B.H. James

Short Fiction

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Bob Sanders, of course, is a fictional character. As such, he does not actually exist. Never has, never will. Bob Sanders is the fictional creation of the author B.H. James, who, in real life, isn’t an author at all, just a guy named Bill who teaches high school English at the local high school.

To the extent that Bob does exist, which he technically doesn’t, he does so as a fictional version of Bill. Bob is Bill on paper. Sort of.

MONDAY 8/9/21

Yesterday, which was the eighth of August, 2021, Bill was with his family in Santa Cruz, CA. It was Day Two of a two-day trip. Santa Cruz is just over two hours from Bill’s home, which is in Stockton, CA. Bill and his wife were taking their two sons on a vacation after the first week of school. The boys were in third and first grades. Bill’s wife also teaches high school English at the local high school.

You may have noticed that, unlike Bill, Bob Sanders doesn’t have a hometown, or, more accurately, Bob’s hometown doesn’t have a name, as Bill’s does. You, whoever you are, may also have noticed that Bob and his wife Linda don’t have jobs, or that their jobs don’t have names, like “teaches high school English at the local high school.” That’s because neither Bob nor Linda exist.

Bill and his wife and his boys spent the first day of their two-day vacation at the beach. They played in the sand and in the waves and rode the rides on the Boardwalk.

TUESDAY 8/10/21

That was three days ago. Yesterday, when Bill wrote everything from “Bob Sanders, of course, is a fictional character” up to “Bill and his wife and his boys spent the first day of their two-day vacation at the beach,” seventy-five words back, it had been two days ago, the Monday morning after their two-day trip. Bill, that morning—yesterday morning—had stopped at “Bill and his wife and his boys spent the first day of their two-day vacation at the beach” because he had reached the bottom of the page.” Bill gets up at five, every morning, to drink a cup of coffee and fill one page of a spiral notebook. Bill, at this very moment, with these very words, is doing just that, on Tuesday morning, two days since his family’s two-day trip, working his way across and down a thirty-three line sheet of binder paper spiral-bound to one hundred and nineteen other such sheets, at the bottom of which he will stop and, in theory, begin again, or simply continue, on Wednesday morning, at the top of the next sheet.

WEDNESDAY 8/11/21

Bill and his wife and his two boys, having spent Day One of their two-day trip at the beach, spent Day Two of their two-day trip in the forest. Bill, early in the morning of Day Two, in the travel trailer, parked at the RV park, woke up and thought of the line “Bob Sanders, of course, is a fictional character,” then the line, “As such, he does not actually exist,” and so on. Bill stayed awake for at least an hour, repeating those lines, which, twenty-four hours later, he would write out in his spiral notebook, just as, forty-eight hours after that, it now being Wednesday, he would write these words (including this one) onto a subsequent page of the same notebook.

Bill, in the travel trailer, couldn’t go back to sleep because his mind was busy imagining an argument between Bill and the new work experience guy, whose office was at the end of the hallway, just down from Bill’s classroom, and who Bill didn’t care for simply because this new work experience guy was a bit too enthusiastic about things and talked a bit too loud for Bill’s taste, and in this hallway argument that Bill’s mind had created and which Bill’s mind had begun in media res such that Bill had no idea what had sparked the argument, Bill, in what Bill, lying in bed in the gooseneck of a travel trailer in a forest, thought to be a rather Bob Sanders-ish thing to say, told the new work experience guy, who usually wore shorts and a tee shirt and a ball cap, that he should go ahead and get dressed like a grown man before coming to work.

