Prose off: What have we here? Another genius masterpiece in Granta put forward by plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face liars in editors Sigrid Rausing and Luke Neima v. Fleming story

Tuesday 4/22/25

Want to do another Granta prose off? Okay.

This is from Moses McKenzie's "Fast by the Horns." I'm sure you'll love it. Ready?

I papa stroke him goatee. Him face straight. ‘If Joyce seriously mean fi damage the bank then that woman even more concern with fruitless victory than I already know her fi be.’  Him turn to his second-in-command. ‘It might be a trap fi get I&I outta the centre and inna the Garden so that them can lock I&I up without the trouble of blasting through I&I door.’ Him point at two of the older boys. ‘Unuh stay here and make sure nobody don’t come in when we gone.’ Him march from the door and the rest of we follow after him: Ras Joseph Tafari, Denton, Sister Dorothy and I, everybody in the centre except those two older boy, we tip and pour onto City Road, twenty-tree of we in total, all in our outerwear, all head toward the Garden.

I mostly knew Angela by reputation: I knew that she never belong to the centre, even when the area was one; that bald-head gossip did whisper ill-proven rumour bout her friendship with Joyce; that she help establish the Mother as a hub; I’d heard that, of the two woman, she was the more prone to violence – which now seem f i be true; and her inability to  hold liquor was well-known, mostly because the volume of her drunkenness had woken many a resident, many a time.  I knew that she was a product of the children home pon City Road and had tree fully gold teeth; and I’d heard that she once work there at the supermarket down a Broadmead but was sack for her temperament.

The bank Angela allegedly want gone stand alone at the beginning of City Road, near the corner where Frontline con- verge on Lower Ashley: another of the area lightbulb-less main road. It had a car dealership and a corner store on either side, but it remain detach – too full of itself to associate with any neighbour. Dust spiral inna the lobby. Its desk older than the area. It was red-brick where the other building in St Pauls were white or grey. Its clerks English, its manager and money too: I don’t know a single person in St Pauls who keep them money inside; only strangers rush through the doors and pass its watchmen in the foyer. Coppers patrol nearby, them detail double after dark and them German shepherds were without muzzle, and mercurial. At teatime, the few West Indian who ever attempt fi get a loan share story and spin them embarrassment into anecdote to laugh about over Ovaltine and milk biscuit.

We never pass the bank on City Road. Instead, we went down Campbell Street and across Frontline – where the sun always felt warmer. And Denton say, ‘Baba, somebody say them see the copper bring fertiliser and oil from Angela yard, the kind yuh use fi make an IED.’ I roll I eye. The only reason either of we knew what an IED was, was because every Rasta in St Pauls follow the IRA report. ‘Proper,’ is what Ras Levi would say whenever the newsman mention them on the radio. ‘It’s not our fight but them proper still,’ him would go on.

‘Them nah stand a chance of winning, Jabari, but still them a fight the fight. Them nah have a hope, because them a fight people who favour them, overs? Yuh can’t tell a English from a Irish till him talk, and an English spy can master an Irish accent, but them can’t step inside no black skin, iyah.’’

Oh, thank you. That's profound.

Great stuff as always that you're publishing there, Granta editor in chief Sigrid Rausing and Granta deputy editor Luke Neima.

People definitely need to read that. Just like they needed that Motorollah.

Let me tell you how these frauds work with this kind of nonsense. They publish it under the guise of "The voice is amazing!" but they don't want to read it themselves because obviously no one would want to read this.

Can you picture anyone in the world sitting there at night voluntarily reading the likes of this for an hour? What would they be like? You know that person doesn't exist.

I don't know...shouldn't someone be able to sit there and read something for an hour at night?

And let me remind you: This is Granta. We are told that Granta publishes the best fiction in the world. So it should be remarkable, right? Brilliant, yes?

Do you think what you just read was those things? Do you think anyone does? Could?

Obviously the answers to those questions are no, no, and no.

As always, we're just shooting fish in a thimble here, because all I have to do is drag any of this crap into the light and anyone can see it for what it is.

There is no one who can write me and say, "This is amazing because..."

If you asked these lying bigoted classist frauds in Sigrid Rausing and Luke Neima why they published the above, they could not give you a single viable reason as pertains the work itself--that is, anything they'd be able to point to in the text.

It's stupid. We all know it'd stupid. They know it's stupid.

I papa stroke him goatee. Him face straight. ‘If Joyce seriously mean fi damage the bank then that woman even more concern with fruitless victory than I already know her fi be.’ 

What genius.

There's a loneliness epidemic. People are lonely. The person today who is reading these very words is likely lonely. It's okay. It isn't just you. We are in something together. We just don't act much like it. Or even believe that we are, because we think what dogs us, hold us back, is our source of shame, is endemic to us.

It isn't.

This is from a story called "Just Pants." It's a story for always--for long after I'm gone--but it's a story for right here, right now, this world, as well.

The story is about a lonely man. He doesn't have anything in his life. Doesn't have anyone to talk to. Be with.

We don't have friends anymore. We aren't able to be friends. Friendship requires selflessness. Empathy. Strength to lend.

Similarly, there are no people out there who can be our friends. Same reasons.

We are collectively alone and hurting in a form of shared--but separative--isolation.

So I'm going to write a story addressing all of that, aren't I? I'm going to write a story that's here for people.

