Periphery (First Draft) – Part Two

“I may be biting off more than I can chew.”

Well, here we are in week two of an ongoing series where I write pretty much anything I want. How is that different than what I usually do? Well, this time, it’s all fictional. And it is starting to sink in just how out of practice I am with fiction writing. Because this is way longer than it has any right to be, and I am thinking that, fucking hell, this story might be in four or five parts when it really should be less than, like, 3,000 words. In other words, I pictured this as the length of one extra-long blog post, and it’s shaping up to look like maybe four fucking medium posts. What the hell.

To this end, there are two standard pieces of writing… advice? Mantras? Guidances? Rules of Thumb? Piles of Bullshit? that I’d like to include. The first is the sentiment that anyone can write a novel, but it takes a really good author to write a proper short story. This idea, which I think originated with a journalist and/or newspaper mogul in the 1930’s (though I could be way off-base; I can’t find the original quote anymore) encapsulates the idea that it is a lot harder to write sparingly than it is to write expansively. It’s easy to add padding and fluff and extra nonsense that adds nothing. It’s hard to pare down a story to its most basic essence while still keeping everything important and being emotionally resonant. Hell, that’s why every creative writing professor I ever had creamed themselves over Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” but didn’t give a flying fuck about bullshit like the tractor manual that is Dune. For the record, I hate both Raymond Carver and Dune, so I don’t know what that says about me. This story is leaning more on the Dune side of things, unfortunately.

The second piece of writing mumbo jumbo I do know the source of, and it’s everyone’s favorite goblin from Maine, Stephen King. In his excellent memoir, On Writing, which I suggest reading despite King’s ego, the most salient piece of information I pulled from the text is the idea that a final draft (or “next draft,” really) is the previous draft minus ten percent. I’m pretty sure he writes it out as a formula, saying “Final Draft = First Draft – 10%” or something like that. And I think this is pretty good advice; unless you forget a pretty major scene the first time around, any subsequent draft should probably be noticeably shorter than the one before it. There are, of course, always exceptions to this, but most of the time, good writing is an act of subtraction. No editor I have ever met has said to me “This section is too sparse. Write a few more scenes to pad it out.” Sure, they’ve said, “You should add more detail here,” or “This character needs some extra dialogue to explain this section,” but I’ve never been told “This is too short.” And I don’t think I ever will.

Just because I make fun of this stuff doesn’t mean I don’t believe in it, though. I especially follow that 10% rule pretty closely. The upshot of all this, then, is that it’s going to have an effect on my story in the second draft. If I want this to be a short story, and not a small novel, I’ve got to cut out the fat. That’ll happen after the story is all done, of course, but I feel fairly certain that our friend the Orbital Mechanics TA is not going to make it into the second draft. I hope no one grew too attached to miss ponytails. Because as it stands right now, she contributes nothing. And unless my plans for her in part three end up meaning anything, I don’t think she’ll be showing up again, either. But we’ll see. A third surprise writing tip is that you shouldn’t try editing until the whole thing is done, because you can get in your own way. And with the creeping progress I’m making here, getting in my own way is the last thing I need.

With all that said, I’d better get on with the story, or I’ll be here all night, and I have work tomorrow so that won’t do. Here’s the second part of a brand new, very fictional story about a very well-adjusted person. This is not a cry for help. Do not make the mistake I make every time I read anything ever and confuse the narrator for the author. They are not the same.

Here’s part one, for your convenience.

“Periphery,” By Andy Sima (2022)

Where we left off:

I watched her leave and realized that I had no idea where my next class was. That was something I was supposed to know, right? There was something else I was forgetting, too, but that had to wait. Even though I felt like if I just took thirty more seconds, I could see it clearly. But I was standing in the middle of the door like some sort of lunatic, which surely people thought I was, so I had to get moving to wherever it was I was headed to next.

I made my way back across the vegetative green heart of campus, sweetgum trees and massive oaks growing in between the latticework paths of concrete. My next stop was a basic astronomy class that I could have very well skipped and gone to the TA’s office hours instead, but they gave out participation points in that one, and I didn’t want to miss those. It occurred to me as I walked that I hadn’t even asked her name, and she hadn’t bothered to supply it. Weird. Then again, I could have sworn that I had seen her somewhere before. If it wasn’t club last week, then when? Her ponytails weren’t something I would have forgotten. Or would I? I had a terrible way with faces. In fact, I barely remembered my own, half the time. But I could count the buttons on my shirt and the stars in the sky and remember what I looked like, and what everyone else looked like, too, and in fact, if I thought about it closely enough, I swore that I could just make out the shape of whatever it was at the edge of my vision, which maybe it was her face, or maybe it was you’re being stupid something from this morning, I swear there was something else, but then again that conversation with my mom, something had caught at my attention anyway, and-

I stopped mid-thought, coming to the sudden realization that I didn’t know where I was. I jerked my head around, slamming my neck muscles backward and jamming my teeth together, painfully. My spasm did not go unnoticed, and the man in the desk next to me gave me a withering look.

