Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Henri said that the tribesmen captured everything from the convoy. The Hotchkiss and its manual. A frontal assault would be suicide, mon capitan!”

“Then you may remain behind,” said Captain Richat. “Your cowardice will be noted in my official report.”

Claude’s eyes widened at the tribunal and bullet-pockmarked wall the captain’s words implied, and shouldered his rifle. “V-very well, mon capitan. I will lead the assault as you have requested.”

“Excellent. Carry out your orders then, corporal.”

Claude led his men over the crest of the dune, whooping and running. The distinct rumble of a machine gun soon followed; Richat kept himself low and quietly counted the bullets fired by tens.

“Ten, twenty, thirty…”

Screams from over the dune, and rifle fire.

“Seven-ten, seven-twenty, seven-thirty…”

The firing stopped just after Richat’s count made it to one thousand one hundred. He casually surmounted the dune and strolled toward the tribesmen’s position. They were violently arguing over the Hotchkiss, and clearly exposed. The captain’s Lebel cracked eight times, one for each of the raiders. His pace didn’t slacken as they fell; he tossed the rifle aside, its magazine empty, and withdrew his revolver from its well-oiled holster.

Several Bedouin were still alive; a quick report from the pistol put and end to that. Richat found Claude, breathing shallowly and weeping blood from multiple wounds, just before the Hotchkiss.

“You see, corporal,” he said, “the Hotchkiss tends to overheat and become useless after about a thousand rounds have been fired in quick succession. The tribesmen lack the discipline to perform a barrel change; all that was needed was an assault to soak up their fire until that point.”

Claude tried to speak, but red foam was all he could push out.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Richat. “I will be sure to mention your brave, foolish, and totally unauthorized charge in my report. You may even qualify for a posthumous promotion.”

The form was colorful and animated, with a steady stream of HV ads running along the bottom. The questions flew by—her old junior college had wanted to know more, and unlike Metromart, there wasn’t a drug test. Standard stuff, really.

Until the last one, of course. “I hereby release Healing Visions LLC from any and all legal liability that may arise during the aforementioned procedure,” she read silently. “This includes physical traumas such as strokes, heart conditions, degenerative neurological conditions, and mental ones such as hallucinations, insomnia, paranoia, manic depression, suicidal tendencies, and/or depression. I, the undersigned, do recognize and accept the risks of this procedure and…”

Aria sighed. “What am I doing here?” she whispered. Her mind turned toward the ladies in the break room the other day, and how much she’d agreed with them.

They’d been watching TV and chatting when an HV commercial had come on, and immediately the gossip had started. “I heard that the can only show you a few seconds because it’ll cause a brain tumor if the go any longer. One slip up and you’ve got a fried egg up there.”

Aria had nodded silently as the one-upsmanship began. “Well, I heard that there are these guys—like slum lords or something—in Nigeria that collect money from people so they can go on ‘spirit quests’ to the local HV center,” another lady had said.

“And you know they’re whipping those people up into a frenzy over it,” Maria from jewelry had added. “On 60 Minutes the other day I saw a feature about these people in London that’d had a bad time at HV. They saw bad things, and just quit their jobs, walked away from everything and started hanging out in gangs, doing drugs and crime and suicidally dangerous stuff.”

“Who’d ever want to do that?” Aria had interjected, half-heartedly. “Who’d want to see? I’d rather be surprised.”

This post is part of the August Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s theme is color as a metaphor for an aspect of one’s writing.

Graham’s apartment was lit well enough from the streetlights below that Allison was able to find her way around without fumbling for a light switch. WJR was playing quietly in the dark, combining with the rain on the windows to generate a sheet of white noise.

“Nice place,” Allison muttered, glancing at the spare surroundings and the heap of dishes in the sink. Her gaze alighted on the overstuffed armchair in front of the radio. “What’s with the purple loveseat?”

“Purple’s my favorite color,” Graham said. “I’ve loved it ever since I had a little cast-iron toy truck that was that shade. Poor old girl was down to her last flecks when Mom melted her down for a scrap drive during the war.”

“Even so, purple doesn’t seem like your color,” Allison said, settling into the chair. “It wouldn’t strike most people as very manly, though it’s anyone’s guess how much raw masculinity matters to someone in your line of work.”

“Not just any purple,” replied Graham. “A very ancient and powerful hue they called ‘Tyrian purple.’ You could smell the sea-slugs they boiled in its manufacture for miles, and only emperors were allowed to wear it. Then, in time, people got to thinking it was a softer color, a pretty color, and now if you see purple at all it’s on a lady’s dress. Slumming in the fashion industry to pay the bills when once only the most powerful man in the world had the right to use it.”

“You think that’s a sad fate for a color that once represented absolutist oppression, huh? Some might say that purple’s gotten its poetic due.”

Graham shrugged. “I feel like purple and I both have a lot in common, in point of fact. Our best days are behind us, and we’re left to grind out what we can in a long, slow afterlife. Such potential, at the beginning, all wasted. So it’s livening up ladies’ dresses while I sit here with a job that can’t afford to pay me. Made into a handbag against your will or chasing down an overdue library book because you’ve got nothing better to do…I’d say there’s a kinship there, wouldn’t you?”

