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The Mysteries of the Island: Creating and Preserving Ambiguity in Lost

A twelve page essay I wrote about one of my favorite TV shows and how it fits into the grand tradition of storytelling. I dissect it by means of Todorov and compare its bits to the classic Middle Eastern folktales collected in One Thousand and One Nights. Written in May of 2015.

Since its publication in 1970, Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre has allowed scholars to draw critical comparisons in fictional narratives based upon their engagements with the supernatural. His analysis is timeless – investigating a subject that is fundamental to the structure of most literature, from its inception as an oral custom to its modern day manifestations in the popular media. In his study, Todorov refers to the tale of The Thousand and One Nights, citing it as an excellent example of his research, a narrative which balances the dramatic realism of our familiar world with an opulent dose of magic and the impossible. But The Nights are only a single instance in a tradition that has experienced innumerable iterations and adaptations, one of these being the television series Lost, which aired for six seasons between 2004 and 2010. The acclaimed show conforms agreeably to Todorov’s critical proposal of a necessary hesitation, relying on the synthesis between the real and the unreal to create an intriguing narrative tension for both its characters and its audience. By adopting the element of ambiguity throughout the various aspects of its storytelling, Lost parallels its Arabic literary predecessor in its engagement with Todorov’s concept of the fantastic – even in its refusal to resolve that essential hesitation in its ultimately ambiguous finale.

To understand how this ambiguity originates, we have to consider the formulation of the world which Lost inhabits. To arrive at this uncertainty, there is the initial requisite of “the existence of events of two orders, those of the natural world and those of the supernatural world” (Todorov 26-7). These two systems, the former being regular and comfortable and the latter being unusual and disturbing, work in conjunction to attract and fascinate the readers (or in the case of Lost, viewers) without alienating them. In our example of The Nights, we can explore the integration of these two orders through the frame story, whereupon the reader is introduced to a tale that is grounded in what appears to be the real world and centered around the familiar drama of human relationships (that of cheating husbands and wives), but that also contains a demon as a part of its environment. This is not unlike the pilot episode of Lost which presents the believable although tragic scenario of a plane crash, alongside a mysterious shadowy smoke monster of unexplained origins. The effect is the blurring together of the real and the imaginary, informing the audience that this fictional world will contain moments that seem incredible but that they should not simply reject all of their preconceived notions. Essentially, it is producing the proper conditions of tension for the fantastic to exist by inserting the supernatural into the real world.

For this reason, it is important that Lost be cautious of the genre with which it affiliates itself. Describing it as strictly science fiction, for example, would prove problematic. “Science fiction,” Thornham and Purvis inform us in their comprehensive study titled Television Drama: Theories and Identities, “is not the same as ‘the fantastic’, and writers of science fiction have sought to distinguish the two” on the primary basis of “alternative worlds […] described with technical precision and presented as internally coherent, possible worlds, unlike the ‘irrational’ transformations of the fantastic” (104). To suggest that Lost is solely a work of science fiction would spoil the tension that is essential to a fantastic narrative, because the genre implies an order that is precise and all-encompassing. Regarding it so would mean that Lost is only concerned with the supernatural world, rather than being the integration of the real and the unreal. It would annul any tension because the audience would understand the entire universe to be beyond their rationalization, beyond comparison with the natural standard; and thus, there would be no fantastic, only fantasy.

To prevent this, Lost needs to balance out the supernatural order with the natural: by prioritizing the human elements of drama over the magical. This approach is explained by executive producer Carlton Cuse, who says, “At the beginning the secret was that the show didn’t announce itself as a genre show, so it could be about the characters. The audience got invested in the characters first and the mythology second” (“The Island Paradox”). This formulation is key to Lost’s development of the fantastic, which requires the tension to be between the real and the imaginary but through the understanding that everything is occurring in the normal world. The show focuses on the relationships between the characters and their reactions to the supernatural instead of the actual reason such things are happening. This allows the audience to experience the same confusion as the characters and side with those whom they feel are morally or intellectually correct in regards to the island’s mysteries. Lost relies on the union of drama and science fiction as its natural and supernatural orders, using this tension to establish the proper climate for the fantastic. By refusing to label itself as a genre show, it retains its ambivalence; by keeping vague as to the source of the supernatural, it intensifies its plot. This method of producing the fantastic is valuable to the story’s intrigue, with novelist Evelyn Vaughn remarking that “[t]he only classic frame that comes close in drama [to Lost] is Sheherazade’s daily risk of death in the Book of One Thousand and One [Arabian] Nights” (57). By comparing it back to The Nights, we can see that Lost is following an effective model that necessitates human interactions interspersed with acts of magic. The drama, which Shahrazad’s situation epitomizes and which exists in each of her stories, constitutes the natural order that reminds its readers that the supernatural must be anchored within the factual in order to produce the proper tension.

This tension, which Todorov labeled ‘the fantastic’, can be rebranded as the genre ‘mystery’ in the context of Lost. If the purpose of the fantastic is to create an ambiguity towards the strange and a suspension of clarification until a climactic finale, whereupon the cause of the tension is disclosed, then mystery fits the definition. Just as the fantastic navigates a fine line between the uncanny and the marvelous, mystery (as it manifests in Lost) is so too situated between drama and science fiction. Author Stacey Abbott explores Lost’s engagement with mystery, describing “its narrative” as a “labyrinth of potential storylines, character connections, enigmas and puzzles […] marked by twists, turns, dead ends and misleading clues and [where] the audience is invited to negotiate its way through the maze along with the series’ protagonists” (10). Abbott captures the essence of Lost’s convoluted storyline which is so infused with mystery (the fantastic) that the viewer is never certain which supernatural occurrences will be attributed to the uncanny, the marvelous, or never explained at all. The importance of the audience’s immersion into the mystery is also significant, as “[t]he fantastic therefore implies an integration of the reader into the world of the characters; that world is defined by the reader’s own ambiguous perception of the events narrated” (Todorov 31). Abbott is thus confirming an aspect of Lost that is essential to the fantastic: that the mystery involves its audience in its solving. The viewer, or reader, has to experience the tension through the fictional world of the character; if they are too distant from this, they risk an omniscient perspective and thus the end of their anticipation and even their complete detachment from the story.

In order to maintain the viewer’s commitment to its mystery, Lost creates tension on both narrative and structural levels. If we consider Lost to be “a tightly serialized programme centered upon narrative enigmas”, the duality is efficiently distinguished (Pearson 4). The show’s “narrative enigmas” are its overarching secrets, such as why there are polar bears on a tropical island or how people can travel through time. This level of the fantastic procures a long-term involvement from the viewer who becomes interested in having these mysteries solved despite the lengthy interval between when they are first presented and when they are finally explained. But Lost also captivates attention through its composition; its serialization allows it to abruptly interrupt its program at opportune moments to create cliffhangers, which fragment the stories on a regular basis. This, inversely, serves as a short-term hook, keeping the viewer in constant suspense as the story works its way through the larger narrative tensions. This two-fold technique may seem intrinsic to the sequential format of television episodes but this would only prove ignorant of a mode which predates the medium. Again, we can refer to The Nights as our estimable sample. It too engages the reader – through the nightly intermissions in Shahrazad’s stories (short-term), as well as through the suspense of whether or not she will succeed in changing Shahrayar’s mind and survive the frame-tale (long-term). This surfeit of mystery, although originating in separate means of literary understanding, convenes in the story’s ability to instigate and preserve the audience’s fascination, keeping them perpetually in a state of hesitation and confusion.

The geographic displacement in the narrative is another essential factor in the creation of a conceivable scenario while at the same time introducing ambiguity. By marooning its characters miles off course on an unknown island, Lost “presents the intriguing spectacle of an inviting subtropical terrain both strange yet familiar” (Stringer 74). This “strange yet familiar” landscape indicates elements of both the natural and the supernatural, a place that has, at first, no reason to seem exceptional but that has also agitated the viewer’s stability and sense of order. Throughout the show, the island remains “unknown and unnamed”; even after the series finale acknowledges its purpose, it still leaves many questions about it unanswered, “an island very much of uncertain identity” (75). The unrecognized location and the precipitous means of arrival thus become tools in suggesting the fantastic: by losing our ground on what is usual, we become unsure if we can retain our previous understanding of the world or if we are finding ourselves in a place governed by entirely different rules. This phenomenon can also be traced back in comparison to The Nights, in moments such as the sinking of King Badr’s ship in “The Story of Jullanar of the Sea” causing him to wash ashore at the City of the Magicians where things are not as they appear, or how in “The Story of the Two Viziers”, Badr al-Din Hasan is dropped by demons outside of Damascus when he had just been sleeping in Cairo. One story, that of the Third Dervish, even begins with the destruction of a ship pulled apart by a magnetic mountain (it is eventually revealed in Lost that the plane was drawn to the island due to a burst of electromagnetic energy). What all of these stories share in common is the ensuing supernatural which appears after they have undergone the disorientation of their location. Just as they are unsure where they are, so too is the observer in suspense, awaiting the first hints of strangeness.

