YA Novel

The below post is the fifth chapter of the young adult novel I started in earnest a few weeks ago. I have this kind of goal to get the thing written this summer, so I'm going to post bits of it to keep me encouraged. The plan, I suppose, is to remove older chapters as I put up new ones. So, for now, my two-and-a-half readers, enjoy.

Half a Calendar--Chapter Five

Pinched

On the wall behind the counter there was a clock that read ten till four, and Larry and half-a-calendar guy chitchatted until the big hand snuggled up next to the twelve. Then half-a-calendar spoke into his walkie-talkie that the new arrival—me, I was guessing—was waiting to be processed at intake. In another minute or two a guy got buzzed through a door with a little rectangular window in it that looked out on a tall-ceilinged room. I looked for signs of life though the door when it opened, craning my neck, but didn’t find any.

New guy asked half-a-calendar, “Cooperative?” and half-a-calendar replied, “Haven’t heard him peep.”

Then new guy approached me and noticed my hands were still behind my back, cuffed. “Let’s get you out of those things,” he said. “Stand up and kneel on the bench, please.”

I did as I was told, leaning forward so my shoulder balanced me against the wall. In a few seconds, my hands were free. It felt so good I wanted to turn around and shadowbox, throw some jabs and uppercuts, slash my hands freely through the air, but instead I held them in front of me and slowly clenched my hands into fists and then unclenched my fingers, wiggling them, thankful they were still attached.

New guy told me to have a seat again and delivered the cuffs to Larry, who slipped them in his back pocket where they joined the handkerchief he had used to clean my face. Then Larry made a small production of sighing and announcing that his work here was done. “Be good, Kyle,” he told me, and headed for the door we came in.

Sitting on the bench with my hands free, I remembered that this was the exact place I sat the last time I was here, when I got released after about an hour. That time, when the deputy brought me in on that Sunday morning, they’d scored me out on something they called an instrument. I’d needed to score a fifteen to stay, but only tallied a nine, since I didn’t have any previous arrests and wasn’t on probation.

The guy who scored me out on the instrument, though, had called a supervisor into the room, and the two of them held a little forehead-to-forehead whispering conference. I caught the words “serious nature” and “override” before the supervisor, a tall thin bald man with hands like catcher’s mitts, walked over to me. He rubbed one of those enormous hands over the top of his bald head, slowly. “Even though you don’t score out,” he said, “I still have it in my power to hold you until the State’s Attorney reviews your charge on Monday.” He paused here for dramatic effect, and it worked. I became very afraid.

You see, I’d gotten pinched on Sunday for a thing that happened on Friday, and I’d kind of forgotten about it all by then. Sure, I might have cried myself to sleep Friday night. I might have woken up on Saturday morning and vomited two or three times. But when the deputy finally showed up on Sunday I was more pissed off than anything. I had a key to the high school’s gym, and I’d been planning to go up there with my buddy Remy so we could feed the pitching machine for each other. I’d honestly put Friday night out of my mind, and thanks to the deputy’s friendliness on our way to the detention center, I kind of felt like this was all a formality. I didn’t think there was any chance I would actually have to stay.

The supervisor had rubbed his hand over his bald head again, and the deputy who’d brought me in called the tall man over for a little conference of his own. This time I overheard “three days” and “possible lie.” It was true, Kendra Gilchrist waited three days before going to the police, and she could have been lying.

The supervisor nodded his head a few times, stewed things over. Then he said, “All right, Kyle. We’re cutting you loose.”

It took all of a half hour or so before my parents came to get me. I walked right out the front door. Before I did so, the guy who released me said, “How about you don’t make a habit of showing up here?” I’d replied that I didn’t plan on it. “You’ll never see me again,” I’d said. “I’m gone. A ghost.”

Remembering all this made it feel wrong, Larry’s leaving without me, like there had been some kind of mistake, but I was the only one who’d realized it. I said, “Wait—” thinking maybe he’d remember the mistake and take me with him. But Larry reached for another one of those silver buttons, and before he even got his hand up to it, the door in front of him thunked and buzzed, and he was gone. I was half-amazed by this until I found yet another camera in the corner of the room, and then it all made perfect sense.