Graham gazed at his shoes as he spoke; Allison felt like she out to do something to lighten the mood, which the weather had already rendered depressing enough. “Being a handbag isn’t the worst thing in the world,” she said. “I know a few alligators that are dying to be just that.”

“Ostriches too,” Graham said, smiling a little. “And I could teach them a thing or two about putting your head in the sand.”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post an entry of their own about a colors as metaphors for aspects of writing:

Aheïla (direct link to the relevant post)
Ralph_Pines (direct link to the relevant post)
AuburnAssassin (direct link to the relevant post)
semmie (direct link to the relevant post)
Anarchicq (direct link to the relevant post)
CScottMorris (direct link to the relevant post)
PASeasholtz (direct link to the relevant post)
LadyMage (direct link to the relevant post)
DavidZahir (direct link to the relevant post)
aimeelaine (direct link to the relevant post)
FreshHell (direct link to the relevant post)
sbclark (direct link to the relevant post)
Bettedra (direct link to the relevant post)
Guardian (direct link to the relevant post)
M.R.J. Le Blanc (direct link to the relevant post)
laffarsmith (direct link to the relevant post)

You know, when I was little, one of my favorite games was ‘time travel.’ I’d get together with my brothers, of my friends, and we’d go up into the old hayloft of the barn. That was our time machine—it was cleverly disguised, of course. I’d push some knots in the wood—buttons—and make some noises, and then declare that we were two hours in the future.

We’d go exploring, and the idea that we were somehow out of phase gave loafing around the same old places a new sheen. My parents were good sports about it, feeding the hungry time travelers juice and cookies. When they asked why we chrononauts weren’t running into ourselves, I’d always say that we simply hadn’t gotten back yet—we’d gone two hours into the future, and our trip lasted two hours, so it all worked out perfectly as far as I was concerned.

After all, how much can a lazy summer afternoon change in two hours? The shadows get a little longer, the air a little cooler, but what’s that to a kid who’s been running all day? I think I secretly wished it was that simple, and in many ways it was; we kids believed in an innocent sort of way that we were in the future, and one had only to look as far as Uncle Walt to see someone stuck in the past.

Sometimes the game was interplanetary travel to a planet that was, by an astonishing coincidence, just like ours. That was even more exciting; my eyes tear up with nostalgia when I think of our journeys to Htrae. Would that it were that easy. Even then, deep down, I knew I’d never make it into space for real—eyesight too bad, expenses to great.

Still, that was the last time I felt anything like this—like things were malleable, like there was a world waiting to be explored in every dandelion’s shadow or twinkling point of light.

“Yeah, I guess,” Mary said. She opened her own cookie and silently read the inscription.

“Well, what’s it say?”

“To doubt is human, but to believe is even more so.”

“See? See? What’d I tell you?” Emily said. “You doubted it, and the cookie knew it. Somehow, it knew it.”

Mary was quiet for a moment. “I’d like a second helping,” she said to Li, when he returned. “And bring us more cookies.

Li walked back into the kitchen and said a few words to the cook. Then he turned a corner and came upon his grandfather, seated on a small, low bed in front of a TV. The old man was looking through a peephole into the restaurant proper, and listening at a small speaker.

“The customers would like more cookies,” the younger Li said in Cantonese.

Grandfather Li dipped his hand into a bag of Wal-Mart brand fortune cookies—the treats were an American invention after all, not a Chinese one, something Li found endlessly amusing. He selected a cookie and deftly plucked the manufactured slogan out of it with a pair of steel tweezers.

Li wound a thin slice of rice paper into a typewriter that his grandson had modified. Delicately, he typed out a new message using only his pinkies: “One who expects miraculous things inevitably finds them.” He chuckled, remembering how his grandson would often add the phrase “in bed” to the end of cookie sayings when reading them aloud. The new message was tucked into the empty cookie, and added to the tray, which the younger Li took and served.

“This is the Southern Michigan University Alumni Association calling for Geraldine Thompson. May I speak with her?” Kelly ran through her spiel by rote, flipping through the list of people still to be panhandled.

One name in the J’s popped out immediately: Gregory Johansen.

“Shit!” Kelly said, forgetting that her headset was most definitely not muted.

“I beg your pardon?” Geraldine Thompson huffed. She’d been in the midst of a long-winded denial that Kelly had tuned out.

Eyes wide, Kelly killed the call. “Damn you Johansen…not just content to ruin your own call, are you?

Johansen’d had a rough time at the university, attending as he did from 1966-70 for undergrad and 70-72 for his MBA. SMU had been a minor center of the counterwar and counterculture during that time, leading to violent protests and the suspension of most facets of campus life. There’d been no homecoming in ’67, ’68, or ’69, no football games in ’68 or ’70, and the graduation ceremonies in ’68 and ’72 had been canceled due to bomb threats.

