Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Should we get out?”

“No, we wait here until they come for us,” sighed Liam Colman, the driver, who was answering the question for at least the 17th time.

He had been taking a safari vehicle with six Gisnep Resort guests through the animal preserve area of Gisnep’s Wild Kingdom theme park. The tour was designed to obfuscate the electric rails powering the vehicles and gloss over the fact that the enclosures were essentially a glorified zoo. That meant, however, that when the power failed, they were stuck mid-tour until the gas-powered tow vehicle could reach them.

Until then, Colman was stuck babysitting four adults and two children in the midst of a grey and rainy day, the sort that never appeared in Gisnep Resort pamphlets. He’d passed out plastic cups of water from the vehicle’s emergency stores, and was now stuck answering inane questions.

“Did you feel that?” said one of the kids in back.

Colman was about to roll his eyes, silently thinking that the rugrat just needed a diaper change, when he felt it too. Ripples were visible in the cups of water still on his dash.

“Maybe it’s the power trying to come back on,” said one of the older tourists, sounding not at all convinced.

Colman gripped the steering wheel tightly. “It’s an…an impact tremor, that’s what it is,” he said to himself quietly. “I’m fairly alarmed here.”

A moment later, the nearby foliage gave way as a mature African bull elephant noisily emerged. Colman’s passengers, white with fright, shrieked even as he tried to quiet them down.

“Keep absolutely quiet,” he hissed. “Its aural acuity is based on sound!”

Despite his admonitions, the elephant continued to walk at the tour vehicle…and straight past it, continuing into the brush further down the trail.

“I thought…I thought it was going to eat us!” one of the kids gasped.

“It’s a herbivore, kid,” said Colman, wondering anew when the rescue vehicle would arrive.

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“Is this place really ‘The Most Fun On Planet Earth?'” asked a chunky tourist wearing a Seattle Sonics sweater.

The guide laughed. “That is actually the trademarked logo of our sister park, Gisnep Wonderland in California,” she said. “But I think you’ll find that even though we are number two, the difference in fun is statistically insignificant.” The look on her face spoke volumes about getting this question all the time and her satisfaction in composing an appropriately peppy but still cheeky response.

A flabby hand went up in the back, from a passenger uncomfortably separated from their Rascal scooter for the duration of the tour. “Why is the symbol for Gisnep Resort a tree?”

“Oh, you mean the Tree Ring?” the guide said, with a little snicker about her clever response.

“Yeah,” said the guest, who took up a row of seats designed to hold three adults. “I would’ve expected the logo to have something to do with cartoons or movies.”

“Walpert Gisnep was actually an environmentalist, and he believed strongly in making sure arboretums and trees were a part of the Gisnep Resort,” said the guide. “That’s why we have more green space than the next three of our competitors combined! Mr. Gisnep often used the tree as a metaphor for his company, with everyone from the trunk to the leaves participating in making it strong.”

A third hand went up, this one belonging to a stubby kid who looked like he was destined for a Rascal of his own in a few short years, but the guide was never able to call on him.

The motorized tour carriage ground to a halt and the doors automatically snapped open. as power from the overhead lines went dead.

“Carl?” the guide whispered to the driver with her hand over the mic. “What’s going on?”

Carl could only shrug, but the question was answered moments later over the loudspeakers:

“There has been a power failure. Please locate the nearest exit and proceed to it calmly and quickly.”

Pandemonium ensued.

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INTERVIEWER: Welcome once again to Spirit Guides, the talk show where we channel the spirits of the deceased for the edification and amusement of the living. I’m your host, Madame Epicurie, and I have a very special guest with me here today, the shimmering spectral form of Walpert “Walp” Gisnep. Mr. Gisnep, as you know, died of pancreatic cancer in 1969 but the entertainment empire he built in the form of the famously family friendly Walp Gisnep Company, survives to this day. Welcome, Mr. Gisnep.

GISNEP: Please, call me Walp. Glad to be here, Madame Epicurie.

INTERVIEWER: I thought I would begin by airing some of the most common criticisms of the Walp Gisnep Company, to give you a chance to respond in person to them. First, what do you say to the accusation that the company you founded is a stultifying force of conformity, forcing media consumers into a conservative and heteronormative mold?