THURSDAY 8/12/21

Bill has been writing Bob Sanders stories since 2013, shortly after the publication of Bill’s first and as yet only novel. The novel was called Parnucklian for Chocolate. It, or an early draft of it, had been Bill’s MFA thesis. The novel hadn’t done all that well. Bill had several dozen copies stacked in a cardboard Pampers box stuffed in a cabinet in his office. Six months before the book’s publication, Bill’s first son was born, and nine months after said publication, Bill and his wife and their fifteen-month-old son moved into their new home, and it was in his new office in their new home, which would later become their second son’s bedroom, that Bill, after reading several stories from George Saunders’s collection Tenth of December, wrote his first Bob Sanders sentence (“Bob Sanders stood in his living room, shoulders squared to the wall upon which hung the third 32” flat screen Smart TV Bob had owned in two years.”), and, in the weeks that followed, Bill finished his first Bob Sanders story, titled Wiff and later published in the Summer 2015 issue of F(r)iction Magazine, of which Bill has six copies, Bill just now realizing, as he writes these words, including this one, on Thursday morning, four days after the second day of Bill and his family’s two-day trip, that, thirteen years ago, back in 2008, Bill had been reading, coincidentally, George Saunders’s collection Pastoralia before writing the first sentence (“Josiah eats chocolate.”)—in subsequent drafts the eighth sentence—and first several pages of his eventual not-all-that-successful novel.

FRIDAY 8/13/21

Having decided, on Friday morning, that Wednesday morning’s and Thursday morning’s digressions from said statement had digressed far too far for a seamless, uncontrived segue back to it, Bill starting again from three paragraphs and five hundred and eighty-two words back, (re)writes:

Bill and his wife and their two boys (nearly-nine and newly-six), having spent Day One of their two-day trip at the beach, spent Day Two of their two-day trip in the forest. On Day One, between breakfast and beach, Bill had, at his wife’s request, looked up on his phone info on the train rides at the state park around the corner from the RV park in which they were camped, Bill discovering that while there were no available seats at any times on Day One, he could book seats for a mid-morning departure on Day Two, which, with his wife in agreement, he did. 

So, twenty-four hours later, after breakfast, Bill and family drove over to the state park in plenty of time for a walk through the redwoods before the aforementioned departure time, and, it is in the parking lot of this state park where this story, to the extent that it is one, really begins.

MONDAY 8/16/21

First things first, though: the centrality of Bill’s wife to this part of this story necessitates, in order to ease its telling, a name for the character of Bill’s wife (for, though Bill fully intends [now, on Monday morning, having taken the weekend off from writing] to tell this true tale just as it happened eight days ago, the fact of its transfer from occurrence to memory to words formed by ink on paper makes it, however slightly or greatly, a fictionalized version of this eight-day old occurrence, and therefore the character “Bill” is likewise a fictionalized version of the forty-two-year old bearded man in his pajamas hunched over his grandfather’s desk writing this word and this one [to review: the character Bill, who is now parking his truck in the state park parking lot, is a fictionalized version of the man named Bill who is writing these words down on paper {including this one} and is also the man who writes down the stories about Bob Sanders {also a fictionalized version of this man, those stories, of which thirteen so far have been written and seven published, are attributed to the author B.H. James, also also a fictionalized version of this same man}]), and likewise this man’s wife, her name, as she would probably prefer, withheld, is a living breathing walking talking human whose actual actions eight days ago will be re-performed (or, at least, a fictionalized version of those actions) by the fictionalized version of that person, so far referred to as Bill’s wife, and, as such, that character now needs a name.

WEDNESDAY 8/18/21

And given that Bob Sanders’s wife Linda is also a fictionalized version of the same living-breathing-walking-talking human to which the soon-to-be-named is also a fictionalized version, and that said Linda’s name shares the same first letter as the withheld name of said human, the Bill who writes this and that word will (now, on Wednesday morning [rough start to work week, but that’s another story]) christen the character of Bill’s wife, sitting beside the character Bill as he pulls into the state park parking lot, with a name phonetically representing said shared opening letter: Elle.

Now on with the story:

Bill and Elle and their two boys, newly-six and nearly-nine, in Bill’s and Elle’s and their two boys’ newish pickup truck, pulled into the parking lot of the state park around the corner from the RV park, windows down to let in the cool, coastal, morning air, with the intention of enjoying a brisk walk through the redwoods, and though the lot was beginning to fill with cars and trucks carrying other families with similar intentions, the lot was mostly still empty.