The island itself is only one of the copious mysteries embedded in Lost’s plot, so many even that not all were answered before the show’s termination. Another such example is ‘the numbers’, a series of numbers which appear throughout the show, sometimes all in sequence and other times independently. In his essay, “Codes, Interpretation, and Deconstruction”, Tom Grimwood notes that the numbers “appear in unexpected and unrelated places, yet display enough consistency to suggest a relation” (113). This spectacle is one that is not overtly supernatural, at least not at first glance, but as they continue to turn up, the audience begins to suspect something extraordinary. Once it is clear that they are more than just a coincidence, they become a part of the overall mystery of the show and must be adopted into the tension to be ultimately deemed uncanny or marvelous. The viewer searches for some “suggestion that these numbers hold some significance to the master narrative – without the suggestion that they are, in fact, a code – the numbers are meaningless” (113). The numbers, like every other riddle presented on the island, contribute to the fantastic by demanding resolution; their ambiguous purpose inspires the show’s fans to decipher the role they play in the story, but first by deciding whether or not they can be considered a natural deception or a truly supernatural phenomenon. Although by the end of the series, they are given a significant purpose in the plot, the cause of their constant repetition and whether or not they have any power inherent to themselves is left entirely unanswered.

But Lost will even extend its mythos beyond its fictional limits, transcending its narrative form by materializing in the world of its viewers. This technique modifies a tradition of intermixing historicism with the fantastic to make a story more ambiguous, such as the way in which The Nights will include the real life character Harun al-Rashid or the compounded approach of magical realism in general. The effect is to heighten the hesitation, creating doubt by the subtle association of the natural and the supernatural. Lost expands this by reversing it, portraying elements of the show in the audience’s world as if they were actual rather than fabricated. Derek Johnson, whose essay on Lost considers the role of transmedia in the series, concludes that “[t]he fictional institutions Hanso and Dharma, not fictional characters or narrative threads, enabled viewers to experience everyday life as part of the Lost hyperdiegesis – not just in the digital real, but across a range of mediated experience” (42). Johnson is addressing the way which Lost crosses over into the real world, of which he mentions several instances: television ads for its fake companies on ABC, an actress pretending to be an anti-Hanso activist and harassing the show’s writers during a panel at Comic Con, a false communications director from Hanso appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live to defend his (imaginary) institution against how it is being depicted on Lost. This encroachment on the real world causes an uncanny impression on fans of the show who are forced to question if whether what they thought was fictional is actually so, and their interest is captured by the formulation of such extensive conspiracies. Lost has the ability to create mystery even outside its weekly hour-long timeslot by appearing when the viewer does not expect it, thus augmenting the tension between what is natural and what isn’t.

Apart from the reader’s immersion into the world of the characters, Todorov also insists on the rejection of allegorical and poetic interpretations in order to sustain the proper conditions for the fantastic. His reason is evident – by making the story symbolically supernatural, the audience’s uncertainties are spoiled because there is no longer anything to decipher literally. Lost has adhered to this requirement in order to cultivate its mystery, avoiding those outcomes which would have alienated its viewer’s involvement and made its conclusion predictable and pretentious. One scenario which many fans were outspoken about was the fear that all of the characters had been dead since the initial crash. Co-creator and showrunner Damon Lindelof addressed this concern in an interview at the 2014 PaleyFest by explaining, “For us, one of the ongoing conversations with the audience and there was a very early perception, was that the island was purgatory and we were always out there saying ‘It’s not purgatory, this is real, we’re not going to Sixth Sense you’” (“Lost 10 Year Anniversary Reunion”). Lindelof’s quote demonstrates the unease of an audience who dreads an unoriginal or unfulfilling explanation. By making the island into a physical representation of purgatory, the entire show becomes an allegory and all of the strange activities lose any creative meaning, which in turn severs the fan’s interest in solving something that is just being fit into predetermined analogies. Lindelof’s reference to the 1999 Shyamalan movie demonstrates how exhausted a concept this solution is. Furthermore, it relinquishes the real world, allowing every supernatural instance to occur without the need to question its purpose. If Lost would have revealed its characters to have been dead all along, every mystery up until that point would have been shadowed over by the seemingly last-ditch revelation that their world was never meant to be analyzed. This “anagnorisis” (that is, moment of critical discovery) should ideally produce an effect not unlike Ja’far’s discovery of the apple in his daughter’s pocket in the story of “The Three Apples”; however, whereas The Nights plays this out in “a way as to make the climax seem realistic and unforced”, Lost would have had the opposite effect because the technique would have accepted a strictly supernatural world and isolated the viewer from making sense of the tension (Pinault 98). In the context of the fantastic, allegory destroys mystery by disengaging the audience’s involvement in solving something that is preordained and lacks suspense.

Another similarly detrimental interpretation would have been the possibility that it was all a dream. This is teased at by the first scene of the pilot episode where the main character Jack opens his eyes, finding himself laying on the ground. This scenario has been equally disputed and discredited by both the creators and the fans for many of the same reasons – having everything be a dream denies the conjunction of the natural and supernatural worlds and supersedes any mysteries. Lost creators have been careful to eliminate this option, including indications that “the characters aren’t simply dreaming [such as that] there are a lot of focal characters, for one thing, each of whom seems to have a life that stretches off into the past and to exist largely independently of the other characters” (Richardson 111). The multitude of disconnected perspectives and the constant flashbacks serve to establish the natural world which the characters came from before they were thrust into the island’s mysteries. It shows the viewers information that is outside of that which any one character could be imagining. The inclusion of these safeguards against figurative interpretations allowed the show’s creators to keep the audience involved in the mysteries of its fictional world. If it had all turned out to be nothing more than a dream, this explanation would have overshadowed all of the uncertainty as inconsequential hallucinations, and any supernatural elements to have been a fraud of one’s imagination. If made to accept a dream as a solution to every mystery we have immersed ourselves in, our reaction would be not unlike Badr al-Din’s confusion and incredulity that such a “strange story”, so intricate, could be fake when it surely “must indeed have been real” (Haddawy 204). The dream explanation lacks gratification and diminishes the supernatural to where it is no longer a hesitation but an expectation.

By creating a world that is ambiguously supernatural, eliminating those problematic interpretations, and involving its viewers in the resolution of its mysteries, Lost fulfills the requirements which Todorov details as essential in establishing the fantastic. Having settled the prerequisites, we can next observe how Lost situates itself in regards to the marvelous and the uncanny. In order to do so, the show makes explicit use of the third and expendable condition – that in which the hesitation, which must be experienced by the audience, “may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s role is so to speak entrusted to the character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work” (Todorov 33). The effect serves two purposes: it makes the hesitation a part of the story’s plot and it makes the characters advocates for the ultimate possibilities. By considering the first portion, that of thematizing the fantastic, we can see that Lost is entirely obsessed with this device. Just as the fantastic sets itself in between the marvelous and the uncanny, Lost too is concerned with “trying to skirt that line between the two possible explanations, the scientific one or a mythical and magical one”, all while remaining “purposefully ambiguous about which one might be correct” (Cuse, “15 Questions”). The result is that the characters are as preoccupied with revealing the island’s secrets as its viewers, all of whom are trapped in a six-season period of uncertainty and hesitation.

To evoke the two alternatives of the marvelous and the uncanny, Lost appoints two of its main characters as representatives of the opposing perspectives. The vital hesitation of the show occurs here, in the “dichotomy between faith and science, between Locke and Jack” (Wright 88). Championing science, Jack leads the interpretation for the uncanny. He is pragmatic and skeptical of magic or divine interference; he attributes the plane crash to accidental tragedy. Locke, on the other hand, embraces the marvelous and argues for faith in a purposeful destiny. He views the crash as meaningful, a belief that is doubtlessly affected by the restored use of his legs (as he had prior to the accident been crippled and restrained to a wheelchair). The two characters are constantly disagreeing, eventually in outright opposition. The tension of their relationship is immensely telling of the nature of the fantastic which relies on this stress to build suspense and intrigue the viewer. The discord of these confronting ideologies is discernable when Jack is asked, “Why do you find it so hard to believe, Jack?” by Locke, to which he replies, “Why do you find it so easy?” (“Orientation”). Advocates for inverted resolutions to the fantastic events of the island, the two convey the uncertainty of the audience members who can side with the character they think is correct.

At the end of the show, however, Lost refuses to commit to any definite resolution of the fantastic. Along the way, it answers many of its mysteries, categorizing some as uncanny (electromagnetic discharges, a man living beneath the island for three years, the affected reproductive systems of the island’s inhabitants) and others as marvelous (Walt’s ability to interact with animals, the Man in Black’s shapeshifting, the time-traveling) – but ultimately it is ambivalent towards an overall explanation. “[T]here’s this essential human desire to have a unified field theory,” explains Carlton Cuse, “But there is no unified theory for Lost, nor do we think there should be. Philosophically we don’t buy into that. The great mysteries of life fundamentally can’t be addressed” (“The Island Paradox”). The producers of Lost have willingly chosen to create a narrative that does not settle its tension even upon its conclusion, one that retains some of the fundamental hesitation that first drew its viewers by keeping its mystery pending even beyond the limits of its series. The fear of this kind of conclusion was in itself a contributing factor to that initial tension, as for many fans there was “unease that they were making an investment in a show that is complicated, without any sense of where it is going to lead them”, leading many of them to question the producers: “Are you making it up as you go along?” (“One Mystery Solved”). While unsettling for fans, the approach is brilliantly fantastic. Returning to Jack and Locke’s debate in regards to why the plane ends up on the island, it is significant to note that both are correct. Jack who argued for coincidence is proven right as we find out that the crash occurred due to an electromagnetic discharge caused by one character’s accidental failure to operate a certain machine; but Locke’s faith and belief in fate are also true, as we learn that the passengers on the plane were intentionally chosen as potential candidates to replace the island’s guardian. By legitimizing both perspectives, Lost declares that it will not side with either the uncanny or the marvelous and accept as permanent the fantastic. In rejecting a unified theory, it retains its ambiguity and keeps itself as a source of suspense for viewers to continue to speculate on the mysteries, even years after the show has ended. It creates a more convincing and expansive world, open for future stories to continue and for spinoffs to explore their own projections. By choosing to not provide answers, occasionally where they had even planned to have them (as with the mystery of the outrigger), the show is remaining accessible and irresolute.