The man in this story has a pair of nearly twenty-year-old scrubs pants that were given to him by his long-ago doctor girlfriend. He has these plans for each day, a new start, advancement towards better outcomes, but the days defeat him and he never gets anywhere. And at night, after he gives up, he puts these scrubs back on. Settles in. Tries to think about how tomorrow might be different.

On some nights, he has this subsequent surge of energy, and just to be back out in the world, he goes down the street--you know, to get out--to his local cafe, where there are only a few people by then. Something will happen there on one of these evenings, which will change certain things for him, and others not so much. Here we go:

Come the early evening, he’d formally admit what he’d really known all along: He lost again. By a lot. The contest was never close. His legs had lacked for the necessary juice. Lactic acid had permeated all of his muscles. His spirit. His fight. In a manner of speaking.

But the afternoon was in its final phase. Some hope there. The day was becoming more tomorrow than it was today. Kind of. It’d end and he would not. So there was that. For what it was worth.

Recognizing these thoughts as what they were, and understanding the point at which they came, and what the pairing communicated about the hours he had passed since he last slept, he let resignation take its accustomed, formal hold, capped as per usual with a summarizing, elegiac sigh of, “Well, that was that, what are you go to do? We’ll hop back in tomorrow. Let’s be sure we’re ready.”

He’d try to relax as he put his interactions with the day down to an experiment that hadn’t worked, which didn’t mean that the next one wouldn’t, take the deep and slow breaths, say the same words to himself that he did every evening while wearing his scrubs because the day was a loss anyway so what did it matter, existing in a kind of between-days state of not being in this one or that one, and hoping tomorrow would be different.

But just because he was no longer in the day that was and was yet to be in the day to come, didn’t mean he’d stopped existing. Actually, having entered into this in-between state, he’d notice an uptick in energy, and a weight come off of him, such that he felt almost peckish for life, as someone who responds, “I could eat a bit,” despite not being especially hungry.

Often—but not always; often enough—he’d then go to the cafe near where he lived wearing his scrubs after dark, and thus wasn’t in for the evening after all. You’re still free to venture, he told himself. It wasn’t as bad as all that. Prospects. That things could be different. A great many things. Then he’d look back and think, “See? It was right around the corner. And you acted like none of this existed for you at all.”

There weren’t many people on hand at the cafe on these nights to notice that much about him, as if a higher volume of customers would have produced an aggregation of knowledge in which they all somehow shared and had access to after the fact, like how lonely he was and that he only came in alone, but at least now he could see other humans and there were four walls that were different than his usual four walls and the excursion also served as a form of what he considered airing himself out without anyone having to be close enough to detect anything noisome.

Distance could be maintained on all sides, which he wouldn’t be able to do, say, at lunchtime when the people in the adjacent office building took both their repast and reprieve. The scrubs were a good cover story against charges of malodorousness anyway. What was he supposed to do? Let someone die just because they urinated on him? Turf and territory. Certain things just speak for themselves. Or say more about the person who levels the charge when they ought to have known better.

He popped two wintergreen mints in his mouth—one to bite into smaller parts and eat on the way to the cafe, the other for sucking while he was there. A memory of an old commercial flashed in his mind about a happy woman boasting—no, giving thanks—that she didn’t have dishpan hands thanks to the soap she used. But what if she did? Was that not the cost of doing a job right? And was that not honorable enough itself?

Someone, he theorized, who was aware of these workings of the world, or that mostly bygone world, might walk over to him. Initiate an exchange with a nod. For a fortuitous coming together. Nods spoke to depth of resonance. Can be deeply mutual. Like graves with two names on the headstone and people landing on the same phrase simultaneously. “No, you go.” “No, you.” As if you’re already beyond chitter-chatter and games of twenty questions—the answers of which neither party much cares about—and ice breakers and are already in something together. Interaction wasn’t forbidden. People met “out in the wild,” as they say—“how it used to be”—all the time.

What they would say, though—by which he meant, what they’d possibly say to him—he had no idea.

Perhaps, “Long day?” as they looked him over.

“Yeah. You could say that,” he’d respond, and he wouldn’t be lying. Not with his words, anyway. Do a bit of a laugh. Then reply with a, “You?” that would by its nature sound commiserative.

“Definitely.”

And they’d be off and running.

Wasn’t unlikely at all, in theory.

Everything that ends somewhere good—he reasoned with the logic that was prevalent to this between-days state—by definition starts somewhere else, unless the end-spot was also the beginning, and that’s not how it’s supposed to go. The important thing is to start. And here he was, not giving up yet. Small victories, slow breaths.

It's never close, is it, these prose offs?

Trust me, these people--people like Sigrid Rausing and Luke Naima, a David Remnick, a Christopher Beha, a Michael Ray, a Jackson Howard--know that as well as anyone. That's why they had to lock me out. The contrast and the gap--between what they publish and what they themselves can do--and what I create, what I am, what I know, what I do, is embarrassing for them.

Writing has to be for reading and it has to be for people. It should do them good and add to their lives. Otherwise, it's just the shit that you see in all of these places. Which is there for no other reason than to be the shit in those pages and so that the people of the system can be the people of the system.

It's not meant to do anything for you. Be anything for you. It's not meant for you at all. It really isn't meant for anyone. Just so that these people can say certain things about themselves.

Is there anything more narcissistic and value-less than that? And the things they say about themselves aren't even real things. You're not in Granta because you're great at writing. You obviously suck at writing. It's a lie. A sham.