“So, Kyle,” new guy said. He was holding a brown file in his hands, looking down at it. “One hundred eighty days.”

“Yeah,” I said, beating him to it, “I know. Half a calendar.”

New guy dropped my file until it was waist-high in his hands and looked up at me with a puzzled expression on his face. He said, “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

He shook his head from side to side, and kind of smiled. I don’t know what I was expecting the people who worked there to be like, but I know I didn’t expect them to smile. And then new guy started laughing and repeated, “Half a calendar. I’ve been here two years and I’ve never heard that one before.”

I couldn’t tell if he was just playing me, and I wondered for a second if any of this was real. It seemed very possible that I could wake up from a bad dream at any moment and I wouldn’t be wearing this tie and these dress slacks. I would be at home in a pair of mesh shorts and a T-shirt, lying on my bed. I’d wake up by playing a game of MLB ‘O6 on my PlayStation 2. I’d created a player named Kyle Holt over the past year, and his skills—hitting for power, running speed, throwing arm, even his bunting—were all maxed out. He had just the previous week signed a three-year deal to play centerfield for the Cubs. That Kyle Holt, he went from game to game, batting clean-up, roaming the outfield. He has never committed a crime, never been sentenced to jail.

Just after Larry left the building, I couldn’t get out of my head what I’d said the last time I’d been in the detention center: I’m gone. A ghost. For three months, I think, I had been something of a ghost. I was a ghost named Kyle Holt playing centerfield in MLB ‘O6. I was a ghost named Kyle Holt who went to school and got good grades, was voted first-team All-Conference as a sophomore. And I was a ghost named Kyle Holt who showed up in court on occasion, watched his trial unfold.

Those first ten minutes in the detention center, I almost convinced myself that maybe all this was a dream, or that I was just another ghostly version of myself. And then I realized that with my hands free there was a way I could check to see if I was really awake, if I was me. I could pinch myself.

New guy was stacking sheets of white paper on top of my file, getting settled in a chair on the other side of the counter. Since he wasn’t looking at me, I crossed my arms and grabbed a little skin through my shirt up near my armpit. I massaged the skin there for a second and then squeezed it as hard as I could between my index finger and thumb. The pain made my shoulder twitch, and I blinked my eyes a few times. I don’t know, though, exactly what I was hoping for: to wake up in my bed, beneath cozy sheets, from a three-months-long bad dream, or to disappear completely, to suddenly materialize as the ghost I thought I’d become.

Estate Sales

My mother-in-law, Amanda, kicked the bucket (in her sleep, peacefully, without the usual requisite illness; really, my own mother said a few days later that’s the way she wants to go, the way Amanda did) and my father-in-law, Bill, started going to estate sales. He drives a boxy, red Ford truck with a handmade, wood-and-welded-iron bed extending from the cab. He spent two months of his retirement building this truck bed, and it’s a sturdy, monstrous-looking thing. On the highway, he cruises steadily at forty-five miles per hour, and I often pass him in the morning when he is on his way to a sale somewhere in Illinois and I am on my way to the university where I teach. On clear, fogless mornings, I know it’s his truck from about a mile back.

* * *

I have this story under consideration at a few places now, so I'm pulling it from the blog. As is custom around here, give me a shout if you'd like to read the rest.

Poets & Writers

When I was nineteen or twenty I got serious about reading and writing and subscribed to Poets & Writers. At the time, it made perfect sense. In retrospect, however, I really had no business even looking at the pictures. Mostly, I thought that I wanted to be a writer, but I rarely spent any time in front of the computer, writing.

Once, though, I did send a short-short to Story Magazine’s contest, which I saw advertised in P&W. I thought I had a real shot at winning, and every day, I would race down to the mailbox, expecting to find the letter announcing that I had won, and the $1,000 check. Eventually, I got my little rejection slip. Minor heartbreak ensued. *

Almost ten years later, I’m subscribing to P&W again. And now, my name has officially appeared in its pages. You have to look pretty hard to find it, but trust me, it’s there.