The parking lot consisted of half a dozen strips of dirt and gravel between sections of pavement. Drive on the pavement, pull onto the dirt/gravel to park. 

Bill pulled into one of the gravel rows that was filling up, and despite Bill leaving a car length and then some between his truck and the car of the family next to them, Bill and Elle and the two boys could hear, through their open windows and over the diesel engine, a woman, presumably Elle’s motherly counterpart in this also-four-member family unit, seemingly in a struggle to find sweaters (cool coastal air) for the two shivering children standing next to her car, say, loudly, “Jesus Christ, do they have to park right on top of us?”

SATURDAY 8/21/21

Here’s where this whole project gets dicey: Bill, the human, writing these words on Saturday morning, now thirteen days after the fact, isn’t actually quite sure what this lady—this insufferable lady who, if this story every finally gets told, you will see was insufferable enough to prompt Elle to break character—actually did say. In fact, as human Bill, thirteen days ago, pulled into the afore-described parking spot, despite the windows being down in the cool coastal air, his family didn’t actually hear anything at all over roar of diesel engine. It’s just that human Bill, but no one else, saw lady look at truck in pissed-off way then heard lady say something inaudible in pissed-off way, then look again at truck and at family, as family got out of truck, over and over again in pissed-off way, so when, after first pissed-off look and inaudible pissed-off statement, the human represented by character Elle, still in cab of truck, asked human Bill, “Everything okay?” human Bill answering, loud enough for lady to hear over engine, looking pissed-offedly back at pissed-off-looking lady, “I don’t know. Is she talking to us?”

MONDAY 8/23/21

“What’d she say?” the character Elle said.

“She doesn’t like how we parked,” the character Bill said. “I left an entire car length and then some.”

“Width,” the character Elle said.

“Right,” the character Bill said. “Width,” and as Bill and Elle helped their already-sweatered two boys out of the truck and the four walked toward the train depot, the character Bill (just like the human Bill, who, fifteen days ago, spoke none of the dialogue above, at least not as written by the human Bill) gave a dirty look as they passed (both Bills’ dirty looks consisting of making the eyebrows ask, What the heck is your problem?), first to the lady’s husband, who reacted not at all, and then to the lady, Bill holding the latter just a bit longer before turning forward toward their day.

Something like this happens pretty much every day to Bill. Pretty much every day, Bill, who wants to be a person who sees the best in everyone and who basks in the goodwill of his fellow man but is instead a person whose instinct is to assume that every other person walking the planet with him is a person who is about to do something, or has just done something, that is an affront to Bill, an affront that is consciously and specifically targeted at Bill with the assumption that Bill is not a man with either the will or the ability to do anything about that affront.

So, Bill goes through most of his life with teeth and shoulders clenched, imagining scenarios in which such an affront (entirely imagined in the first place) plays out and Bill, in the interest of justice, must respond forcefully, mightily, pointedly. For example, Bill, who has been a teacher for fifteen years, often imagines a staff meeting wherein the speaker—sometimes the principal, sometimes a guest of some kind, maybe the superintendent—says something outrageous and insulting to the staff and an outraged Bill rushed forward in defense but is held back by his colleagues, or sometimes Bill imagines being in a smaller meeting, in a smaller room, with like the principals and assistant principals and so on, and one of the assistant principals says something so outrageous and insulting that Bill climbs over the table to get to the outrageous insulter but is held back by another, more just assistant principal.

WEDNESDAY 8/25/21

The day before this story takes place, seventeen days ago, Bill must’ve imagined at least thirty distinct altercations with fellow vacationers, of whom there were so, so many, at the beach-slash-boardwalk, the most distinct of these imagined altercations, and only ones left in Bill’s memory after seventeen days, being a recurring imagined scenario in which some villain on the very-crowded boardwalk bumped very hard into one of Bill’s children, forcing Bill to have to push that villain very hard to the ground or to grab that villain by the throat, like Darth Vader, and lift them into the air. But, in reality, as often is the case, there was no affront, no one bumped into his kids. Everyone, even the villainous-looking, watched they were going.