That is not to say that Lost does not reward its fans with any closure – while it chooses to preserve its mystery, it does resolve its narrative tension by returning to its beginning. Todorov explains that really “[a]ll narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical” (163). Lost’s begins with the very first scene where Jack open his eyes as he lays in between the trees, everything peaceful and silent, until he gets up and walks to the beach where we begin to hear screams and are made aware of the plane crash. For The Nights, this is in Shahrayar’s initial ignorance, before the discovery of his wife’s betrayal and his decision to kill every virgin he sleeps with. At this point the tension will enter and we have left the first equilibrium: the story has begun. In both of these scenes as well, we are first exposed to the mystery of the paranormal which “intervenes to break the median disequilibrium and to provoke the long quest for the second equilibrium”; and yet, if as Todorov insists, the “supernatural forces must intervene”, do they also need to be expelled in order to restore the narrative balance (164-5)? Both stories seem to prove otherwise. There is no final decision of the uncanny or the marvelous, only a return to a similar state but one that has broken the tension. Lost’s finale acts like a mirror of its opening: with Jack lying in the same place, watching a plane take off from the island before closing his eyes. The same can be said of The Nights, which returns Shahrayar to his status of married and sane, as in the beginning, but without addressing the supernatural’s significance and clarifying its ambivalence. Either tale’s final ambiguity, while lacking absolute answers, does not interfere with its narrative’s resolve.

Through following Todorov’s model in every aspect of its form, Lost has created a thoroughly fantastic universe, but by refusing to fulfill the hesitation, it has created one that persists. The result is a fertile environment in which to tell stories and from which future stories may still be wrought. Ultimately, Lost chooses to remain as ambiguous at its end about the supernatural forces as it did in its beginning, leaving this open for its viewer’s endless speculation. "It only ever ends once,” the island’s guardian warns, “Everything before that is just progress" (“The Incident, Parts 1 & 2”). But Lost has decided not to finish, to remain a story in progress, still unfolding and ambiguous to all who analyze it. Eternally fantastic, it may stay a source of inspiration, another link in a grander tradition which began with the first suggestion of the supernatural unknown. Followers of Lost are still on the island, hesitant to leave its mysteries behind.

Abbott, Stacy. "How Lost Found Its Audience: The Making of a Cult Blockbuster." Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show. Ed. Roberta E. Pearson. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. 9-26. Print.

Cuse, Carlton, and Damon Lindelof. "The Incident, Parts 1 & 2." Lost. Dir. Jack Bender. ABC. 13 May 2009. Television.

Cuse, Carlton, and Damon Lindelof. "The Island Paradox." Interview by Sean Carroll. As Lost Ends, Creators Explain How They Did It, What’s Going On. Wired Magazine, 19 Apr. 2010. Web. 22 Apr. 2015. <http://www.wired.com/2010/04/ff_lost/>.

Cuse, Carlton, and Damon Lindelof. Interview by Erin McCarthy. 15 Questions for Lost Bosses Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse—and 40 Revealing Answers! Popular Mechanics, 23 Apr. 2008. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a2823/4260693/>.

Grillo-Marxuach, Javier, and Craig Wright. "Orientation." Lost. Dir. Jack Bender. ABC. 5 Oct. 2005. Television.

Grimwood, Tom. "Codes, Interpretation, and Deconstruction." Lost and Philosophy: The Island Has Its Reasons. Ed. Sharon M. Kaye. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2008. 111-21. Print.

Haddawy, Husain, trans. The Arabian Nights. Ed. Muhsin Mahdi. London: W.W. Norton &, 1995. Print.

Johnson, Derek. "The Fictional Institutions of Lost: World Building, Reality and the Economic Possibilities of Narrative Divergence." Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show. Ed. Roberta E. Pearson. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. N. pag. Print.

Lindelof, Damon. "Lost 10 Year Anniversary Reunion." Interview. Lost Bosses Finally Answer: Was Everyone Really Dead the Whole Time? What Was the Show About? Find Out! E!, 16 Mar. 2014. Web. 27 Apr. 2015. <http://www.eonline.com/news/521687/lost-bosses-finally-answer-were-they-really-dead-the-whole-time-what-was-the-whole-show-about>.

Lindelof, Damon. "One Mystery Solved: 'Lost' to End in 2010." Interview by Gary Levin. USA Today, 7 May 2007. Web. 27 Apr. 2015. <http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2007-05-06-lost_N.htm>.

Pearson, Roberta E. "Introduction: Why Lost?" Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show. Ed. Roberta E. Pearson. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. 1-5. Print.

Pinault, David. Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights. Leiden: Brill, 1992. Print.

Richardson, Robert Burke. "Doubt, Descartes, and Evil Geniuses." Getting Lost: Survival, Baggage, and Starting Over in J.J. Abrams' Lost. Ed. Orson Scott. Card. Dallas, TX: BenBella, 2006. 109-118. Print.

Stringer, Julian. "The Gathering Place: Lost in Oahu." Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show. Ed. Roberta E. Pearson. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. 75-93. Print.

Thornham, Sue, and Tony Purvis. Television Drama: Theories and Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975. Print.

Vaughn, Evelyn. "Oceanic Tales: Have You Been Framed?" Getting Lost: Survival, Baggage, and Starting Over in J.J. Abrams' Lost. Ed. Orson Scott Card. Dallas, TX: BenBella, 2006. 55-64. Print.

Wright, Leigh Adams. "There Are No Coicidences." Getting Lost: Survival, Baggage, and Starting Over in J.J. Abrams' Lost. Ed. Orson Scott. Card. Dallas, TX: BenBella, 2006. 85-90. Print.

#essay #lost #jjabrams #one thousand and one nights #island #hurley #locke #tzvetan todorov #uc berkeley

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Process

[catfishmera]

No. 9, part two

That evening, as he was walking home, Bill noted that the sun had already set before he was even halfway to the bus stop and, certain that he had clocked out precisely at 5:01, he deduced that he must have just been walking slower, most likely due to the weight of the thoughts in his head. He paused to muse this for a second, and then decided to make an unprecedented stop at Dryden’s Bar which was only a block away. ‘I will only stay a half an hour, as per usual,’ he comforted himself, hoping that no one would find it too alarming if he came by two days before a Friday. He was relieved to find the second seat from the end of the bar empty, and though no one so much as looked up at him, this eased some of the anxiety caused by his premature weekly visit.

Most of the day had gone by with him accomplishing very little, his thoughts revolving around David’s machine and what the red could have meant. He was positive it had nothing to do with anger – perhaps he had been frustrated at the time but not mad. And he was absolutely not mad at Clara, no way. He had read the Webopedia article on anger extensively and none of its symptoms had seemed appropriate. And yet, what was the alternative? Love? He had looked that up too, but after countless articles, decided he couldn’t make any sense of it and gave up.

BARN UPGRADE PENDING.

But still, it couldn’t be love, could it? Love wasn’t something that just occurred out of nothing, it was rudimentary and controlled. There were complex algorithms for it; LoveFinder’s intricately crafted formula guaranteed love in 99% of all its pairings. Maybe that would help clear it up, if he ran Clara’s name through the program and saw what came up. And yet, imagine how crazy it would be, to find out you were capable of love with someone who you had worked with for years! No, he had rarely ever spoken to her and besides, that was the sort of stuff that only existed in old movies and their obsession with spontaneous, instinct-driven humans.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO UPGRADE YOUR BARN NOW?

Bill brushed away the notifications and opened his phone’s browser. There seemed to be so many blogs about love: colorful stories of soulmates who had met through KindleSpark or LoveFinder or Romatch, but nothing about falling in love in person. He ran the words through five search engines, each resulting only in academic texts – historians chronicling the romantic tendencies of civilizations long since disappeared, descriptions of awkward mating rituals that were often unsuccessful, redundant song lyrics that all seemed the same despite having different titles. Bill felt exhausted; it all sounded so elaborate and obsolete.

He then realized that he had yet to order a drink and as it seemed the most pleasant cure for his current distraction, he tapped the glass counter in front of him to open the menu. His fingers scrolled automatically until they reached ‘Coke and rum’ which he made careful sure to click only once so as not to suffer the embarrassment of last October when he had had ten beverages placed before him. It felt so dangerous to be considering love so carelessly, without any buffer of technology to help regulate it. Every app, every algorithm, were they not there for a reason, to perfect such things? He looked around the bar. Each face was downturned, a galaxy of features lit by the synthetic glow of handheld identities. Even the bartender stood behind the counter entranced, his nose nearly touching the screen, his eyes glazed and reflective, until a ding caused him to blink with astonishment, and Bill knew his order had been put through. The mobile device was slipped into a breast pocket where it remained glowing through the fabric like a window into his heart; he had barely set the drink on the counter before his other hand was already pulling it back out. Bill transferred the money through his PayPower account, drank it all in one gulp, and left.