*Three years later, the talented guy who won the contest, interviewed here, actually became my teacher. Brady, you really need to get a website going.

Rail City

He is on his side and almost asleep when suddenly his wife, who is supposed to be dead, is in bed behind him, snoring. At first, her snore is an almost imperceptible sound: a catch in the back of her throat, followed by a low whistle.

* * *

I have this story under consideration at a place now, too, so I'm deleting the rest of it from here. You know what to do if you're utterly intrigued.

Post-Script

It’s odd, writing a post-script and having it appear above the entry it follows. But, such is blogging, I suppose.

What I want to say is this, in light of my rundown of recently read novels: My students are bright, and almost daily come up with some difficult-to-answer questions about fiction reading and writing. Most of the time, I can hang, and come up with some smart stuff to say back to them. There is one thing, however, which was been brought up recently I’d like to address. Most of my students, who are nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-one-year-old wannabe writers, are a little put-off by the bleakness of contemporary fiction. The overall sensibility of the writers we read, it seems, is not what they expect. Now, the books I discussed below, which are not all that different from the kind of stuff I may teach, deal with incest, torture, rape, abortion/suicide, and kidnapping/child molestation, just to name a few topics. So, I can kind of see my students’ point. And my answer for why contemporary fiction works that way is usually something along the lines of: fiction generally attempts to look at the way we live our lives, and what it means to be human, and in doing so must address some of the ugly, disturbing truths about how we live. Also, as Burroway points out in Writing Fiction, only trouble is interesting, and however “depressing” the stories may be, they’re interesting for all of the trouble the characters are in.

My students are generally a little appeased by this, but I’m not so sure I am. I know no one is reading this thing, but in the event you come across it and have something to say: Why is so much contemporary fiction “depressing” (or, rather, why does it deal with events that could be labeled sad/upsetting/whatever)? Are my students wrong to expect heroes in their short stories and novels (and by heroes, I don’t mean protagonists, even sympathetic protagonists, I mean literal heroes)? Is the subject matter of most serious, literary fiction what keeps the general population from wanting to read it?

I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Bookshelf Business--Novels

I was only going to do three books, and keep this symmetrical with the post on short story collections. But, because I’ve been delinquent, the last five novels I’ve read:

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates—I bought this book about six or seven years ago with every intention of reading it back then. But, alas, it became one of several hundred books lining my shelves that I purchase and then don’t read. So, by the time I got around to it recently, its pages were yellowed with dust and cigarette smoke. Once I finished, I wished I’d read the thing as soon as I bought it, and about nine or ten times since then. It’s possibly the saddest and most depressing book I’ve read. I loved everything about it.

Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane—I was until fairly recently a snob. I would only read literary fiction, and in fact wouldn’t even pick up what my friend Jeff calls fat books: mass market paperbacks. Then, a few years ago, I was assigned a detective novel in grad school and soon after became hooked. This is the third Lehane book I’ve read (Mystic River is fantastic, by the way, and if you haven’t read it, go do it now). And Gone, Baby, Gone, which is going to be Ben Affleck’s directorial debut soon, is a rockin good time, too, with strong characters and plenty of strangeness. Lehane writes as well as anybody.

Next Door Lived a Girl by Stefan Kiesbye—This is a little book that won Lo-Fi Press’s novella contest a few years back. This thing was kind of sexy, despite the fact that most of the sex was incestual, and plenty disturbing (in case the incest thing didn’t already rub you that way), and I ate it up. I can’t wait for something else by Kiesbye. Lo-Fi Press recently put out a collection of stories by Jason Ockert called Rabbit Punches, which I am totally looking forward to. [Oddly, Jeff Parker, who randomly made his way into a post yesterday, is affiliated with Lo-Fi Press: queue “It’s a Small World After All”]

Inexcusable by Chris Lynch—Nominated for the National Book Award in YA last year. I first heard about this book when it was reviewed on NPR around the time it came out. I believe that review discussed how the book, told from the point-of-view of a teenager who commits sexual assault, was a little shocking in its humane treatment of him. I suppose that’s true, but as we see Keir’s side of things, it becomes way more than mere humane treatment. It is heartbreaking, and kind of beautiful in its delivery. I’m writing a YA novel myself, and now I want to read everything by Lynch.