THURSDAY 8/26/21

All day, every day, the human Bill imagines altercations, in response to imagined altercations, in response to imagined affronts, and occasionally these imaginings become stories about Bob Sanders, a fictionalized version of Bill, those stories attributed, if published, to the author B.H. James, another fictionalized version of Bill, but in this story, which Bill is still writing, eighteen days later, though he has his doubts about it, the character Bill (another, etc.) has indeed been affronted by an insufferable, huffy woman, and, as is his character, Bill, as his family walked toward the train depot, imagined various altercations he might have, mostly with the woman’s husband—one such ending with Bill asking the man, who in all imagined altercations was unresponsive, how he manages to live with such a cunt—but, once Bill and his family had redeemed their train tickets and toured the little old west town and had their picnic, Bill forgot all about the other family of four, until

SATURDAY 8/28/21

On Wednesday—that morning having handwritten the page of fiction ending in the word until, intending the following morning (Thursday) to continue that prepositional phrase and thereby finish that sentence (already, at until, 162 words long) and possibly, just possibly, on Thursday or Friday, finish telling this story—Bill, the human, got into an actual, unimagined altercation with the work experience guy down the hall, and now Bill, on Saturday morning, his story, despite his aforementioned intent, having remained suspended at until through Thursday and Friday, will attempt to, albeit briefly, tell that story, Bill determining it somewhat relevant to this one, via ink on paper, thereby, intentionally or not, fictionalizing it.

Basically, it goes like this: Bill, the human teacher, has an autistic student who doesn’t like being around people, especially crowds of them, and therefore spends his lunchtime in the quiet classroom of one of his teachers, but at lunchtime on Wednesday, as the student, to get to said quiet classroom, made his way down the upstairs hallway, where students are not allowed without permission, the work experience guy, his actual job taking up about an hour a month and thus, with nothing else to do, having deputized himself as assistant campus security monitor, started shouting at the student about being in the hallway and what not, so Bill, whose door was propped open for the student to enter and thus having heard the shouting, went into the hallway, sent the student into the classroom, and then got into the face of the work experience guy, who in turn got into Bill’s face, and Bill and the work experience guy, both masked like bandits, started really giving it to each other, and each of their half-covered faces got really red, and though it didn’t come to blows, and though Bill doesn’t remember the opening or middle dialogue all that well (other than snippets, such as telling the guy not to bark at the student like that and reminding the guy that he’s not a campus security monitor but instead the work experience guy, the guy responding, as if offended at being called “the work experience guy,” that he’s a “teacher. A TEACHER!”), Bill does remember that it all ended with Bill, still in the guy’s face, pointing his finger at the guy’s chest and saying, “You don’t talk to him like that. I’m not going to tell you again,” to which the work experience guy, quite puffed up, replied, “And you don’t talk to me like that. I’m not going to tell you again,” after which Bill and the work experience guy went back into their respective work areas.

WEDNESDAY 9/1/21

until it was time to board the train. Bill (the character) and Elle and the two boys stepped up to one of the cars, one end of which was in the shade. It so happened that Bill and Elle and the boys were the first to step up to that car, a roofless rectangle with benches along its inner perimeter, and thus they were the first, when the time came to board, to board the car, choosing to sit across from one another—one parent and one son on each side—on the shady end of the car.

Unbeknownst to Bill’s family of four, the other family of four, last seen in the parking lot, were behind Bill and Elle and boys, in line for the same car, despite the train having five other cars to choose from, and as Bill and Elle and boys took their seats, Elle heard, though Bill did not, the woman say to her husband, “Jesus Christ, are they just going to take every inch of shade?” 

The husband didn’t say anything. Didn’t respond or react in any way. He might, in fact, have been dead.