After two weeks, the tension had become more than he could bear. Clara consumed his thoughts. His nights were now spent awake, wondering what he could say to her, and his days were spent avoiding every scenario he imagined. He was constantly distracted and as his meticulous routine suffered, so did he. He found himself at Dryden’s with increasing spontaneity, once on a Monday and again on a Thursday – looking around unnoticed, out of sync.

One morning, as he realized the electric bus had already passed his stop and he was still on it, Bill made the decision to confront David’s box again. He waited until his lunch hour that same day and, pleased to find that David had stepped out too but left his door unlocked, snuck into the office and over to the desk where the box sat exactly where it had been when he had last seen it. ‘I’ll be out of here in less than a minute,’ he promised himself, moving quickly, determined to be gone before David returned. He pressed the button on the side of the machine and listened to its soft whirring. As all the colors flashed briefly, he became suddenly aware that he had been holding his breath since he had stepped into the room. His finger pressed the cold glass sensor.

And there it was – electroluminescent red and everything with it. Eyes open, alone, a distant supernova blinking in the cosmos and fading; or shut, light filtered through eyelids, staring through the red, red skin at something unfamiliar or only obscured.

Then the door handle turned. It might have occurred immediately after the light had vanished or he may have been standing there, lost amidst hypotheticals and constellations, for much longer than he could tell (he should have been keeping track of the time, or was that not so important anymore?). He took one automatic step away from the desk but his mind was void of excuses.

“David, I-”

It was not David. It was Clara who stepped into the office so hastily that she did not notice Bill until she had shut the door behind her and almost walked into him.

“Oh!” That was automatic too – she was startled. “Bill,” she whispered, letting the last sound of his name fade softly but leaving her mouth slightly open as if there might have been more she considered saying.

“I’m just leaving.” He could hardly form words. He moved his eyes towards the wall just as he felt them slipping into the gravitational pull of her deep black pupils. “Are you looking for David?”

“Uh, no actually. I was hoping there wouldn’t be anyone here.”

He looked back at her and now she turned away, examining the still glowing box on the desk.

“Last time I was in here, the box was red for me too,” she explained. “And well, after what David said, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Or you.”

“Oh.” They were quiet, watching each other carefully, and Bill realized then that nothing else existed, nothing beyond the walls of that room which had become the limits of a universe that was so much smaller than he had imagined. Something was pounding deep in his chest but he was too distracted to take much notice. He remembered the words, “organic defect – our glitch” from his psychology notes and he remembered studying Clara’s profile picture where she wasn’t looking directly at the camera but at something else that made her forehead crease and her eyes lock and her smile. He felt his cheeks fill with warmth and then words spill from his stale tongue.

“I think it’s love.”

She moved her mouth slowly from side to side. “Yeah, I think so too. But I’m not sure what it means.”

When David entered the room, he found them both in this same position, standing apart and yet conjoined in their gaze.

“Hey guys, what’s up?” He wore his usual parted smile, but his eyes revealed that he was confused.

“We need to know more about the box,” Bill answered.

David’s face lost its inconsistency – his mouth slumped and his eyes followed.

“Oh, that? Shoot, I’m sorry guys, I hope it hasn’t been troubling you too much. Truth is, it’s broken. It worked fine the first couple of times when I tested it but ever since, it just keeps turning up red, no matter who tries it. I think I need to recalibrate it and adjust the sensors, but I just haven’t had the chance yet.”

Bill and Clara looked back at each other. So maybe it had meant nothing. Maybe they had only been worried all along about a glitch in a machine.

They both left David’s office, turning to go their separate ways. Bill could return now and focus on his work. He could sleep again at night, eight and a half hours, shave his face on Sundays, and only visit Dryden’s on Fridays when he knew the second seat from the end expected him. He could settle all those Word Warrior matches (he won an average of 72% of them) and he could get off at the right bus stop and he could again sit in his empty apartment every night before bed, letting the electric glow of technology put him to sleep.

“Hey Bill?”

“Yeah?” He spun around to find that she was looking back at him.

“Maybe it wasn’t wrong though.”

“Maybe not.”

“So what should we do?”

Bill thought for a second. “Well, we could always meet up after work and talk about it some more.”

Clara smiled at him. “Yeah, I’d like that. Let me give you my number.”

Bill smiled back, but as he did so, he realized that he did not have his phone with him, nor was he entirely sure where he had left it.

[catfishmera]

No. 9, part one

This story is three times as long because it was the final project. After this, I’ll have to come up with new stuff to post, I guess. I split it into two posts.

It was 12:32 PM on a Wednesday when Bill received five text messages, all in immediate succession. He had just sat down at his desk for lunch, his fingers automatically navigating through Town Market offers on bushels of corn, bales of hay, buckets of creamy virtual milk. Only three hours and fourteen minutes had passed since he had last checked the status of his PhoneFarm and the remaining sixteen minutes vital to the upgrading of his crammed grain silo were meant to be spent productively – settling any of his seven ongoing Word Warrior matches, his twenty-two pending uMessenger conversations, or his four hundred and sixty unread emails (although he was absolutely positive at least half of these were merely spam), not to mention the burrito in his lunchbox he was to remember to microwave. He was busy, and yet as each luminescent notification appeared at the top of his screen, tantalizing, distastefully negligent of the societal protocol regarding excessive capitalization, his attention was seduced and his curiosity successfully incited.

David’s office was on the same hall, only ten rooms down and just around the corner. The door hung half open; it was anticipating him, all while retaining the same ambiguous suspense that each text message had so aggravatingly expressed. Bill took one hand out of his pocket and knocked softly, pushing the door in as he did so. He was met by the back of his colleague’s coat, which was slumped forward onto a desk, hiding most of the man inside it. A head was just barely visible above the hunched shoulders of white fabric. Without turning around, it greeted the anticipated intruder.

“Bill! Come in. I’ve finally finished and you need to see it.”

The engineer straightened his back and took a step away from the desk, rotating his head around until his eyes met Bill’s. Despite the immoderate enthusiasm that was radiating from his body (humorous wrinkles below the eyes, a slow circular rubbing of the thumb and index finger, a steady tapping of the foot), his smile was the same as always: his mouth slightly open with only the top row of teeth visible.

“What are you so excited about?” asked Bill, laughing a little at David’s undeniable frenzy.

David turned back towards the desk and Bill followed his gaze to the small metallic box situated in the middle. It seemed alarmingly simple, with only a single button on one side and a round LED screen on top. David’s arm made a demonstrative motion beneath the device as if to exhibit its remarkability but Bill noted that it really did not improve much about its plain appearance.

“Ok, so you know that project I’ve been working on? Not the one for Sanderson, but the one I told you about before the Christmas party and then I told you I told Weiland about it and he seemed pretty interested in it too. Well, this is it. I did it.”

Bill scrunched up his eyes, scouring the silver box for the source of its creator’s excitement but nothing materialized from its smooth polished surfaces. Perhaps all of this intensity was somehow contained within the intricacy of its wiring, concealed in its modest dimensions. It was David who then made the realization that his friend did not remember the purpose of the machine and at once felt embarrassed.

“Well, here, let me show you how it works. That’s what I called you over for after all, isn’t it?”

David opened a small back panel, twisting something slowly with his fingers before shutting it back up and pressing the small button on the side. The LED screen lit up like a rainbow, a ring containing every color with a white circle in the center. It remained this way for less than a second before all of the colors dulled and only the white middle remained. David turned his head back to Bill, raising his eyebrows playfully, and then to the machine, pressing his finger into the circle. The machine made a soft whirring noise and the color yellow lit up on the display, shining until David removed his finger.

“What do you think, huh?”

“David. I don’t get it.”

Bill was now irritatingly conscious of each passing second and frustrated by what was happening in front of him. He, like David, had expected a demonstration of the device to have brushed away the cobwebs from his memory and revealed the purpose of the technological trifle on the desk. Plus, though the two engineers would consider each other friends, this spoken conversation was becoming longer than Bill was comfortable with and he wished David would have just sent him a link to a video with an explanation of whatever the machine was.

“Oh.” David’s lips compressed into thin bloodless lines. Then he laughed: “Ok, well, shoot. Let me start from scratch! The idea came to me just around a year ago when I was visiting my grandmother. We were going through some old boxes of stuff from her childhood and I pulled out this plastic ring with a shiny piece of paper glued on top. She told me it was just a toy mood ring that she’d had when she was a little girl but that her mother, who would have been a girl herself in the nineteen-seventies, had had a real fancy one, what with a large faux gemstone filled with thermochromic liquid crystal and set in gold.

“So anyway, it got me thinking because I’d never seen or heard of anything like this. Of course, they weren’t legitimate at all scientifically; they were only reacting to shallow temperature changes from the skin’s surface, but I started wondering whether there could be any way to actually tap into our emotions and find out how we’re feeling. Imagine that! Well actually, you don’t have to because here it is. Presenting, the Mood Box!”

At this he made the same sweeping motion with his arm. Bill was reminded of his appreciation for the research and marketing team who would never let this machine leave the laboratory with a name like that.

“It’s extremely simple to use,” continued David. “All you do is turn it on and press any finger to the sensor in the center of the top and it sends pulses that pick up on your heart rate, different temperatures from all over your body, and most importantly, grabs information from your brain: your amygdala, your hippocampus, and your hypothalamus. Then it just takes in all this information and computes your emotional state. It’ll straight tell you how you feel!”