Wait, that wasn’t right. I had just been walking across the quadrangle, but now I found myself in astronomy class, ankles crossed and knees bowed under a particleboard desk with black metal legs. The professor’s eyes crossed the classroom. I swore they lingered on me for more than was usual. Because he knew. Knew what?

I shook my head and checked my watch. Looking down, I saw a notebook filled out with notes from that day’s lecture, in my handwriting. So I had been paying attention, yet I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d heard. It felt like I was just coming out of one of those afternoon naps that drains your body and spins your internal clock a full twenty-four hours in thirty minutes.

The bell went off, a metallic sound that wasn’t really a bell at all but an electric buzzer played over the building’s loudspeakers, and I spasmed again, biting down harder and squeezing my eyes shut. The class was over, though this wasn’t due to some weird fugue state time jump at least; I had just happened to come to at the end of class. The other students got out of their plastic seats and shuffled, ambled, and loped out of the classroom. The man who had been sitting next to me earlier snapped his notebook shut with conviction as he walked out, the prick. He was probably doing that to spite me.

I stared at the professor as they packed up their laptop. I needed to sit, and think about this. The tall man strode past me, neatly pressed shirt rumpled at the back and untucked only in one place at the very right edge of his blue-plaid vest. If I looked closely, I could see where the edge of the vest had begun to fray, and a strand of thread poked out at the very edge. It was black on blue, so it was difficult to see, but I figured that-

I shook my head. No. I wasn’t doing this again. I had to get going on to my next class, and after that, get dinner and head to my environmental science club. I took a deep breath, and focused myself. I stood up, and walked out of the door. The bell rang a second time, a holdover from when the building had been an ROTC training center, to mark the half-way point of what could be considered a passing period. I left the building.

My next class, my time on the campus quadrangle, and my purchase of dinner at a fast food joint down the street were uneventful and thankfully in one continuous stream of consciousness. I did not experience a blip in time again. I chalked up that oddness to stress from the morning, and tried not to think about it more. Even though I felt like I really, really needed to.

I entered the student union, an enormous brick building that sat at the end of the quadrangle, and made my way up to the classroom on the second floor that my club reserved for a weekly meeting space. I opened the door and stepped inside, crunching the blue felt carpeting as I shuffled in.

There were maybe twenty-five students scattered at tables around the room, which we had made double-wide by moving the flexible sliding walls and connecting to the classroom next door. A new, wide-eyed freshman stared at me as the door swung open, but we both quickly looked away. Indistinct chatter, interspersed with high-pitched laughter, spiraled around the room. Stephanie, the club president, was leaned over a podium at the head of the room, tacking away at a laptop. Her buzz-cut exposed her yellow teardrop earrings, which complemented the orange eyeshadow that graced her face. I breathed in, breathed out, counted my buttons, and finding them all present, did my best to saunter up casually to her. Which of course you screwed up, you fool.

“Hey, Steph!” I said, pushing my glasses up my nose. “How goes it?”

“It goes poorly, Dan,” she said, glancing up from her laptop with a half-smile, half-grimace, her face split down the middle like a cracked iceberg. “Evelyn forgot to fucking email me the fucking presentation again, and she’s fucking sick with some fucking last-minute disease and I’m just about done with this stupid bullshit, you know what I mean? I’m rewriting the whole god damn thing from memory now. I’m about to take this whole club and kick it out the window.”

I laughed. Too loud. “That fucking sucks. I’m sorry.” My neck twitched. “Want me to take a crack at it?”

“No, I’ve got it, but thanks for the offer, dude,” she said, looking up at me as my neck twitched again. The corner of my mouth got pulled down into what probably looked like a sickening contortion, because I hate my face, and because her expression tightened into a furrowed brow that made her eyeshadow catch the light and sparkle. I counted my buttons as casually as I could, but her gaze was drawn to that, too.

“You alright, dude? You’ve got, uh, a thing in your face,” said Stephanie.

This is your chance your stupid asshole, say something meaningful. The wires in my brain crossed and short-circuited, and like a specter coming out of the fog from the fields in the morning, I could hear my mother saying how it’s important to open up to people and be vulnerable at meaningful times without oversharing, because trust builds friendships, but there was no way I could do that, because I always either would overshare or freeze up and say nothing, and when I would say anything it was always meaningless tripe and I had nothing interesting to contribute anyway, what was I gonna do tell her about what I had for breakfast this morning? I could just imagine her face falling as I went into way too much detail about whatever thing I had pinched into my arm that day and the ins and outs of insurance premiums for medication coverage and I was sure that she’d hate me after that like everyone else and

“I think I saw a ghost this morning,” I said. FUCKING WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Her eyes went huge, her mouth fell slack, and she huffed out her nose, which caused her septum piercing to briefly fog over. “You saw what?”