As the second family of four entered the car, the woman huffed at Bill and his family and gave them dirty looks. She ushered her husband and children to the opposite end of the car, where they sat down in the sun and where the woman proceeded, while casting frequent astonished stares at Bill and Elle, to frantically lather her poor shriveling children in sunblock, after which the woman dramatically draped a towel over her head.

That’s pretty much it. Not much else to tell. No further progression. No climactic confrontation with the woman or her dead husband. No further interaction with her or him at all. Just a long, slow, pleasant train ride followed by the walk back to the truck.

But it was on the walk back to the truck that Elle, the character, turned to Bill, as did, twenty-four days ago, the human of which Elle is a fictionalized version, and asked, “Should I write cunt on their windshield?”

THURSDAY 9/2/21

The point, if there is one, of this story, if it is one, is that while Bill the human spends all day every day perceiving affronts to proper behavior and/or justice and thus imagining altercations he might have with the villains responsible for these affronts, sometimes turning those imagined altercations into stories about Bob Sanders, Bill’s wife, L—, as demonstrated by her fictional counterpart, Bob’s wife Linda, serves as the foil to Bill, or to Bob. The rational juxtaposed with the ridiculous.

Bill thus assumed, last Wednesday, after his argument with the work experience guy, that he would return to Elle to be laughed at, or even admonished for such an overreaction, such a childish display—once, years earlier, after Bill had told a man at the zoo to “Mind his business,” Elle had scooped up the baby and the toddler and rushed to the car—but instead, last Wednesday, Elle hugged Bill, told him she was proud of him, told the story, a version in which Bill was the hero, over the next couple of days to anyone who would listen, and Bill also assumed, twenty-five days ago, that should Elle learn of the things that Bill imagined saying and/or doing to that woman and/or her maybe-dead husband, Elle would likewise laugh at him, or admonish him, for such an overreaction, but instead, in her profane question-slash-suggestion, Elle demonstrated that, in that moment, Bill and Elle (Bob and Linda) were of the same mind. Not foils at all.

FRIDAY 9/3/21

And, so, when, twenty-six days ago, after buckling their two boys into the truck, parked in the state park parking lot, Elle took from the truck’s center console a post-it note and a pen and wrote a note and showed it to Bill and it said, How do you live with such an insufferable cunt, Bill wondered, in the work of fiction that this story would become (is becoming, now, as the human Bill writes this word, and this one), if Elle is not his foil, then who is she, and, then, when Bill, twenty-six days ago, was the one who convinced Elle not to post the post-it note on the other (parallel) family’s windshield but instead put it back in the center console—keep it, as it made for a good story—Bill wondered if, in this work of fiction, if this counted as a role reversal, if Bob had become Linda and Linda Bob, like Quixote and Panza, but then Bill the human (who never, twenty-six days ago, actually wondered any of this but, twenty-six days later, made Bill the character, with ink on paper, wonder all of it) realized, as he wrote these words (including this one) that there had been no role reversal, that Bill and L were not characters, and they are not in a work of fiction, or a play, or a drama of any kind, they are in Life—bright, full, vibrating Life—

SUNDAY 9/5/21

and while Linda, being fictional, may be the foil to Bob, also fictional, Bill’s wife is not his foil, never has been, though Bill, he now realizes, too often treats her as such, but twenty-eight days ago, as they drove out of the state park parking lot, her hand in his on the center console, B and L were, as they always had been, and always would be, partners.

END

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B.H. James is the author of Parnucklian for Chocolate and co-author of A Sea of Troubles: Pairing Literary and Informational Texts to Address Social Inequality. He teaches English in Stockton, CA, where he lives with his wife and two sons.

Photo Credit: Minta Samii is from Iran. She started photography 2 years ago and is very interested in documentary and street photography. Many of her works have been published in domestic and foreign books and magazines. She is the judge of the International Association of Yarushat and the artistic editor of the association’s magazine.