Alaina Hammond
Short Fiction
Because she respected the man so much, she wants to like his book. She really wants to. She recognizes his talent but can’t abide his formal choices.
Perhaps she would make more of an effort to like it if she could talk directly to its author, and realistically hope to receive a response.
Shortly after graduation, she’d mailed him a letter. Some random philosophical musing. Not romantic, not flirtatious, and honestly not even musing so much as rambling. Pretentious and incoherent, mostly likely; she can’t remember the details. He’d been a physics major who’d minored in philosophy, to her philosophy major/theater minor. Thus, she was still trying to impress him, even though they were no longer classmates. Her attempt manifested in a five-page handwritten screed, sent by snail mail. God, why not use scroll paper and sealing wax.
It would have been less embarrassing if she’d had a proper crush on him. Like a normal person. But sexually, she found him uninteresting. She hated how he dressed. Those fingerless gloves were so faux-hip! In retrospect, she realizes he likely wore them due to bad circulation. Also, she once mailed him a hand-written letter, thus forever forfeiting her right to mock anyone as pretentious.
She intellectually understands that he had absolutely no reason to keep it.
Still. She wonders, sometimes. If it was in his possession at the time of his death. Having known him in their twenties, it seemed like the kind of thing he’d hold onto. Perhaps BECAUSE of its random rambling. He collected the odd.
When he was thirty-four, his book was published. A year later he succumbed to ALS. Or not ALS, something similar to ALS, something as bad and deadly as ALS, but not technically ALS. Whatever it was, he died of it. She thinks of him fondly, but not frequently. His memory’s more of a high note than a song.
And sometimes, unwelcome, her harshest critic claws its way out. Just to be cruel to a dead man who can never defend himself.
She thinks: Before you fell to the equivalent of ALS, you were seduced by the uglier monster of postmodernism. It consumed and subverted what should have been a brilliant literary achievement. Instead, your magnum opus is mediocre. You corrupted your own gift. You squandered potential greatness for the sake of being “clever.” You asked the muses to sing to you less loudly. You blasphemed against the holy.
My letter to you sucked less than your book does.
Oh god, I’m sorry. Forgive me. That isn’t fair.
The truth is your book is better than my letter to you, but not as much better as it should have been. That’s a fairer assessment, even as it’s still subjective.
It doesn’t feel like a book. It feels like something a twenty-year-old would doodle in a spiral notebook. A talented twenty-year-old, maybe.
But still. I’m mad at you for producing what feels like a second draft, at best. You died at 35, not 25. As such, you have no excuse for producing this smug, trite slice of garbage. I’ll forgive you for dying—which wasn’t your fault—before I forgive you for this shitty-ass book.
And for that, again, forgive me.
It’s their first night in their new apartment. Her husband’s asleep and her son really should be. He asks her for another bedtime story, but most of the books are still packed. He hands her a shiny paperback, randomly chosen from an open box. Of The Body, by Kurt Ethan Gray.
“This book isn’t for kids,” she explains.
“Is it scary?”
“No, Honey. Not at all. Just not interesting for you.”
“Oh, OK.” He’s already selected another book.
An hour later, her son finally asleep, she lies in her new bedroom, and listens to her husband breathe. As she holds Of The Body upon her breasts, she reflects on its striking cover. Gorgeous. Lush.
Its author was a genius. As such, it deserves another chance.
She turns to a random page, to find a line demanding she consider the sky. Pretty bossy he is, this dead guy. Ordering readers around, from his lofty position of abstraction.
But it works. She’s considering it.
Well damn. Well-played. Not bad. Good words.
Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram.
Photo Credit: Bill Kessler is an American expat residing on the Portuguese island of Madeira. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women.
L'Esprit Literary Review 