“I think I saw a ghost this morning,” I said again, mouth suddenly moving on its own. The nerves in my face seemed to dance with a distant electrical pulse, controlled from far away by some power I could place, charging my lips to move up and down and my lungs to expel air to form sound, someone else guiding the motions but not me. Or so I told myself. Right? “I was getting ready to go today, and I looked out the window and I swear to God, there was this bright, glowing figure just floating there. I don’t know what it was. It was just this orb of light, blazing like a star, and it looked at me, and I felt so cold, so distant, like a faraway scream, and then it blinked and it was gone. I was trying to speak but I couldn’t and all I could do was pinch my arm,” I said, and I showed her the small puckered skin just below my wrist. Every single bell that had ever been installed in my head was howling.

She stared at me. I had fucked up, but I didn’t know how bad yet. I waited for the blow. “Dude. That’s fucking rad as hell. But, like, are you ok? Do you, uh, feel safe, and all that?”

No.

“Yeah, I feel fine, it just has really screwed with my day. I couldn’t focus at all in classes. It’s just… totally kind of rocked my worldview,” I said. I was reaching now. I think that if I reached just outside of things, just beyond of what I could see, I could pull out one more good phrase or something that would cement this in her mind, and my own. But I couldn’t find it, and with the rush of blood all leaving my body at once, I realized I really, really wanted to go home.

“You’re gonna have to tell me about this after the meeting, that is fucking wild,” she said, eyes still huge, but the corners of her wide-open mouth now upturned. “I do not have the fucking brain cells to comprehend the teat you’re putting down right now, but once I throttle Evelyn I’ll be good to go. Let’s catch up afterwards with the rest of the board at Gerald’s Pub, yeah?”

I grinned, and nodded to her, and my teeth were trying to leap out of my mouth, squirming and writhing and pulling at the roots, insects fleeing from a lit match. “Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll let you get started with the meeting.”

            She gave me a winning grin back and turned to face the laptop again. “Awesome, dude. Looking forward to it.” I backed away from her, still grinning, and chose that moment to leave through the door. She never turned to look at me as I left.

            The grin fell from my face and shattered at my feet. I grabbed at my eyes and my head involuntarily threw itself backwards. Good god, what am I saying? What am I doing? I can’t do this. I need to get home, right now. I need to get out of here. I need to get out. This is too much. Stop it I can’t remember that it is I’m forgetting now, and I can’t even remember if there was something I needed to forget. I counted the buttons up and down again and again, onetwothreefour onetwothreefour onetwothreefour, and my eyes dripped like a stalactite in the darkness, shut up! and I knew I was crying and I must look like an absolute fool, and God, how will I ever make it to class again? I don’t even remember what I did today, my classes are ruined, and why am I leaving it is so weak of me to leave, I just need to go back in there and Get a fucking grip, you goddamn moron!

            I stopped counting and took my hands off my face. I found that I had stumbled and was leaning against the wall in the hallway. I turned, and glancing out of the corner of my eye, I saw that a young man, maybe even too young to be a freshman, was standing just outside the door, hand outstretched to open it but staring at me, seemingly trying to decide if he should intervene or not. A loose tear fell from the tip of my nose, hitting the floor with a barely audible splash. That seemed to give him all the impetus he needed to rush inside the classroom and leave me to my own devices.

            I felt empty, now. Embarrassed. He had seen me, and he would surely tell Stephanie or someone else who would tell Stephanie what he had seen. She’d know I was unfit to be an officer in the club. That I was unfit in general. This was all happening too fast. I had to go home.

            So I did. I wished the walk had been easy, or another skip in time forward, or something, but every aching step seemed to instill a sense of agony and dread into my feet, pulling me left, right, backwards, any way at all except the way to go back to my empty studio apartment and the window where there was definitely no ghost. Even across the span of the ten minute it took me to walk, the same thoughts came to me, over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. You’re a fucking idiot. You’re such a fucking idiot. You’re done. That’s it. You won’t even be able to do your homework tonight. You’ll fall behind in classes.

            It was that, ad nauseum, like ticker tape underlying the newscaster, for the half mile walk back. When I finally got to my apartment, I stood at the window where I had claimed to see a ghost, and I stared upward, into the night sky, into an empty space between the stars of the little dipper and the north star that I had always been drawn to. I stared at it, and out of the corner of my eyes, counted the stars around it. I counted as many as I could. And they all danced, icy, cold, and so, so far away, twinkling in the void between worlds. There had to be a way to put these feelings to rest. I hoped my sleep would be deep and dreamless.

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            My sleep was, thankfully, refreshing, and I awoke outside of the spiral I had dug myself into my last night. But it was anything but dreamless. There was something, once more, as always, beyond the edge of my perception that I couldn’t quite remember about the dream, and it seemed crucial. All I could picture now was a deep, uncomfortable red. Like the color of blood, or a ruby, or the space between stars. No, that wasn’t right. Like blood. That’s more like it.

            I got ready for the day, and I felt better than I had last night. Not by much. But at least the only thing on my mind now was the color red, and not anything else….

And that’s the end of part two. This will probably be at least four parts. Maybe more. And then, sometime after that, I’ll have the final draft, too. So this is gonna be like, at least five posts total. Hey, at least I don’t have to just write filler for this blog anymore. I’m actually kind of excited to write again. Kind of.