Bill now understood the device but was not yet convinced of its practicality. A machine that tells you how you feel. Something felt odd about that. Bill was sure that he already knew how he felt; it certainly didn’t seem like something that you’d need to be told. Like right now he felt like he was wasting time. He felt like he was missing out on the prime hours to be selling tomatoes and his Instagraph would be so inundated with new photos that he wouldn’t have the opportunity to favorite them all. And he felt something else too. Hunger.

“So for example, when I pressed my finger on it, it came up as yellow, right? And so yellow means excitement, which would totally make sense because I finished my invention today. Isn’t that crazy? Bill, come over here and try it for yourself.”

Bill walked over to the desk and pressed his finger to the top of the box. The colors all appeared again but when they vanished, only a deep blue remained.

“Alright, very nice! Looks like you’re doing ok, maybe just a little anxious or something. Does that sound right?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Bill, realizing how strange it was to actually think of oneself as having emotions. They were just kind of things you took for granted, weren’t they? Basic biological processes – he was trying to remember what else he had learned about them in school. Something about the state of feeling, and their complexity. Subjective. Archaic. He suddenly recalled a psychology teacher who had called them the “most fatal of human impediments”.

Just as Bill was preparing to clap David on the shoulder and offer a commending albeit brief farewell, Clara walked into the room.

“Hey David. Hey Bill. Sorry it took me a while to get away from the office but I saw your text and I wanted to see what was happening.”

“Yeah, you’ve got to check this out! It’s the Mood Box I was telling you about last week. Show her how it works Bill.”

Bill pressed his finger down on the top again, his mind wandering as David began explaining something about a partner app that automatically updates your emotional status to all your social networking accounts. Clara was listening to him intently, her forehead delicately creased, her eyes locked decisively with David’s. Her mouth made little frequent movements from side to side as if she were dispersing lip balm. He had remembered analyzing her face once before, when he had accepted her FriendBank.com friend request. There was something about it that had made him feel good and somewhat disoriented, but he hadn’t been able to figure it out then, and neither could he now.

“Hey, Earth to Bill! You alright, man? What are you staring at? Move your hand so we can see the color.”

Bill stepped away from the desk, conscious that his cheeks were much warmer than they were thirty seconds before. They felt so hot in fact that he was worried that they might have turned bright red and that his colleagues would look at him and think something wrong was happening like he had come down with a fever. But they were not looking at him. Their attention was towards the box, which also blushed red from its LED face.

“So see, for example now it’s red which means Bill is either extremely angry or passionately in love.”

Clara giggled at David’s explanation but Bill didn’t understand. He felt sick and frustrated. Hadn’t it only been blue a minute ago?

“Actually, I’ve got to get back from my lunch break. It’s really a great invention, David. Excuse me.”

Bill walked back to his office and though he still had four minutes left, he didn’t feel as if he could eat.

[catfishmera]

No. 8

A classic sci-fi experience I believe. A little future, a little space.

“Two minutes everyone.”

Abhay Dhagavker had been staring off entranced, oblivious to the passing seconds. How long had he been sitting? He looked down at the remainder of a chocolate bar, nearly melted in his hand. He was suddenly aware of movement around him – men and woman all leaving the small, brightly lit break room. He hurried to his locker, replacing his dusty thermal suit with an empty lunchbox and a half-finished crossword puzzle. The suit he would put on within two feet of the door; they were made so well insulated that wearing it in a heated room was as unbearable as not wearing it outdoors was suicidal. The cold Martian air can freeze your bloodstream in under a minute, he was reminded on every return flight. It’s why he always took his vacation days in the summer, regardless of the spike in demand and the higher wages. There was some sort of primal, bodily craving that demanded sunlight or threatened insurrection.

The large artificial sunlamps that illuminated the 16 square miles of fenced-in ice quarry were little more than illusory. They reproduced the sun’s color decently enough but they could never be too warm so as not to affect the product that was mined, packaged, and shipped to Earth at every hour of the day. Even the artificial atmosphere, generated by enormous hovering panels, felt excessively fake: the air was too thin for the labored breathing of the miners, the synthetic gravitational pull did well to keep the glaciers from evaporating into the Martian air but felt heavy on one’s shoulders. Abhay had learned to manage – he let his shoulders hunch a little and always used his vivirespirator when doing anything more than sitting.

The last shuttle was still waiting for him so Abhay hurried to grab his ice-saw and took a seat in the back. Today they would begin to carve into the lower dimension of less developed Martian glacier to prepare it for harvesting. Abhay smiled, briefly feeling that same alien allure that had captured his interest nine years ago when humankind’s first team had returned with the ice. Back then it had seemed so thrilling and noble, man’s modern heroes, disappearing into the cosmic unknown to return victoriously with a rocket full of water. The Martian glaciers had been known about for nearly a century at that point, but it hadn’t been until Earth’s fresh water had all but vanished that such a mission had been attempted. He could still remember the faces of the fifteen men and women, smiling and waving with their helmets under their arms and medals around their necks; and six years later, he was propelling into the stars in a company issued Martian Ice Quarry jumper with two thousand new recruits.

“Dhagavker, quit staring into space and get to work!” The voice of his shift-leader Burt Alvarez shattered his nostalgic reverie. He realized he had already stepped off the shuttle and was standing alone; most of the others were already operating large drill-like machines that bore large cavities into the solid ice, while a few others collected the shavings and deposited them in large containers. His eyes began to follow the cables attached to the containers, all the way up to the mouth of the quarry, where a faint crane peeked silver against the circle of profound black.

“Hey, are you listening Abhay?” Burt was staring at him uneasily now. He nodded. “Good, I’m gonna put you on Orderly, alright?”

Abhay nodded again and adjusted his ice-saw to begin warming up. His work today would be lonesome – Orderly duty meant going along the machine-dug tunnels and cleaning up the walls, removing any sharp protrusions of ice that anyone could get hurt on, and then cleaning up the scraps of ice to be melted down and refrozen into bricks later.

Perhaps not entirely though. He hadn’t expected any company but as he set to work down the dark ice tunnel, he saw that Burt had followed him and was slicing at the opposite wall.

“Everything alright, Abhay? I’ve noticed you’ve been a little out of it lately.”

“Yes sir, I’m fine. It’s just that the longer you’re away, the more you miss home, you know?”

Burt turned to him. “Absolutely. I’ve been here five years now and I’m not sure how much longer I want to go for. There’s something so exciting about it at first but then you just fall into that routine and realize it’s just like any old job on Earth.”

“You really think you’ll leave soon?”

“Sure. I’ve got a vacation coming up soon, plan to propose to my girl. If she says yes, then that’s it. I ain’t coming back to this cold red rock.”

The two men settled into a quiet rhythm, Abhay again lost in his head. Maybe he too should consider leaving. He’d like to meet a girl and settle down, maybe even start a family in a couple of years. Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up in the morning not in electric pajamas but to the warmth of another human’s body? To be able to sleep through the night without the alarms, canaries they called them because of their sound and color, bright yellow bulbs flashing, screeching for everyone to line up outside due to some emergency malfunction in the artificial atmosphere or some workplace accident; Abhay had seen Evan Buckowitz, who was just as homesick and prone to staring into space, crushed between a slab of ice, blood red water congealing in the red dust.

“What the hell?” His saw had stopped cutting and abruptly jarred him from his thoughts.

“You alri-” Burt, who had turned to look at him, was frozen in place, his mouth hanging open, his eyes pinned to the ice wall above Abhay’s head. Then Abhay stepped back and saw it too, the dark shape encased in the ice, his saw lodged into what appeared to be one of the six arms, each limb as wide and thick as Abhay himself.

[catfishmera]

No. 7

I remember that for this story we got to play with various tarot decks. The assignment was to draw a few cards and use them as characters or props in the story.

The morning after the war, Death brushed his hair. He had spent every day afraid that Don Miguel would die, a possibility he had not considered until he had seen him standing among his men, armed. His annihilation would have meant tragedy – she would never forget his courage, the noble defense of his honor, dying professions of inviolable love that would accumulate cancerously on her heart, malignant, parasitic tumor demanding its eternal share of some portion of her blood, of her devotion. It would be better for him to be tried and hung from the gallows, stripped of his dignity and shamed. Of course, if he had been injured in the war, Death could have overlooked it. There were occasionally times when Death abstained from his task and the people would call it a miracle. They kissed their saints and dropped to their knees, unaware that their glory was due to his error; he could forget, or arrive in the wrong village, or simply not feel like leaving his home. But no, this would only have made Don Miguel seem more heroic.

On that morning, Death was on his way to the village of Figueras to visit Alma Maria whom he believed to be the most beautiful woman in all of Girona, if not the entire world. He had at first admired her from a distance until the day when he could not bear his solitude any longer and decided he would charm her. He would pick flowers for her and leave them at her doorstep, but she would only brush away the dry, shriveled stems with a broom. He sent her all variety of beautiful birds, doves, bee-eaters, even exotic cacatuas, each in a cage of finely wrought gold, but she could not bear the stench of their decaying bones and had them thrown into the river. Once he had sent her a splendid coffin, carved entirely of alabaster and adorned with sapphires, but at this she had fainted and buried it empty.

“Is there nothing I can provide for you that you would cherish?” he asked her afterwards, sitting on his horse beneath her window.

“I simply cannot love you,” she had said.

Even then, Death had not been concerned. She was young and he had his immortal life to woo her, and if she grew old and died, his chances only improved. It was not until Don Miguel de La Pera, with his handsome features and his ten magnificent swords rode into Figueras, the same day that Alma Maria stopped even bothering to sweep the dry stems from her doorway, that Death felt afraid.

