Stories: All-New Tales

Yvonne comes into the room with a tray of soup and crackers. I can see she’s brought saltines instead of Ritz, and I almost decide to call off the whole plan and leave her to find out about Arthur for herself. But I take a deep breath and remind myself that she’s my sister. And in any case, she’s already seen the box in the middle of the floor.

She sets the tray down on the bed and points at the box. “What’s this?” she asks, even though it’s clearly marked and she’s seen it a hundred times before. Really, she is the most infuriating creature. Arthur doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into.

But I smile and make my voice as sugary as the icing on the tacky wedding cake she’s sure to have on Saturday. “A wedding gift,” I say. “I know how you’ve always wanted these.” She gets that look on her face that I’ve always hated, a sort of tentative, frightened joy, like a dog taking meat from a hand she knows might hit her.

“Arlette, really?” she says. She sounds like she might cry, and I feel like pinching her.

“Well, I expect I’ll be coming over to your house for Christmas from now on. It just makes sense.”

“Oh, Arlette!” she cries and throws her arms around me, nearly upsetting my bowl of broth. “That’s why you made me come over here today, isn’t it? You’re the sweetest sister a person could have!”

“You always could see right through me,” I say and bite into a saltine.

I watch as she picks the box up to carry it down to her car, chattering away about some nonsense or other. I think about the picture of Arthur hidden deep inside, his lying face wrapped around a ruined angel. She’ll find it at Christmastime, if her eyes are sharp. And if anything should happen before then, I can hardly be held accountable. I’ve done everything I can.

And if, God forbid, anything should happen before then, I’m prepared to take the situation into my own hands. I have no doubt that, with a little bit of guidance, Arthur could become the kind of husband I deserve.

A LIFE IN FICTIONS

Kat Howard

HE WROTE ME INTO A STORY AGAIN.

I told him to stop doing that, after we broke up. In fact, it was one of the reasons that we broke up. I mean, being a muse is all well and good until you actually become one.

The first time it happened, I was flattered. And it wasn’t like my normal life was so great that I was going to miss it, you know? So getting pulled into that world—a world he had written just for me, where I was the everything, the unattainable, the ideal—it was pretty powerful.

When he finished the story, and I came back to the real world, the first thing I did was screw him until my thighs ached. It was our first time together. He said it was the best sex of his life.

When I asked him if someone had ever fallen into a story that he had written before, he said not that he knew of. Oh, sure, he had based characters on people he knew, stolen little bits of their lives. A gesture, a phrase, a particular color of eye or way of walking. The petty thievery all writers commit.

I asked what he had done differently this time.

“I was falling in love with you, I guess. You were all I could think of. So when I wrote Marah, there you were in my head. Always.”

I hadn’t fallen into the story right away, and I didn’t know what happened in the parts where Marah didn’t appear. Reading the finished draft was this weird mix of déjà vu and mystery.

Apparently inspired by my real-world sexual abandon, the next thing he wrote me into was an erotic novella. Ali was a great deal more flexible than I was, both physically and in her gender preferences.

I really enjoyed that story, but one night I tried something in bed that Ali thought was fun but that he thought was beyond kinky. After that, the only sex scenes he wrote me into involved o**l s*x.

Men can be so predictable, even when they are literary geniuses.

Maybe especially then.

The next time he wrote me into something, I lost my job. It was a novel, what he was working on then, and when he was writing Nora, I would just disappear from my life as soon as he picked up his pen. For days, or even weeks at a time, when the writing was going well.

He said he didn’t know what happened to me during those times. He would go to my apartment, check on things, water my plants. When he remembered. When he wasn’t so deep in the writing that nothing outside registered.

I was always in his head during those times, he said, at the edges of his thoughts. As if that should reassure me.

It happened faster. He would begin to write, and I would be in the story, and I would stay there until he was finished.

The more I lived in his writing, the less I lived in the real world, and the less I remembered what it was like to live in the real world, as a real person, as me.

When the writing was going well, I would be surrounded by the comfortable, warm feeling that someone else knew what was going on, was making all the decisions, was the safety net under the high wire. Everything was gauzy, soft focus, fuzzed at the periphery.

I could have an adventure without worrying about the consequences. After all, I was always at the edges of his thoughts.

Until the day I wasn’t. Everything froze, and I was in a cold, white room, full of statues of the people I had been talking to.

I walked from person to person, attempting to start conversations, but nothing happened. Walked around the room again, looking for a way out, but there was nothing. Solid white walls, floor, ceiling. It was a large room, but I could feel the pressure of the walls against my skin.

I walked to the center of the room, and sat, cross-legged, on the floor. Waiting.

Have you ever had your mind go blank? That space between one thought and the next when your brain is just white noise, when there is not one thought in your head—do you remember that feeling?

Imagine that absence extending forever. There’s no way of escaping it, because you don’t know—not don’t remember, don’t know—what you were thinking about before your brain blanked out, and so you don’t know what to do to get it started again. There’s just nothing. Silence. White.

And there’s no time. No way of telling how long you sit in that vast, claustrophobic white room, becoming increasingly less.

I never was able to figure out how long I waited there. But suddenly I was in a room I had never seen before, back in the real world, and he was there.

There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and gray threading through his hair. Writer’s block, he explained to me. He had tried to write through it, work on other projects, but nothing helped. Finally, that morning, he had abandoned the novel as unworkable.