Breathe, honor is on the return

I wanted to come here while Joseph Biden is still preparing his victory speech and say that we made it, folks. We got through four years with a child as the perceived leader of the free world. Soon we'll have an adult in the highest office again. Just think of the progress we can now be confident will come. Progress in human rights, progress in bringing honor back to the United States again, progress in repairing our global relationships. Progress in ways we've not seen in the last long and disgusting 48 barren months. Breathe, everybody. Breathe.

TEXTBOOK

by SHELDON LEE COMPTON

Science class. Patricia pays attention. Pays attention like she’s got credit cards full of it. All the plastic attention they can handle.

The rest of the class pays attention to Patricia, the tight t-shirt even more tight over her melon belly. Chatter over her shoulder, food chain chatter at the front of the room where Mrs. Evans explains and explains. Chatter in Patricia’s head so that she can almost hear her thoughts in her throat, real words vibrating downward.

She raises her hand and Mrs. Evans calls on her without looking away from the caged boa propped on the edge of her desk.

“Can a baby inside of you hear what you’re thinking?”

Mrs. Evans says nothing and does not call down the kids laughing at the back of the room. Instead, she takes a white mouse from a box the class prepared the day before. Tiffany stabbed holes in the sides and top so the mice could live long enough to die.

Patricia raises her hand again but Mrs. Evans and the rest of the class watch the mouse and the snake. She writes another note in the margins of her textbook instead and resharpens her pencil.

In the textbook are pictures. Anatomy. The insides of men. Of women. The insides of her. She draws ash-light lines, curling around the skinless woman’s legs, wrapping them until they meet at the exposed stomach and then slickly enter her.

Blunt, Patricia sharpens.

Now the lead, knife-slender, continues its cut through the small and large intestine. Patricia works the pencil down to a nub again, circling a dark mass in the stomach. She hardly hears Mrs. Evans calling her name.

“Patricia. Am I boring you?” Mrs. Evans says. She is fumbling the chalk through spider web fingers, picking at it with her long, red nails.

“No, Mrs. Evans.”

The whispers. Patricia always has somebody to do. She’s never bored. Not Patricia. The giggles.

Patricia writes the names of three boys beside the skinless woman when there’s a snapfast thud from the boa’s cage. The mouse is a cotton ball in the unhinged mouth, a bloodied clump of twitch and panic.

Again, Patricia raises her hand. This time Mrs. Evans waves to the door, agitated, already sure a bathroom request is coming.

Patricia edges sideways out of her desk, closes her eyes and moves in a wobble across the classroom. She does not need the bathroom, only the silence. She rubs her stomach with snowflake fingertips and leans against the wall. When a student bangs open a locker just out of site she turns back to the door.

Walking into the classroom is crawling across broken glass, a gallows walk, the laughter a noose with teeth. Her textbook is in the floor, opened to her page. In red ink are the names of eight more boys scrawled beside the three she wrote. The circled mass in the stomach is now covered over in red. There is an X over each of the lidless eyes.

The crack of the book closing is the thud of a rattled cage and she thinks to herself, hopes it can hear her. That she can hear her. That he can hear her. 

(Originally published in Necessary Fiction).

10:49 a.m.

It's back to work on The Orchard Is Full of Sound today. Two days off has made me more hesitant than anything else, really. I thought it might give me a chance to reboot and start fresh with new ideas and some kind of steam for pushing through to getting at least the reworked sections placed and building up a different narrative arc. Or not different, but stronger, better woven. Instead, I'm gun-shy.

Maybe the issue is that I have my pain medicine today, Tylenol 3, which always sort of gives me an energy boost (this due to the lifting of my back pain for a period of time) but then leads to a crash. That crash is essentially a sudden wave of grogginess that cuts through any creative drive I might have managed.

I will write on this today. In fact, I'm dead set on getting the manuscript to better match the table of contents outline. Thing is, I had a look at some of the short stories I have in progress yesterday and now my head's in that space.

UPDATE: It's now 4:03 p.m. and I opened the Orchard folder and had a look, got overwhelmed, and then closed it, came here to finish a blog post instead. Not sure how I'm going to finish the book if that's the approach I'm bound to take. What I do know is that writing about not being able to write is getting me nowhere.

10:44 a.m.

Watched a couple short horror films last night. One called I Heart It Too got me in all the spooky spots. Have a look.

5:58 p.m.