After two weeks, when it seemed that Don Miguel meant to stay in Figueras, Death grew anxious and decided to take action. He woke up early one morning and, sneaking into Don Miguel’s room, stole the magnificent swords, then proceeded to stick all ten into the body of Alfonso Villamante, who apart from being Alma Maria’s uncle was also the Duke of Figueras. The incident caused a horrendous scandal and Don Miguel was forced to return to La Pera for fear of being murdered wherever he went. Three days later, the two municipalities were at war. Three days after the war began, the war was over. Don Miguel had been turned over by his own men, who feared death more than they valued loyalty.

Death did not delay. The following day he dressed himself lavishly, brushed his hair, and set out for Figueras. On his way into the town, he passed the gallows where Don Miguel was fastened to a post, awaiting his sentence. In his youth, Death had found it difficult to look at a person whom he knew would soon be dead, but that nausea had long been overcome.

“Excuse me, stranger. Could you tell me the hour?”

Death turned his head to the prisoner. He had not expected to be addressed by him. There had been times when he had had conversations with men he knew were near expiring but never with anyone whose outcome he had been so involved in.

“I believe it is nearly noon.”

“Thank you.” Don Miguel tilted his head upwards to contemplate the hot sun which drew beads of moisture from his skin and then stole them as quickly as they appeared. “Any chance you might cut down an innocent who doesn’t deserve his fate?”

“I am afraid there is little I can do for you. There is a guard over by that wall who is already studying my face and frowning at our conversation.”

“Yes, I suppose you are right. I could not ask a man I have never before met to risk so much. But it is only because of my fear and affection for my lover, she who is more beautiful than any other in the world, that I am so desperate, for I worry that she may soon get herself hurt or worse.”

At these words, Death stopped his horse and turned back to look at Don Miguel.

“How so?” If the man were serious that Alma Maria was in any danger and that he might be responsible, Death knew he could not bear to live with himself.

“My lover came by to tell me that she plans to sneak here at night and attempt to free me so that we may run away together. She knows that I am innocent because we were together on the night of the murder which I have been accused of. But I am afraid that in the dark, a guard may catch her and anything could occur.”

Death did not continue into Figueras. Instead, he turned his horse around and returned to his home, which he did not leave for several days. He remained in his bed that very night when a beautiful girl was stabbed in her stomach. He remained in bed the following day as a handsome man who owned ten magnificent swords swung for four hours from his neck before they cut him down. And on the day of their wedding, he got out of bed only to brush his hair and hear them talk about miracles.

[catfishmera]

No. 6

Every good little wolf, from the day his eyes first open and his ears perk up towards the moon, knows to avoid Man’s Village. “That is their place, understand?” Blackfoot remembered how Paw Wolf had taken him all around the valley as part of his coming-of-age First Hunt years ago, stopping at the edge of the forest to show him the cluster of coarse inorganic shapes surrounded by a wall of shiny reeds netted together. “Just as we sleep peacefully in our caves on the mountains, man’s shelter is his city. The fence that circles his town was built long ago, not only to mark his territory and to keep us out, but to keep him in. This way, each side is safe from the other.”

“What about the forest, Paw?”

Paw Wolf turned his gray muzzle down to his son. “The forest is common ground to us both. Man and wolf equally rely on it for food and thus, as the Rule says, it is here that man is also free to hurt us and we them.”

Very few defied the Rule – it was essentially instinctual, so integral to the harmony between the two species that those who broke it were banned from the mountains to roam alone. The Rule was absolute; it was this same system that had decided that men would have the day and wolves would have the night, a diplomatic compromise established ages ago. And Blackfoot never questioned the Rule. He understood its purpose and though Man’s Village filled him with intrigue, he managed to suppress his curiosity. At least, until Mauler told him what they kept inside.

“I’m telling you, Blackie, they keep all the best stuff just hidden up there.” The two young wolves were loitering at Bone Point, a tall cliff at the edge of the mountains where other adolescent wolves went to lick with their significant others in the light of mid-day, unbeknownst to their sleeping parents. But now at night, the place seemed abandoned – the ground littered with crushed bones and the air filled with the strong intoxicating smell of spilt marrow. From Bone Point, the two wolves could see Man’s Village in the distance, the angular mounds ominous beneath a black cloud. “All it takes is someone brave enough to break in there and find the place!” Mauler information came from the cousin of a friend of his pack-mate White Fang who swore he had been there and seen it himself. “The softest, most delicious grub you could ever imagine, all stored in one place! You just gotta find the red X.”

Blackfoot wished Mauler hadn’t told him this. He now found it difficult to sleep at day, tossing and turning in his cave. His nights were spent hunting restlessly, each day venturing closer and closer to Man’s Village until he was spending every day just walking alongside its fence. Finally, after several weeks that seemed to drive him beyond his sanity, he found a tear in the barrier big enough for him to crawl through. He considered going back to find Mauler but his curiosity would not spare him a single second so he stepped inside.

Everything was suddenly so strange – Blackfoot felt as if he had been transported to another world. The scents were all different, blander, the air stagnant and musty. His paws didn’t sink lightly into the soil, instead resting on a long slab of solid rock. He thought how amazing it was that man had carved entire paths out of seamless, unbroken stone and even the houses were marvelously refined caves, shaped to look square and boxy, and spattered with countless stars in neat patterns along its outer walls. There was one peaked hill, shorter and open all along its side so that Blackfoot could see inside to where men sat, wearing their sleek fur loose around their skin, their front legs resting on counters, holding polished stones to their mouths and pouring black water straight into their throats. This cave had a sun inside, a light that was not warm and quivering like the one he had seen men put on the ground when they came to the woods at night, but bright and steady. Blackfoot worried that if men had the power to make it day time whenever they wanted, then they would make it so that the world was always their domain. But perhaps they were more honorable than Blackfoot had imagined and upheld the Rule regardless.

He had been prowling around lost for hours, pressed low to the ground to avoid being noticed. Several times large beasts had roared past him and, afraid they were patrolling the city, he stayed away from their shiny eyes. When he finally found it, the crossed red lines glowing like a star in the sky, he rushed to the entrance of its cave watching as men came and went. He waited until there was only one man and when she turned, facing him with her mane, he slunk inside.

But stealth no longer served him – everywhere he turned was just a series of brightly lit tunnels built of smooth white stone leaving him nowhere to hide. He could only run, his tongue hanging from his mouth, his eyes squinted so tightly he could hardly make out his surroundings. High-pitched screams and the clanging of fallen objects rang in his ears and before long he could hear the sound of many steps behind him, heavy like hooves, shouts, the loud chirp of a bird echoing, flashing red lights, following him as he ran faster and faster. He turned corner after corner, afraid he would soon run out of places to go. And then he stopped. There it was. Man’s secret stash. He tried to approach them but an invisible wall blocked his way. So instead, he stood and stared: small, succulent pink men, each individually wrapped, exquisite morsels of tender meat. Drool slipped from his tongue onto the polished stone at his feet.

[catfishmera]

No. 5

I stopped doing these because school made it so I was too busy. Now I don’t remember what the assignment was. Let’s pretend it was: write about a detective. (Shout out to my best friend Josue for creating the character back when we were primordial crud.)

It was five in the morning when the telephone rang. Slick had already been awake for fifteen minutes. He was sitting by his open window, watching as cigarette smoke tangled with the steam from his coffee mug, coalescing into a frail, translucent phantom that drifted away into the heavy Seattle fog. It amused him to imagine this as its source: thousands upon thousands of tormented souls, incapable of finding relief even in their sleep, waking every morning while the rest of the world still slept to breathe their smog over the entire city. It made him feel less alone, at least.

He arrived at the waterfront ten minutes later. Pike’s Place was already bustling with activity, loud with the sound of packed ice, the groaning of lifted boxes. But no one spoke; unshaven men walked mechanically past in their rubber boots, eyes downturned. Slick stepped cautiously around them, careful not to slip on the drenched cobblestone, over to where they held the evidence. It was a severed leg, sawed from the mid-calf down and sealed in a Ziplock freezer bag. That’s how they had found it, bag and foot, brought in with that morning’s cast in a net combing less than a mile into Elliot Bay. The foot appeared old and decaying, but the plastic bag was obviously new. This was something more than fishy – something was a foot.

There were already four boats searching the bay for more body parts. Slick found himself walking down one of the long piers, running every possible scenario through his head. If they had found the foot that close, more likely than not the body would have been dropped off of a dock much like this one, without even bothering to take it any further into the ocean. The pier still stretched ahead of him, vanishing into the fog. He had been walking for nearly ten minutes before it stopped. Two figures sat on opposite sides near the end, both facing away from the other and neither turning as Slick approached.

“Hey fellas. Been out here long?”

“Every morning for twenty years,” replied the man on the left, old, wrinkled, a wiry white neckbeard vanishing into the worn beanie on his head to encircle his hard face with a soft halo. He sat on the edge with his pole in his hands and his legs dangling above the waves.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been here every morning for twenty-two years,” said the man on the right from under his thick gray mustache, his back still turned to Slick and other fisherman. Both men were stone-faced, staring out into the sea as if their catch relied on their unbroken gaze.

“I’m an investigator, the name’s Detective Slick Saran. Any chance you gentlemen have seen anything suspicious within the last couple of days?”

