I'm sorry

Tuesday 9/15/26

But no one is ever going to write any prose better than this. I'm putting this here simply because it's from what I'm working on now in the revised "Dead Thomas" and "Fitty" for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. The intensity of these two stories, and the impact of being deep within the presence of both at the same time is overwhelming. These are works that make me feel more alive than anything else I have experienced in my life. Not as their author, but in the partaking of them as what they are apart from me. Both of these excerpts are from "Dead Thomas." The first one (which has been tweaked today) featured in an earlier prose off with Paul Yoon's entirely-to-be-expected MFA factory shavings, but as I just want this here on this day in this journal. Besides: one can read the likes of this over and over and over again and it never dims. None of these male writers can write a female character, never mind have one creditably narrate a story. And that's this whole book, these women and girls, with Bonita doing the storytelling honors in "Dead Thomas."

The first time my dad told me that you should be your brother’s keeper, I asked him what if you don’t have a brother, because I didn’t. I wouldn’t have minded, but a brother or a sister wasn’t anything I wished for. Santa didn’t see “Baby sibling” beneath “Binoculars but not toy binoculars” on my Christmas list.

There was Rachel, who was like a sister. But I didn’t want for what I didn’t have, given that it felt like what I had was what I wanted, even if I didn’t consciously say that to myself, though I likely would have if pressed on the subject by someone like Mr. Margolis, except I didn’t know him at the time.

One year, Rachel gave me a Valentine’s card she’d made after having first said that this card, special as it was, and as much as she meant it, didn’t also mean she wanted to marry me, because she would someday marry a boy—but only if I also thought this boy was amazing and “really super truly” the boy for her—though we would continue to live close to each other.

She still had fresh Crayola caked under her nails along with some backyard dirt, as if she’d biked over the second she finished the card because she couldn’t wait to give it. She’d drawn this heart in a blue sky on the outside that took up practically the whole front. Only the thin edges of the heart were red—it looked like thread—and there were clouds in its open middle where clouds would have normally been anyway like they were a part of something beautiful without needing to alter their daily routine.

Inside the card she wrote, “I would stitch all of my love in the sky for you.”

We had recently learned that a stitch in time saves nine, which was confusing, but sounded important.

When my dad said, “Be your brother’s keeper,” he spoke as if both to me and to the air, making me think of Rachel’s card. He clarified that it was an expression—the first few times, that is, until I guess he figured he didn’t have to anymore.

And he’d ask whether I followed him, which was how he finished these talks, and when I would ask questions if I had any. I said sure, because as I was saying, sure works that way, and you like to follow people you love. That doesn’t mean you can’t follow your own heart. But two clouds usually go in the same direction.

And this is the newly revised first page of the same story, which is just sick. True, being able to do the likes of this is a significant part of the reason why these people hate me--that and the expansive knowledge and publication record--but come on. Imagine being penalized and despised because this is what you can create that no one else can.

“I could go at any time,” Thomas would say like he knew exactly when you needed to be reminded. “It’s nip and tuck—simply how these things work.”

He spoke as an authority with a hint of someone messing with you a little. If a man dissatisfied in his career and conceivably compensating with sarcasm came to our school to give a talk on duck-billed platypuses, I’d have expected him to sound like Thomas. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to make your day bearable. But it also wouldn’t mean he was lying just because I didn’t understand how those creatures were real despite the video evidence in the presentation.

Even Thomas wasn't certain the precise label for his status, or his state, I guess, and it had happened to him, though he possessed this attitude of someone schooled in a galaxy beyond anything you’ve known.

That isn’t me making a play on words like my friend Rachel or not caring about higher planes and how they pertain to third period. You don’t encounter the power of other worlds that often, even if realistically speaking the duck-billed platypus guy could tell you anything about those animals—that they changed color and levitated—and you’d be like, “Okay…” and that’s how it went with Thomas.  

We were fifteen minutes into Ms. Kathleen’s English class the day we met him. He knocked on the door and waited a couple seconds in the hallway like he was grown-up enough to understand that’s how you did it, until Ms. Kathleen said, “Hark, a visitor,” in her weird, “I’m a Medieval lady” voice to us, and a hearty “Enter, knave,” to Thomas, who did.

How do you compare that to anything? It looks like no fiction in these books and magazines and journals.

Lastly, this is a letter from this morning:

Just a heads up that I had to put you down for Guggenheim references. I wouldn't expect them to contact you. I handled this as in past years. They're not going to give it to the likes of me anyhow if they don't have to, and right now they don't. Plus, I'm not paying money to buy copies of my own books to send to them in the mail each year when it's rigged anyway for them to ultimately pulp said books. But in the off-chance you get an email. As I said to them, the main reason I do this at all at this point is so that when I do the prose offs on the journal it's not a false claim that I applied for the Guggenheim as well. 

More importantly, I spotted some errors in "Dead Thomas" while uploading this application. I need to get back into that story anyway. I am giving thought to it being the opener of There Is No Doubt and moving "Fitty" back. 

I will send you revised "Hero of Mine" after I double check a few things in it. Don't be fooled by the "it's a kids' story" thing. It really isn't. I mean, it is. But that's not what it mostly is. I'm doing something radical with the book this work is in. Same book with "What the Mouse Knew" and "Thank You, Human." There is such a power in "Hero of Mine" come the part about the otherworldly monstrous force and the idea of opposition, ending with "the beautiful proof." You'll see. It's a story that should be in every home. 

Anyway. Hope you don't mind me putting you on the spot with the reference thing. You had to do a minimum of three, and I don't associate with these people, of course, to most of whom I'm worse than the devil through no fault of my own. 

Still haven't finished the horror film school thing, but may have the title for the horror film book. I've done a lousy job of most things lately. Hard to rally. To find that energy to throw myself into it completely and for long stretches. The results--as with the "Fitty" revision--have been significant, but I'm coming and going, rather than getting there and sticking, if that makes sense.