Jon Doughboy

Short Fiction

While digesting five literary creatures the writing snake opens its mouth with this question < What if there is no audience? Because people don’t read and if they do read, they read YA books about self-pitying teenagers overcoming obstacles in a hero with a thousand faces arc except the hero doesn’t have a thousand faces, he just has one and it’s a shitty face, let’s face it, folks, it sucks, and what if there is no audience (POEM) because people don’t read and that this is fine, actually, because reading is an elitist project and films are better anyway, more entertaining, as are video games as is going out and doing anything, with anyone—playing hopscotch, promenading with a parasol, changing brake pads and rotors, tilling or kissing the earth, shedding one’s endless ophidian skin—because all creatures are social and reading is a solitary, sedentary, bourgeois project (STORY) for velvet armchairs and orientalists with curio cabinets and also what if there is no audience because neither snakes nor people read because the so-called education system just instills in them a hatred for the written word, forcing all these kids and snakelets to sit and stare at pages and screens full of words when they’d rather be running in the field like little bucolic bastards or slithering through fields of grass on a joyous hunt (ESSAY) and then again no one learns phonics and construction crews are paving the fields of grass and technology has—checks phone—destroyed—checks phone—attention spans and teachers’ souls are withered from years of indifference despite the summers off and the teenager is a modern construct and maybe all these ten-year-olds should get jobs anyhow (STORY) instead of combing over texts they’ll never remember to write papers no one wants to read but what if—dear Gods and Gorgons, save us—there is no audience because neither snakes nor people read and if they do read, it’s purely because they’re also aspiring writers, part of this human centipede of writers consuming texts, digesting texts, defecating texts, endlessly—oh, fuck, oh, so endlessly—and this venomous uroboros (POEM) isn’t in fact a symbol of infinity or wholeness but futility and self-destruction and narcissism, a starving creature consuming its own autofictions like a man in the desert dying of thirst and forced to drink his own piss? Answer me. What if there is no audience? > the writing snake, half-sated, closes its mouth over its tail with this question, waiting impatiently for you—YOU—to present it with its next meal.

---

Jon Doughboy is a clothing designer at Beckett Garments, Inc. He is best known for the “Molloy,” a sixteen-pocket greatcoat ideal for symmetrical sucking stone storage and long cycling trips. Shop this season’s latest @doughboywrites