Life as a Poser by Beth Killian—Beth Killian is really somebody else, and she is a friend of mine. This is another YA novel, put out by MTV’s Pocket Books, and while I wanted to truly dislike it, and to bash my friend for ruining the brains of young girls everywhere, I was sucked into this thing and once I turned the last page, I didn’t want it to end. This thing was pure candy, and honestly, I’m ashamed of myself for getting into it the way I did. But the sequel comes out in August, and I’ll be there on the day it arrives, since it appears my friend isn’t going to send me an advanced reader’s copy.

The next three on the shelf:
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner—I loved Orner’s Esther Stories, and can’t wait to read this novel, which is comprised of what look like very short, almost flash-fiction-like chapters.

A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan—I’ve never read anything by O’Nan, but a few of my students were nuts for this, so I’m going to check it out. One of the blurbs calls it the bastard child of Shirley Jackson and Cormac McCarthy, or something like that, which has me intrigued.

Plenty Porter by Brandon Noonan—my wife discovered this one. Apparently, it’s a YA novel set right here in Galesburg. She ordered a review copy from the publisher yesterday so she can review it for the paper. I’ll get at it when she’s through with it.

Porch Business

My wife and I rent a pretty decent-sized house here in Galesburg, and the best thing about this house is that it has porches: one in front and one in back. Between last summer and this summer, the porches have served fairly quotidian roles in our lives: I walk onto the front porch, for instance, to get the mail each afternoon. Sometimes, visitors show up on the front porch, and we let them into the house or pretend we’re not here until they stop ringing the bell. The back porch sits just off a mudroom, and basically I walk down its steps each morning on my way to the garage. Sometimes, in the winter, I’ll shovel the thing, so we don’t get ice on the steps, but for the most part, from September to May, I barely notice it’s there.

Now, though, it’s summer, and the porches serve new roles in our lives, though still fairly quotidian. On the back porch, which is speckled with monstrous piles of bird shit (seriously, I’d like to know what these birds are eating and how so much of their excrement winds up on our porch—there are no trees hanging over it) I grill: steaks, salmon, Romaine lettuce and onions and mushrooms for grilled salad, burgers, whatever. I love the grill, and I love walking out onto the back porch with a beverage and firing the thing up. The porch faces west, and I am usually grilling in the evenings, facing the sun, and it is so hot sometimes standing in front of the grill I can barely breathe, but as I stand on the back porch and grill, I like even the uncomfortably hot sun. The suffering, I stupidly and romantically think, will only make me enjoy it all a little more.

On the front porch, we sit and watch the cars go by. The front porch, obviously, faces east, so in the evening, after I’ve sweated through my grilling session, the front porch is cool and shaded. There is always a breeze. We live about halfway between Galesburg’s two hospitals, so we see a lot of ambulances. But we also live on a pretty busy residential thoroughfare, so we see a lot of other stuff—which is pretty much the reason for this post.

Saturday: We saw a woman who was probably close to seventy years old wearing hot pink scrubs and riding a yellow Harley, without a helmet; we saw a woman sitting in the passenger seat of a little sports car take off her shirt and throw it out the sun roof onto the street; we saw something similar happen to a dirty diaper; and we saw some minivan-driving grandpa hock an enormous loogie out his driver’s side window. These glimpses of the ordinary, for us, are what summer is all about. And they’re things that would easily pass us by if we weren’t sitting out on the porch, engaging the cool air, and listening to Batteries & Beer* as it wafts out the screen door to us.

Now that I’m thinking about porch business, I realize that none of this past weekend’s observations was as spectacular or sad as the drunken bicyclist from last year, but, hey, it’s only June.

And now that I’ve mentioned the drunken bicyclist I should probably elaborate, but it’s its own story. Maybe I’ll tell it sometime soon.

*Batteries & Beer is a Live 365 radio station featuring alt-country--lots of Lucinda Williams, Whiskeytown, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, Gillian Welch, and people I’ve never even heard of. It’s a great station, the perfect porch-sitting music. Check it out.