GISNEP: Companies are products of their time and reflect the attitudes thereof, with few exceptions. Big companies like mine are bigger targets, but even ones that are the darling of the critics, like Gaggle Inc. or Pear Computer, are guilty of this to one degree or another but are better at spinning the media to deflect criticism. Those companies steal and use personal data for their own nefarious purposes, yet Gisnep is a more tempting target because of its visibility. You’ll note that many of my competitors, like Working Dreams XLG, have failed to attract the same criticisms despite aggressively gunning for the same market segments.

INTERVIEWER: So you hold the Walp Gisnep Company blameless?

GISNEP: Not blameless, Madame Epicurie. No one is blameless. But everyone aims for the biggest target, and there is an innate human need to see the mighty brought low.

INTERVIEWER: Fair enough, Walp. What about the accusation that your company is anti-union and anti-Semitic?

GISNEP: That’s partly my fault, I will admit, for making some rather tasteless jokes in my earlier animations that were the product of a less culturally sensitive age. But if you look at the top employees and top actors in my company, you’ll find plenty of yordim among them. It’s an easy criticism to make, and a hard one to disprove, and so an easy stick to beat someone with.

INTERVIEWER: And anti-union?

GISNEP: Again, that is mea culpa. I always saw my company more as a family than a business, and anyone who has ever worked for a family business will tell you how lousy the pay is. But you have to admit that the key incidents in that rumor are older than the Second World War at this point. And I challenge you to find a pro-union attitude among employees at Working Dreams XLG, Gaggle Inc., or Pear Computer.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. Is there anything you’d like to add before we go to our audience for questions?

GISNEP: Only that rumors of my cryogenic preservation are completely false. Do you think someone who spent most of their life in California and Florida could stomach the idea of such cold for so long? Anaheim forecasters call a week of 45-degree weather an “arctic blast,” for chrissakes.

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And so, thinking to outsmart the terrible truth that men with all their material desires fulfilled live lives of misery, he made the following wish: “I wish that I might meet the love of my life, my perfect match, with whom I might happily live out my days on this earth.”

The djinn, its spectral features unreadable, acquiesced with a simple nod. The man’s other two wishes, for a healthful long life and to spare the life of his father who had been condemned to death, came true so far as the man could see, so he had no reason to doubt that the djinn had made good on its promise.

But as time wore on, the man realized that he had made a fatal mistake: he had failed to specify when or where he might meet the love of his life, or a sign by which he might know them. He was therefore wracked with unease upon every fist meeting, every spark, fearing that the perfect match for which he had wished might still be ahead of him.

They say that, from then on, he led a lonely life, and that he left no descendants to carry on his line despite his long and healthy life. Some say that in a final twist of fate he met his perfect match in a kindly nurse or a fellow sufferer on his deathbed. Some say that the love of his life was sent away out of fear, that there was no provision in the wish for this eventuality, the language being strictly conditional.

All agree that he stands as a sad example of the inability of man to control fate, even with infinite power available to do so.

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This post is part of the February 2014 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “Characters Writing About Authors”

I come down the stairs into the first floor of my dingy and cluttered house, but I am surprised to see that it is more cluttered than usual. Someone has set out a semicircle of mismatched chairs and filled them with a motley assortment of figures who I recognize but can’t quite place.

“What’s all this?” I say. I only came downstairs for a glass of Coke, to raise my screaming kidneys to a new tenor, after all, and certainly not expecting anyone else to be in the place I shared with me, myself, and I.

“What do you think? It’s an intervention, chief.” Leaning on the wall near the front door is my muse, the personification of my creative impulses, in a greasy A-shirt and boxer shorts. Ironically, he’s not even an original idea, but one shamelessly jacked from Stephen King.

“An intervention?” I say. “What for? I don’t even drink!”

“I suppose you’ll need an intervention for that too, sooner or later,” says my muse, sucking noisily on a half empty beer bottle. “But that’s not what this is about.”

“You write lousy endings for your characters, when they even get the dignity of an ending.” The speaker is Vasily Albanov, the Russian star of a science-fiction novel I wrote and which successfully accumulated 75 rejection slips. “We’re here to intervene and talk about it.”

“What? I don’t do that,” I say, incredulous.

“No? You basically made me watch the love of my life die, after betting beaten up first by her and then by monsters, and all I got was a lousy ‘maybe things will get better from here on out’ ending looking up at the stars!” says Albanov.