As a result, Johansen bore a heavy grudge against SMU as an institution and against his fellow students, past and present, in particular. His wide-ranging diatribes to SMU Alumni Association solicitors to the effect that they could have his money when he got his stolen pomp and circumstance back were legendary for their ferocity. But he was an alumni nevertheless, and loaded to boot, and so remained on the list. For all his venom, Johansen’s number was openly listed; Kelly was of the opinion that he relished the opportunity to bring the “hippie students” soliciting funds down a peg or two.

Dave had gone forth invigorated, ready to transform the young writers of today into the crusading postmodern figures his old professors lauded. That phase of his career had lasted two weeks. Two years later, Dave counted himself lucky if his students wrote in readable English, and his tongue was red and swollen from biting back the urge to tear into the kids and rip their work to shreds.

This is not to say that Dave thought there were no good writers, that the young generation lacked artists of the caliber needed to belt out fine prose in the tradition of Faulkner or Hemingway. It’s just that those people did not take writing courses. Over the years, Dave had found that most of his students conformed to a few archetypes, all of which were represented in his current group.

For example, some see the writing workshop for what it really is: a captive audience. These are the kinds of people whose friends and loved ones have long since developed defense mechanisms to deflect or escape, things like faking death of feigning illiteracy. Lucy fell squarely in this category: in every way except her considerable girth she looked like a refugee from a Tim Burton drawing, and she loved nothing more than inflicting bad emo poetry on her classmates (this despite the fact that it was explicitly a prose class).

“My piece is called Better Off Dead,” Lucy said. “It’s a commentary on the crushing despair that infests every hollow moment of modern life.”

“Wonderful,” Dave said. The idea that Lucy might need professional help had occurred to him more than once, until he had seen the folder the girl used for her writings–a Lisa Frank piece featuring a pastel unicorn flying through space with a pod of smiling dolphins.

Dan circled around the periphery of the group that had sprung up about Sandy. They were discussing her outfit for the evening–specifically the large, blue stone danging from a silver chain encircling her neck.

“It’s just so unique!” An onlooker said, ogling the jewel. “Is it a blue diamond?”

“It’s not just about uniqueness, but also value and perception,” Sandy said airily. “The price of diamonds has been kept artificially high for almost a century by the great southern African cartels. That, combined with a PR campaign worthy of any great commodity, has served to make them the Wal-Mart of gemstones: commercialized, callous, overpriced, even ruinous to some.”

The questioner, who sparked with several diamonds of her own, faded into the crowd. Dan tried to line himself up for a good, casual snapshot as Sandy moved under a good light source.

“This is benitoite, one of the rarest gemstones in the world,” Sandy said. “It’s only found in one place, and most of it is used for research. Only a tiny amount is gemstone quality; few are cut, and fewer still sold.”

She was lined up perfectly; what’s more, the stone glowed with an almost unholy light. Its blue overpowered the red tones in Sandy’s skin, giving her an elegant, icy quality through the viewfinder.

“This may just be the only gem-quality benitoite being worn anywhere right now,” Sandy said. “That’s what attracted me.” Dan’s camera snapped as she spoke, fixing the moment in amber. He should have been thinking about his editor, or the freelancer contacts he still had from the old days, and how much the snap could sell for.

Instead, he was entranced by the stone and its wearer, such that he all but joined the crowd of hollow worshippers thronging around her.

Anna returned to her sketchbook. There was already something written on it, even though she hadn’t begun to draw yet.

Two words: Sara Dinch.

“What the?” Anna said. “I don’t know anybody called Sara Dinch. Heck, I don’t know any Saras at all, or any Dinches either.” Still, the words looked as though they had been written in Anna’s thin, flowing handwriting; she picked the sketchpad up to get a closer look.

As she did, a spider, larger than the others, fell off of the bottom of the sketchbook where it has been hiding. Anna gasped, and the spider quickly scurried under the bathroom door.

Anna didn’t relish the idea of having the critter surprise her the next time she was in there, and scooped up a small coffee can to go after it with.

“Come here, little guy…” she said. “ “I’m not going to squash you, just get you out of here.

She flicked on the light, and screamed.

A spider was not more than two inches from her face, dangling on an invisible strand of silk. It was lowering itself to the floor, but Anna, regaining her composure, trapped it in the coffee can.

The bathroom was crawling with bugs; the one from her sketchbook was in the tub, while two more were on the mirror and another worked on a web near the light. Anna scooped each up in turn, though the big one in the tub led her on a merry chase before she clamped down the lid.

“What do you want?” Anna demanded of the can. “What is it in my place that keeps you coming in here?”

Isn’t it wonderful to sit out, late at night, and watch the stars?

Of course, you probably haven’t.

Few have, anymore.

The night sky is one of the things modernity has taken away from us, and the ever-lit nature of our lives is not going away. Let’s face it—darkness is frightening and dangerous. But like many such things, it is also beautiful, a windswept wonder spelled out by celestial candles.

After a fleeting glimpse of what few glowing points make it through the humming fluorescent veil, who hasn’t wished they could lay out in an open field away from everything? What a simple pleasure it could be, watching the night sky spin overhead with no distractions save those found in nature and a soft piano tune in mind?