The man on the left turned his head and signaled him over. “Yeah, I’ve seen something alright.” His voice had dropped to almost a whisper. “Between you and me, buddy, this guy behind me has been acting real funny lately. What kind of business you asking about anyway?”

“Just something we found in the water. A suitcase full of money.”

“A suitcase, huh? Yeah, come to think of it, just like a week ago, I noticed him come out here a bit earlier than usual. I was still in my car but I’m positive he had a suitcase with him as he passed by. And he was acting real nervous-like too.”

“Hmm, thanks. Got a name for him?”

Slick wrote down the fisherman’s information and rose from his crouched squat. As he turned to go back towards the market, the other man whistled at him. Slick walked over.

“Ey, what did he tell you, huh? Something going on?”

“Just trying to solve a mystery. We found a backpack stuffed with cocaine that washed up close by.”

“Oh yeah, a backpack? Well, let me tell you, that guy behind me, I saw him walk out here just a few days ago with a real suspicious feel, like looking over his shoulders you know, and he had a backpack in his arms. I’ll bet you anything it’s his.”

“What kind of lies is he telling you?!” The voice came from the other side. The second man turned and both fishermen were staring at each other.

“You best shut up, you old crab! Your head is more full of saltwater than the ocean!”

“Look at who’s talking, you gull-brained idiot!”

“Well why don’t you hobble over here and do something about it?”

The first man swung his legs up onto the dock and slowly stood up. Slick saw that at the end of his right leg was a stout wooden peg. His face was gushed red with anger and he looked at the detective while pointing a thick, calloused finger at the man with the mustache.

“Alright, I don’t know nothing about no suitcase of money, but I should be the one reporting a theft. Twenty years ago, when we worked on the same ship, I lost my foot and my job because of him. And ever since, I’ve brought my foot with me whenever I go fishing – take it outta its jar where I keep it pickled, pack it in my ice chest along with whatever I catch. I know it’s kind of odd but it’s my foot and it brings me luck at that. That is until a week ago when this rat threw it into the ocean.”

“Oh shut it, again with the foot? Let’s not forget what you did to me.” He turned his head so Slick could see the scar where a left ear would have been. “I got kicked off that ship too and what’s more is: I didn’t touch your foot!”

“Then who did? Ain’t no one here every day but us two and I know you was waiting that day last week for when I was reeling in that snapper cause when I turned around, that’s when it was gone!”

The man on the right stared down into the waves, fuming, and turned back around.

“Oh yeah? Well, you’ve been stealing my bait for years!”

“Well, you keep cutting all my crab traps!”

The two men were yelling again. Slick Saran was headed back to bed.

[catfishmera]

No. 4

This week's assignment involves describing a city street after having just committed a murder.

Everyone loves to complain about the suburbs. Or maybe that’s no longer true and only applies to sitcoms and American history lectures on the Fifties. There’s just something so pitiable about it – stagnant, idealistic, a quicksand trap for the meek and unambitious. Plastic houses for cookie-cut citizens. A Shangri-La for the 9 to 5 man to store his mannequin wife, his two-and-a-half kids, and his integrity. Someone once called it “the final battleground of the American dream”. That was Harlan Coben, I think. He was wrong though because nothing about this place is a battleground; it’s everything but. Not quite heaven on earth, but a spoiler at least, and with that model home feel to it. It’s just all too perfect.

Look, you can stand here, just like this, right in the middle of the road and see it. Let your eyes follow the painted stripe all the way down and all the way back and then look to either side: uncanny symmetry. You could place a mirror along this line and it couldn’t be more exact. The black tarmac flows evenly to both sides and ends in two equidistant shores of gray cement. Driveways form neat beaches that rise into corresponding palaces, each surrounded by trim lawns and joined by tidy sidewalks. I salute the nearest tree, a scrawny sentinel still too young to be any good at his job, but I can see that they all are – one in each yard, evenly spaced apart, guarding empty fortresses. Every house is the same; some are just painted or shaped a little different. Some houses can be one story or two stories but they are still the same.

There is no one around. If I look down at my watch, at the red hands, I will know why. It’s noon on a weekday, when the everyman is out and about, away at work or running errands, the kids at school, etc. But even still, when would you see them? People live between doors; from the entrance of their homes and into their cars, they are seen for only a moment before they disappear. Maybe it’s better this way, with invisible neighbors. People are ignorant and dull and self-obsessed. They’re only concerned with their own problems, how their suit looks when it’s starched and pressed, how their makeup hangs to their faces and their hair sprouts from their fragile skulls. People can be so cruel and unforgiving. They can do terrible things to each other.

So maybe I like how bland the suburbs are. I like that nothing thrilling ever happens, how every day is a continuation of the last. It’s better this way. It makes you believe the world is a quiet place. Not entirely silent, not dead, but with like a low register hum that makes you stop and stand still to hear it. I can taste the springtime here. Birds chirping from the nearby trees. Cats disappearing beneath cars. Anxious red hands. How the sun fills your eyes with too much brilliance, laying a veil over everything it touches like a photograph with the contrast reduced. The suburbs are a banquet for the senses. The distant sound of a lawnmower. The nauseating smell of iron. A cool breeze picking up and then vanishing. The roaring of sirens. Blood red hands. It’s hot and the sun is moving slowly in the cloudless sky; I set my knife down on the warm pavement and take off my coat.

#english141 shortstory fiction

[catfishmera]

No. 3

This week involves an interaction between three characters and has to continue/modify a previously written story.

Everything about Red-Nose spelled trouble – the clenched fists, the hurried step, the eyes blindly focused ahead, only half visible beneath his sloping eyebrows. They saw him for only a moment as he passed quickly by the entrance of the tent. Claude and Dan looked at each other, a silent assurance that neither had been alone in observing the clown’s obvious fury. Claude grabbed his top hat to follow. Perhaps this was what Madame Luciana had read in his cards earlier that week. The Tower: a great disturbance. Chaos.

“What do you think’s going on?” asked Strongman Dan as they ducked under the opening of the tent, turning in the direction the clown had disappeared towards.

“I don’t know. But I have a horrible feeling about this.”

By the time they opened the door to Petey’s changing room, Red-Nose’s hands were already around the other clown’s neck. Claude had to peel away the relentless fingers while Dan pulled him back by his arms.

“What the hell is going on in here? What’s wrong with you, Red?” Claude was yelling, his face as crimson as the fuming clown’s now recovered prop. Red was thrashing in Dan’s grasp, hissing, foam gathering in the corners of his mouth.

Petey gulped in air and struggled to speak. “Don’t blame him please, sir. It’s- It’s all my fault. I must have just been trying to pull a prank on Red by taking his nose. Please don’t get mad at him.”

“Don’t get mad?” Claude was mad. “He had his hands wrapped around your throat and you’re telling me not to get mad? I can’t run circus like this with my star running around trying to murder the other acts. What’s gotten into you, Red?”

“He took it! He took my nose!”

“Calm down! You got it back, didn’t you?” Claude turned to face the other clown and sighed. “Is this true, Petey? Because you know how firm I am about our rules. This circus runs like a family and that means we don’t steal from each other. And even if this was just a prank, you of all people know how Red gets about his nose.”

“Well, I guess it’s all true, sir,” Petey stammered.

“What do you mean, ‘I guess’?”

“I mean I don’t really remember taking it, sir, but sure enough I did have it and I pulled it out from behind his ear.”

“Oh that is it!” cried Red, striving harder to break free from Dan’s grip. “He just keeps going on like that, acting innocent like he doesn’t have a clue how he got the nose. He’s the only one who knows where I hide it between shows, but he just keeps shaking his head like it’s some big mystery. Just own up to it before I shove my foot down your throat!”

“Ok, ok, everybody relax.” Claude massaged his temples, his head threatening to split in two. It was at times like these that he missed the simpler days, nothing to worry about but sticking his head into a lion’s mouth. That had been half a century ago; now he ran the whole circus and as its ringleader, his head was subject to the crushing pressure and razor-sharp pain that his younger self had been so fortunate to narrowly escape every night.

“Alright, listen up you two. Red, you need to get yourself together. You’re our top act and I need you to settle down. You’re too important to us for you to lose it like this. Just keep reminding yourself, your show brings in five times the audience as the next most popular act and that’s just because Gustav is a hypnotist and he’s been demanding we advertise him extra hard these last couple of months. He’s still got nothing on you, no one here does. And you Petey, I don’t know what kind of crap you’re trying to prove with this forgetful bit but cut it out. We need to all be together on thi-”

But Claude had stopped midsentence. He was thinking.

“Red, what was it you were saying to Petey right before he seemed to come to? Before he brought out your nose?”

“Uh, I don’t know. I was just yelling in his face, telling him stuff like how I was gonna knock him so hard that he’d never wake up.”

At these final words, Petey seemed to give a little jolt. “Huh, what’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you what’s going on. I think you’ve been set up, Petey. I think someone’s jealous of being number two and they hypnotized you in order to mess with Red.”

“Aw that good-for-nothing, scumbag…” Red was struggling to break out of Dan’s grasp again.

“Cool it, Red. I’ll go talk to him.”