“You left me with my hometown destroyed, my friends and family and allies scattered, and no clear way forward, you miserable polecat!” chimes Virginia McNeill, the heroine of a revisionist western I’m in the middle of revising.

“I gave you an epilogue!” I say, waving my arms. “It was very optimistic!”

McNeill makes a derisive farting noise with her mouth. “Suggesting that things are somehow going to get better for my great-grandchildren is about as optimistic as Schindler’s List,” she snorts.

“I got basically the same ending, except I had to be content with a goddamn dream,” adds Peg Gregory, the anti-heroine of a space opera trunk novel I tried to salvage years back. “I was abandoned by my selfish excuses for friends, left to take the rap for what was all the fault of an inconceivable alien lifeform, and all I got was a goddamn dream? Most soap operas get better than that!”

“Look, I-” I begin.

“At least you got an ending!” The other side of the room speaks up, led by a scruffy and sullen-sounding youth I recognize as Eric Cummings, the snarky hero of what I had imagined would be a very serious literary novel. “You gave up on me maybe a quarter of the way through!”

“I wrote you an ending!” I counter. “A very heartwarming one! In advance!”

“It was the same as the one you wrote for Peg!” Eric groused. “You stole an ending from your trunk novel to paste somewhere else and thought that no one would notice!”

The chorus was joined by the hero and heroine of my unfinished action novel, the hardboiled protagonist of my noir novel, and a host of others. The room was such a cacophony I could barely hear.

“I’d break out the hors d’oeuvres, buddy, and fast,” whispered my muse from behind me. “This intervention’s about to turn ugly otherwise.”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Sneaky Devil
Anarchic Q
Sixpence
SamanthaLehane
pyrosama
Angyl78
meowzbark
MsLaylaCakes
ishtar’sgate

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“Let me in! I need to use your power source!” The stranger thumped on the door of Hill 71, one of the few remaining bastions of humanity amid swarms of the Infected.

Tall, grim, and heavily built, with the long beards common among seasoned Infected fighters of the Wastelands, the stranger’s request–command, really–was honored. That the gatekeepers had seen him slaughter his way to their gates through a horde of Infected certainly didn’t hurt.

“I need access to your power source at once,” the stranger repeated once the gates had been opened.

“What for?” asked the gatekeepers, wary of outside interference with the solar storage batteries that kept their electrified anti-Infected barriers up.

“It’s important,” said the stranger, glaring at the Hill 71 denizens from above his wanderer’s beard and behind cracked polarized spectacles.

They let him into the House of the Sun to wander amid the storage batteries. He deigned to let them seize his weapons, but the Hill 71ers knew that such a seasoned killer of the Infected was dangerous even barehanded. The stranger moved with purpose through the batteries, some of the last electric power on earth, and knelt by an old-fashioned power outlet. He removed a dingy package from a knapsack, and plugged a frayed cord into the socket.

His Kindle powered up, displaying pg. 237 of The Da Vinci Code, and the stranger sat down to read.

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CARL: This is Carl Drake, play-by-play commentator for NBS Broadcasting, and we are live at the Mega Bowl pregame festivities.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. This is Tom Hicks, color commentator for NBS Broadcasting, and we are seven hours into our pregame coverage, with only a further four to go.

CARL: The excitement is palpable, isn’t it? Just look at those streams of people finding their seats and purchasing concessions, and the gridlock outside as people try to find parking spots.

TOM: Right you are, Carl. Since NBS mandates this level of coverage despite there not being enough content to sustain it, our usual level of sports rhetoric, tissue-paper-thin as it is, has been stretched to the breaking point. I don’t know that there is anyone else we can ask for their uninformed opinions about the game, or any more sound bites we can unload about how this is a must-win game and that hustle, follow-through, and giving 110% will all be required.

CARL: Fair enough, Tom. I for one feel as if I am trapped in a nightmare from which I cannot wake. But, consider that this pregame coverage is just background noise for Mega Bowl parties as they warm up.

TOM: Right again as always, Carl. It doesn’t matter what we say, so long as the tenor and rhythm of our communication falls within acceptable inane sports patter levels. We can lay bare our darkest personal demons if we so wish, and the haze of conversation and alcohol that surrounds the watching of the Mega Bowl will serve to obfuscate the citizenry from the existential horror of our predicament.