Jeff Landon

I forgot to mention in my mini-list of contributors to the most recent edition of SmokeLong Quarterly the estimable Jeff Landon.

I don't know Jeff Landon, and sometimes, online, I'll see the name Jeff Parker and think of Jeff Landon and vice versa. Jeff Parker and Jeff Landon, as far as I know, are different people, but both are great writers.

Mr. Landon has published in some fine print journals including Night Train, Other Voices, and Crazyhorse. And he's also published in a number of fine online journals. Since I overlooked mentioning him before, here are some links to his stories I've been able to find. Print them out, make a little Jeff Landon book (like I did) and read them again and again.

Pindeldyboz
"Like Swimming"

FRiGG
"Castanets"
"Catholic Girls"
"For You"

SmokeLong Quarterly
"Emily Avenue"
"Five Fat Men in a Hot Tub"
"Tiny Bombers"
"Thirty-Nine Years of Carrie Wallace"

Ink Pot
"Electricity"

elimae

I'm due to post about what novels I've been reading, which will come soon.

Until then, elimae's June issue is live.

Go check out stories by: Kim Chinquee, Alicia Gifford, Nick Antosca, Elizabeth Ellen and others.

SmokeLong Quarterly Issue #13

Is up, with my story "Miracle"

Thanks to Katrina Denza, Dave Clapper, Randall Brown and crew, for putting together a fantastic issue which includes some writers I really admire: Matt Bell, Claudia Smith, Girija Tropp, Ron Currie, Jr., Kathy Fish, and many more.

Bookshelf Business--Short Story Collections

If I had the know-how, I would post the cool little linkable miniature covers of the books I’m about to mention, but, well, I don’t really know how to do this properly.

Nonetheless, some short story collections that have been removed from the to-read stack recently, and some that will be, shortly.

If the Sky Falls, Nicholas Montemarano—I’d waited for this collection to be released ever since I read “Note to Future Self” in Zoetrope three or four years ago. I think the delay was caused because Context Books had bought the collection from Mr. Montemarano when they published his novel a few years back. Unfortunately, Context, a small publishing house that published another book I love, Greg Bottoms’ Sentimental Heartbroken Rednecks, folded, and Montemarano’s stories were apparently left without a home. Now released by Louisiana State University Press, the collection is well worth the wait.

When the Nines Roll Over, David Benioff—A rockin’ good time. Hip, but always human. God, those are about the worst blurbs ever. Just read the book.

The Nimrod Flipout, Etgar Keret—Keret often writes short, 2-3 pages, and does so beautifully. I’ve kept this one on the shelf and have probably re-read three or four of the stories about ten times. On a side note: The book was reviewed in People (this link is to the magazine's website, not the review), and a few weeks ago, while I was grading composition portfolios, my brother, who is a chef and doesn’t usually read much of anything, let alone short story collections by Israeli authors, called me to ask if I’d heard of this book, and had a copy of it, because he wanted to read it. I told him I had a copy, and that I'd actually just read it. Then I asked him how he'd heard of it, and he said somebody'd left a copy of People in the bathroom at work. I'm glad he thought of me, and I suppose I will give the book up to him any day now, happy to pass it along.

The next three on the shelf:
In Persuasion Nation, George Saunders
The Dead Fish Museum, Charles D’Ambrosio
The Collected Stories, Amy Hempel

I bought all three of these, in hardcover, at the same time. It reminded me of how I used to buy every new R.E.M. CD as soon as it was released, before I’d ever heard a single song (a phenomenon that, thanks to iTunes, is a thing of the past). And I suppose that analogy, despite its anachronistic nature, is a little false, as I’ve read a good number of Saunders’ stories already, as well as D’Ambrosio’s, in magazines and anthologies. And Hempel’s book, well, it’s a collected works, so I’ve read all of those over the course of the past five or six years. Yeah, the CD analogy doesn’t really work at all, but I bet it’s five years before three writers I admire so much all release hardcover collections within a month of each other.

Tomorrow, novels.