Taking two days off from Orchard. Today was the first of two. I've been working four to five hours a day on it for the past month. I'm not good at math but let's give it at try.

Added up that's a total of about 150 hours in four weeks. And I went from a 226-page manuscript down to a 93-page manuscript. Not one solitary word added as of this evening. Tomorrow is another day off, and I should be glad, really. If not, by tomorrow at this time I'd maybe have a 20-page essay, a far cry from my contractual obligation.

Heather talked me into taking the two days off. I didn't complain. It seemed like a good idea then and I know it was a good idea now. Six or seven times today I started to open my laptop, Golden Boy, and dive into my Orchard folder. Each time I did other things instead: I checked Twitter, checked on my MFA students, started to watch a movie on Amazon Prime, and actually did buy a really fantastic cardigan button-up sweater. That's the fourth sweater-type shirt I've bought in the past three days. I also bought a Polo long-sleeve button-up this past weekend. I don't know what's wrong with me.

All I knew was that I had to write something today. Other than days and nights I've had surgery or was in recovery from surgery I have written. Something, anything. But I've written nearly every day for the past 34 years. Wasn't about to let today go by without continuing that obsession. 

10:37 p.m.

Watching the Braves trying to win the pennant. They're leading the series 3-1. But that stupid Seager hit another home run. I hate the Dodgers. Almost as much as I hate the Nationals. But not as much as a hate the Packers. I'd say I will though over the next few years. It's going to clash with the stupid Dodgers for a while. I think we'll win. I get too invested in baseball games. I get nervous, giddy, enraged, elated. I wish I could just watch a ball game without all the emotional pain. 

I nearly aspirated about fifteen minutes ago. Acid reflux. It's about to kill me. That's twice I've almost choked to death in my sleep in the last two weeks. All I know to do is not eat at this point. Nothing is safe after about 5 p.m. I'll have to wash my blanket tomorrow and an outfit to wear to the wedding. I'm tired. I want to just sit here with nothing to do and nothing coming up, nothing to be nervous or worried about.

I'm working on draft eight of Orchard. Burnout doesn't begin to explain where I'm at with this book. All I'm sure about is that this is my last full-length work. I had two novels in progress before I even started this book and I'm going to stop working on them. It's short stories from here on out. Full-length works are just exhausting, and it doesn't help that I'm not as talented at novels and longer nonfiction books. After 34 years writing, I know where I'm strong, and that's with short stories. My novels have been mediocre, and you could fill Truist Park with all the mediocre novels that have been written and exist in this world.

I'm tired even writing about writing.

This fall's MFA class is wrapping up. It was a good one. I had three graduating students. A small class but advanced and enjoyable. And a wide spread of different kinds of literature being written. Fantasy, literary short stories. A good mix. I did the best I could trying to help them become better writers. Sometimes I struggle with that, talking about writing, helping people write better. I don't know if it's because I'm not as good a writer as I think I am or if it's because I've had limited experience talking to other people about writing. No idea. Nothing.

Tired of writing and here I am just pecking away. I've worn out two laptops in the past three years. 

Oh, I also hate Mookie Betts. Stupid Mookie Betts. He's already won a World Series with the stupid Red Sox. Give me a break. 

Go Braves.

If it ain't not broken

 I've done a lot of reading in the past several days. Finished Amelia Gray's first book, AM PM. It's really very much like a Lydia Davis book. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Gray was influenced by Davis quite a bit. AM PM was a good book though. The Featherproof copy has text that is waaaaaay too small. I don't know why they did that, and I don't think it's just that I'm older and my eyesight is worse. This text was TINY.

I finished up John Langan's Sefira and Other Betrayals. The opening novel, Sefira, was just too long. It might have worked as a short story but not as a novel or, as this is referred to, a novella. A lot of the main character traveling and thinking that could have been cut out. But I like Langan's work a lot. The rest of the book was filled with good, solid short stories.

I also finished reading the Berkley lecture book of Julio Cortazar. I can't figure out why Latin American writers always have to talk about politics. I mean I get that Latin America is messed up and there are a lot of political problems there, or at least there was during Cortazar's time, but my gosh don't let it paint everything about your work. I'm definitely more into his short stories than his novels or lectures.

I'm trying to kick up my reading again. I've been neglectful of it for the past year because I've focused so much on Orchard. I might as well read because I've found out in the past week that my writing mind has shut down. I know enough about all this to know that it's not permanent, but it's still no fun.