themselves, into tight fists, as if physically straining to contain her complaint.

You just can’t tell someone they have a terrible laugh.

+

While he was waiting for her to come from work, a Jehovah's Witness came to the door. He was aggressive, impolite at first, feeling undone.

Then he softened and invited the woman in. He gave her a glass of water. She asked, "How do you decide how high to make your ceilings?"

"We're just renting," he said. The woman nodded, sitting on the edge on the bench on his front porch and made as if to go.

"Wait," he said, "do you have a flyer or something?"

+

On the second floor of the public library, it was possible to exchange your library card for a key to a small, soundproof room.

This seemed to her an imperfect system, because a library card wasn’t like a credit card: what was its worth in relation to that of a key to a private room, why would you not just forfeit the library card and keep the key?

“Is Room 24 available?” she asked the library page. He said that it was.

She took the key to what she now thought of as her room.

+

He could not contain his irritation. He had expected her early, and she could not even be bothered to be on time. A delivery man unloaded a large package meant for another house.

Her voicemail was unhelpful, and he considered the message he left tame by his standards. In the car he felt more secure, so he turned it on and drove to an ice cream stand that featured live cows as an attraction. A homeless man wore a t-shirt that said, "Samsung Galaxy note." He gave the guy his sunglasses and finished his sherbet in the car.

+

There was a chair in the library room but she sat on the carpeted floor, back propped against the door. There was graffiti on the wall, pairs of initials connected by plus signs or ampersands, enclosed in misshapen hearts. Someone had written, "Everything is beautiful and nothing hurt," in capital letters near the floorboards, a teenager, she thought.

She removed her phone from her pocket. There was a new message and a new-old message, that is, a message she had avoided listening to for several days now.

The soundproofed white walls pressed in around her; she pressed play. "Hey," it said. "The Japanese restaurant I told you about, the new one, I looked it up, it's on Washington. There's a soft opening this week. But I can't go." There was a pause and then he started to speak faster, the way he did after two or three drinks, like there were words he couldn't get out fast enough and needed the aid of his limbs, head bobbing, hands moving through the air. "I can't go this week and I can't go next week. But you should take Mark.”

+

Before bed he continued his discourse on the lark. He sketched the lark high on some parapet, observing all below his wings, but scratched it out when he decided the bird's expression appeared too cockeyed.

In the new version, which he would compose the following morning, the bird had seen something in the sky above him, and was very near to cowering.

When she came in, long after he had gone to sleep, he did not wake. She climbed in bed for a minute, moving as little as possible so she might not  disturb his slumber. He woke and opened his mouth to speak, but she was no longer beside him.

+

For a minute, she wondered where to go. The library was closed. She tucked her hands in her pockets and walked south, towards Washington. The lights were out everywhere except the second-story of the building that housed the newspaper. On the ground floor was the Japanese restaurant. The neon sign on the door advertising KIRIN illuminated chairs upturned over tables inside.

She sat down on a bench across the street and took out her phone. There was an old message and an old-old message, that is, a message she had listened to many times already, so many times she did not need to press play to hear its words distinctly.

Instead, she played the other one, the plain-old message. 

"It's me," he said, as he always said, even though she had pointed out to him that his name showed up on her caller ID, that this introduction was unnecessary and a waste of her time. "I wanted to know when you were planning on coming home because, I was thinking..." There was a pause. "Goddamnit." Another pause, while she heard him swallow. "I just was thinking we should go out to dinner."

Darla Rosenstein is a writer living in Houston.

"Distance" - Why? (mp3)

"Waterlines" - Why? (mp3)

The new album from Why? is entitled Mumps, etc. and it will be released on October 8th.

In Which He Felt The Need To Defend Himself

You can find the archive of our Saturday fiction series here.

by Gideon Rubin

Nine and Zooey

by ALEX CARNEVALE

He said, "It connects thematically with the transient nature of things, and the permanent nature of institutions." He always preferred to start a sentence with a vowel. His tears, extended over time, were icicles, but just now they were anguished droplets, patterning the piece of paper.

It was awkward to see him crying in the middle of class, but after a moment, the rest of the group relaxed. A woman named Virginia pointed at the sky. A girl named Jamie reapplied lipstick. He said, "If you establish something, then remove it, you haven't taken it away completely. The absence remains."

He let that sink in, sipped his coffee, accidentally slurped it. He wondered if that undermined his point, but dismissed this insecurity. The only emotion that was worth analyzing was the last, since it contained all others.

Jamie picked up the papers in front of her and shuffled them as if that might rearrange the words into something different. She said, "I don't care for the narrator. He's simply not likeable. If I met him, these are the very last things I would want to know."

Tony nodded, brushing back his long hair. They waited for him to speak but he never did.

Ariana said, "Just because you don't like one facet of a person, doesn't mean you dislike him entirely."