The outside air was cold. Claude hadn’t realized how heavily he had been sweating. Gustav’s trailer was across the fairgrounds but that was fine. It gave him a chance to calm himself, regain his composure. Everything seemed so tranquil under a layer of night. The big top without its glaring lights and loud music became a somber mausoleum. The sleeping shapes of elephants melted into the ground. He passed the lion’s cage – the beast was still awake, pacing along the sides of its enclosure. Its emerald eyes reflected bright moonlight; they met his and both stared at each other. Claude remembered when this circus had meant nothing but pure, uncompromising fun, when his terrors came from true death-defying thrill, not these conscientious, managerial dramas. He had felt invincible, indomitable, the king of the king of the beasts. He looked away from the lion’s gaze over to Gustav’s trailer in the distance. That talk could wait fifteen, twenty minutes, he thought, and as he stepped into the cage, he felt freer than he had in years.

#english141

[catfishmera]

No. 2

I am taking my first creative writing class and we are asked to write short stories, less than 1000 words, weekly. Each one has some sort of prompt/requirement (for example, this week involved an interaction between two characters with the potential for romance) and sometimes we are asked to continue or modify a previous story.

It began in irony and ended in unity. Everyone had assumed that someone else would take care of the problem, going about their own business, entering the back storeroom day in and day out, chuckling to themselves as they gathered long cylindrical T12s from the metal racks lining the walls of the small windowless room or rummaged through boxes of 60-watt incandescents – all while the amber light of that single flickering bulb convulsed above them. “Imagine that,” O’Neal had remarked on Monday, “electricians who won’t even bother changing their own lights.”

But it was now Thursday and neither he nor any one had done anything to resolve the situation. A slow day: two phone calls had sent Parker and O’Neal to opposite ends of Minneapolis and apart from the infrequent customer, Frank Littleton found himself alone with his coworker Sam McDonald, an unfinished inventory, and an uncomfortable silence. He prayed desperately for foot traffic, any distraction to alleviate the tension he was sure only he felt. Maybe he had forgotten to turn on their neon OPEN sign, he wondered, but even before he could check the glowing letters hanging below the words “A-1 Electrics”, Sam broke the silence.

“Only 11 and it’s already dead,” he said, his voice deep but humorous. Frank watched his peer’s mouth as he spoke, admiring Sam’s full pink lips which contrasted handsomely with his dark brown face, startlingly white teeth completing the neapolitan complexion. “How about we just hit the inventory early, Frank? Get it out of the way.”

Frank assented, already feeling beads of sweat forming on his small pink turnip nose and dripping into the thick brown mustache below. He could feel his flabby cheeks growing red, electric coil burners in both tint and temperature. Slowly he walked to the storage room door, Sam following him with a clipboard.

“I tell you, it’s weird, man, coming from the South, but I’m really learning to love Minneapolis. You gotta let me know where all the good bars and clubs are though, alright?”

Sam was providing all the small talk and Frank still felt hopeless. He was glad that his back was to his coworker, hiding the embarrassment that racked his face and engrossed his thoughts from the monotonous counting of halogen globes. Clubs? Frank was now in his forties and painfully aware he was balding, but even in his youth he had been too timid and self-conscious of his sexuality to go to such places. He knew Sam was not that much younger either; mid-thirties, he had found out from the job application he had helped review three weeks ago, right when Sam had moved in from Louisiana.

“Oh, clubs? Well ah, ya see, there’re some good ones around, I spose-”. And by perhaps some celestial intervention unable to bear his graceless stammering, just then the filament of that single flickering bulb sizzled and the room hushed into darkness.

“Damn, man! That’s what you get when you wait so long,” came Sam’s voice from the other end of the room.

“It’s okay,” called back Frank. “I’ve already got a bulb in my hand. I just have to find the center of the room and I’ll have it changed in a jiff.”

He stood up from his crouched position and began slowly feeling his way, arms stretched above his head. His leg hit something and a shatter sounded by his feet.

“You alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

He was making a fool of himself. Sam was going to think he was as clumsy as he was overweight and awkward. Wonderful. Maybe he simply needed to face the fact that he didn’t stand a chance. Why had he felt some sort of chemistry with the other electrician when he had been applying for the position? Now all that played through Frank’s head was how Sam had left work early two nights ago to pick up a woman named Lisa from the airport and he knew she was staying with him, at least for some time. Frank needed to abandon these feelings quick; clearly Sam was not only out of his league, but playing an entirely other ballgame.

Then his hand touched warm glass. His fingertips gripped the bulb for a second, feeling its smoothness, the warmth draining from its cooling cadaver, before he felt something else: heat, smothering his hand, rough but gentle contact. He was momentarily startled until realizing that Sam’s hand had likewise found the center of the room and had enveloped Frank’s fingers. The instance seemed strange, surreal, but stranger still when the lifeless lightbulb flickered back on. Perhaps it had only loosened. A small scatter of sparks danced between their fingers and Frank found himself staring into Sam’s eyes.

“Well would you look at that? It’s still going,” uttered Sam with a smile, his hand still over Frank’s. “I’ve been meaning to ask, man, if you’re doing anything later? See, my sister’s in town for a bit and I’d love to introduce you to her.”

Frank felt his heart flicker, electric.

#english141

[catfishmera]

No. 1

I am taking my first creative writing class and we are asked to write short stories, less than 1000 words, weekly. Each one has some sort of prompt/requirement (for example, this week involved a confrontation between two characters) and sometimes we are asked to continue or modify a previous story.

It was now late at night and the fairgrounds were empty of visitors. Petey sat in front of his mirror – his shaky fingers slowly dabbing at his face, revealing small patches of pale, baggy skin. He was beginning to feel vulnerable, exposed with every touch, betrayed by the twelve small bulbs lining the mirror; his face, though void of shadows, felt obscured. His fingers hadn’t stopped shaking since the end of that night’s performance, long before he heard the quick slapping of thick rubber soles on the steps outside his trailer. There was a pause, perhaps a consideration to knock, before the door opened violently. Petey tried remaining casual by not turning in his chair, his head unnaturally still but his disloyal eyes leaping to the mirror, searching for the expression of his intruder.

“Where is it, Petey?”

He had never heard Red-Nose use such a harsh, accusing tone. His voice, so characteristically whimsical, like a frog attempting a falsetto, now sounded low and irate.

“I- I don’t know what you m-mean, Red.”

But there was no doubt in Red-Nose’s mind. However much he wished that it wouldn’t be so, Red-Nose was absolutely certain. After thirty-four years together, he had feared that it would eventually come to this. Since their earlier days in clown-college, Red-Nose’s prominent likeability and popularity had made Petey self-conscious. Red-Nose had often seen the dejected look on his friend’s face as swarms of children ran past him, ignoring Petey’s enthusiastic honking in order to crowd around the star clown.

So now Petey had gone and done it. He had broken that most sacred commandment of clowning and stolen a fellow jester’s nose. His reason for this approach still confused Red-Nose: was it meant simply to hurt him by taking away his defining emblem, his most valued treasure handed down to him by his uncle, the late and great Curly Sal; or perhaps it was a sort of test, to see if he really was worthy of his fame even without his iconic appendage? The nose was certainly no novelty – there existed none bigger or brighter in the entire clown community. Red-Nose himself was unsure as to how much of his popularity was accredited to that crimson sphere, and the more he considered its loss, the further anxious he grew. Of all people, Petey knew how it would affect him. He had noticed Petey watching him often, entranced as he polished it to a shimmering vinyl every night.

“You don’t want to do this. Just give it back to me.”

Petey turned around slowly in his chair. He struggled to keep his face calm but Red-Nose could see thin canals of sweat rolling down his forehead, streaking through the remainder of his makeup and culminating in little clumps on his chin. Petey was a terrible actor, had always been, and could hardly keep a straight face.

“Gosh R-Red, you gonna tell me what’s up?” he stammered.

Red-Nose walked up to Petey and, grabbing him by the wide frill of his collar, lifted him backwards into the mirror. He held him there, his face inches away from his friend’s, his brow so furled in anger that his painted skin cracked, crumbling in slabs and mixing with the glass of several broken lightbulbs. Just an hour ago they had been so close, pressed cheek to cheek with nine other colleagues in a tiny automobile, and now he felt as if he held a stranger in his hands. He must already have been planning his betrayal then, but how far back did this plot go?

“I ain’t a fool,” said the clown. “Give me back the nose, Petey!”

“I don’t have it! I don’t have it! I swear!”

“I know you do and I ain’t leaving until you give it back.” Red-Nose pressed him tighter against the glass.

“No! I swear I don’t! No! No!”

The two clowns trembled together: one in anger, the other in fear; one shouting, demanding his nose, the other mumbling back ‘no’s and ‘I don’t knows’. Red-Nose roared, toughening his grip around Petey’s collar and knocking him against the mirror, all while his longtime companion sobbed deeply. And then, their faces still inches apart, Red-Nose noticed a flash in Petey’s wet, silvery eyes, a quick glance at the side of Red’s head as if noticing something for the first time, and although still pressed against the glass, Petey slowly lifted his quivering arm, his hand grabbing for Red-Nose’s ear.

“Wha-what’s that?” Petey muttered, his voice garbled by surprise and sadness as he brought his hand cautiously forward from behind his friend’s head, his finger’s pinching that red orb of lustrous plastic. Red-Nose was frozen in confusion, his hands still at Petey’s neck, his mouth open in disbelief. Petey likewise looked stunned. Petey had never been good enough to perform this trick. Even pennies would fumble from his hands down people’s shirts or fall from his fingers before he could reach behind them. Could it be that he had actually left it behind his ear by mistake? He looked down at Petey, who for thirty-four years had been like his brother, and let out a shaky laugh. Petey, nervously, smiled back.

#english141