He felt the need to defend himself, but could not imagine how. Instead he told the truth. "It's just a representation of me. You're saying you don't like me."

Virginia said, "Nine times out of ten, I would agree with you. But I just can't sympathize with a smoker. He's giving himself lung cancer after all, and on some level I feel he deserves it."

Ariana said, "If you receive something you ask for, it's a gift, not a disease."

by Gideon Rubin

Jamie said, "Cancer treatment can be very expensive. But I don't feel that kind of pain here. Perhaps he could ask someone for money. It's easy to sympathize with an individual who desperately requires what we all need to survive."

Tony said, "I was watching the Yankee game last night. A ball was hit into the crowd. A woman caught it, and gave it to a child. The boy shook his head and placed it back into her hands."

Miguel said, "I found the part about the nuclear reactor distracting."

He directed the conversation to the ending. Ariana said, "You should never end something with a gesture. I read that somewhere, but I knew it was true even before I read it."

Virginia said, "What is the religion of the protagonist?" He answered that he did not know. "I do sketches in longhand for all my characters," she explained to the group. "I need to know everything about them, so if another character asks them a question, I'll have the answer."

Tony said, "I like to find out things about my creations that I didn't know."

He said, "How could you discover a new fact about a figment that is entirely of your own imagining?"

They took a break. Even though he felt bad about it, he smoked a cigarette. Orion's belt shone like an indecent flag.

Virginia said, "Now that you have some time to think about it, what's his religion?"

Ariana said, "When you cried, I did feel for you. Perhaps your character could cry as well."

An older woman who normally did not talk during the class, and who he knew was named Yvonne, touched his hand. He started from it, surprised. She said, "Have you ever read anything by Knut Hamsun?"

Later, Ariana said, "Have you ever read anything by Howard Norman?" She knocked on wood.

Tony said, "Ethan Coen wrote some inconsistent short stories. Your work reminds me of that."

Virginia said, mere minutes after his hand had been so suddenly impacted, "You'd really like Rabbit at Rest. It is my favorite of those novels."

Their instructor was in her late fifties, her long blonde hair adorned with barrettes of the exact same color. Her golden retriever always sat next to her; the dog was named after one of the characters on Babylon 5. At the end of each class, she made her pronouncement on the story up for discussion. Often it contained some repudiation of his classmates, occasionally she confirmed one or more of their views. At first he thought she touched her chin absentmindedly during these lectures, but the more he saw of the behavior, the more convinced he became she was self-conscious about her neck.

At the bar afterwards, Ariana said, "I'm completely frightened by what she will say to me. You're so lucky."

Virginia gave him a cocktail and pressed an index finger to her temple. When he thanked her she nodded and said, "You know how sheets list their thread count on the package? Everything should do that." She headed right for the bathroom after that.

Ariana said, "Your eyelashes are so long. Have you ever read Mavis Gallant?" When he stared at a row of vodka bottles, they shined in his eyes like spanish dubloons. He had never seen such gold.

In class, Tony had said, "I don't personally find it believable when after I'm done reading something, no one has eaten or slept."

He had responded, "So you're saying every work of fiction has to contain eating or sleeping?"

Tony had answered, "There's a difference between hinting at an event occurring, and actually depicting it."

His instructor had said, her left hand stroking her chin, her right hand petting her dog, "Confusing a tiny part of the thing with the whole is a mistake reminiscent of a poor semiotician. We control each and every part of our lives; no one else shares this burden. Tony."

"Yes," Tony said, and looked at him.

Slowly, as if she were surveying a canvas wider than it was high, his instructor directed her attention to the same place, addressing him thoughtfully. "When you meet someone new, do you tell them everything about yourself?" He shook his head. "And why not?"

"Because I don't know everything." The females laughed, the men just shook their heads.

by Gideon Rubin

The instructor said, "If you met someone, and you wanted her to know you completely, and you wanted to know her completely... What would be the best way of telling her this?" No one answered. "That's right. There is no good way."

Jamie said, "A hurricane approaches from the southeast. All bow."

Tony said, "When I read the word 'speckled', I feel bile rising in my throat."

Ariana said, much later, "When you come it's like you're apologizing. But I like that."

Virginia said, "What does this have to do with what we've read?" His instructor levelled her gaze like a clothesline.

"Maybe you'd rather get to know her more slowly. That way you could adjust yourself to her, and she might do the same. But at the end of it, you would find the identical result, unless you willfully held something back. Actually doing that is harder than it is for me to say it. You want something of her, and to get it, you have to lie. That's what this art is, and nothing else."

He said, "I have never been a very good liar."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here.

"Alone's Just Fine" - Holly McNarland (mp3)

"You'll Forget About Me" - Holly McNarland (mp3)

by Gideon Rubin