CARL: Terrific idea and analysis, Tom. Speaking of which, have you seen the commercial NBS is airing about their Mega Bowl coverage?

TOM: How could I not, Carl? They have shown it every commercial break since the new year. The sight of that intercepted pass and that brutal sack, played over and over again, haunt my every waking hour.

CARL: Answer me this, then, Tom. How can they show previews from the game if it hasn’t happened yet?

TOM: I have always wondered that. My best guess is that it is our only glimpse into a shadow world of football cabals, where each game is played out in advance until the result is predetermined.

CARL: Why would you say someone would do that, Tom? Don’t the Illuminati have better things to do with their time?

TOM: Perhaps pulling the puppet strings of finance, industry, or government grows tiresome from time to time, and the Illuminated Ones relax by rigging football games, leaving those mysterious previews as breadcrumbs by which potential threats might be assessed and eliminated.

CARL: I’m quaking in my boots, Tom. Along the same lines, I’m told that the Mega Bowl will be reaching an audience of four hundred million people today, greater than the population of the United States.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. Somehow, the Mega Bowl has a 127% share of the viewing audience, a figure that would make my old statistics teacher hang himself from a bedsheet in his closet. I can only imagine the insane financial rewards that NBS must be reaping as well, and how many countries have a GDP lower than the amount of money that will be raked in today.

CARL: Tom, what do you make of the fact that America is more sports-crazy than ever, with those figures and their meteoric rises as proof, while at the same time we have never been more sedentary and obese as a nation?

TOM: Correct again, Carl. Our levels of sedentary lardassery are matched only by those of Saudi Arabia, and yet we elevate those few with athletic talent on our shoulders like the gladiators of old.

CARL: In fact, Tom, it seems that despite loving football more than ever, we have fewer people than ever capable of playing it outside of a next-gen game console. Wax poetic for us on where this trend will lead us to fill a few more seconds of otherwise dead airtime.

TOM: I predict that the nascent evolutionary divergence which has already begun will only intensify with the march of time. I foresee a separate race of sportsmen, bred from only the strongest generations of genetic stock of breeding farms where choice specimens are put out to stud with cheerleaders. Within a further few generations, the quivering lumps of manflesh which the average American will have become will be incapable of breeding with our new master race of athletes.

CARL: A chilling, Wellsian vision of things to come, Tom. Would you say at this point that it’s clear whether this master race will rebel against its sedentary masters, perhaps enslaving them?

TOM: A good question, Carl. Bitter historical experience has shown that, like Spartacus and his rebels, these latter-day gladiators will lack the central leadership for coherent rebellion and that their attempts to overthrow us for forcing them into servitude will be ruthlessly crushed. Blood will run in the streets, the moans of crucified quarterbacks along the interstate will echo for miles, and only the inevitable collapse of our stagnant and decadent society at the hands of a nimble new ideology will bring an end to the bloodshed.

CARL: For those of you just joining us, this is Carl Drake and Tom Hicks, bringing you coverage of the pregame festivities at the Mega Bowl, the one unifying factor that remains in an increasingly divided America. We’ll be back with more inane chatter after the break.

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Ol’ Leaky.

That’s what people called the Hopewell Mobile Wash.

It was a startup business, appearing around Hopewell in 2005 or so, and catering to rich Southern Michigan University students who couldn’t be bothered to take the expensive cars their parents had bought for them through a car wash. For a fee, the Hopewell Mobile Wash would pull up to the Land Rover or pink Camaro in question. Using a variety of soaps and a reservoir of water built into the old, yellow GMC Safari panel van, a two or three person crew would do a rapid and thorough soft-touch wash.

As a consequence of the razor-thin profit margins and the jury-rigged nature of the water tank, the van was always leaking steadily when it was seen parked elsewhere in town. Sometimes it was at a busy intersection acting as a mobile billboard; other times the crew seemed to take it on joyrides, with the van appearing outside thrift stores, bars, and such.

One day, early in the spring semester when business was slow for fear of the water freezing into an icy rind on daddy’s sweet sixteen gift Audi, the Hopewell Mobile Wash truck parked in the cavernous parking lot in front of the Hopewell Women’s Shelter Thrift Store (which had once been a K-Mart). Ol’ Leaky, true to its name, began dripping all over the lot, which was ice-free thanks to an unseasonable warm snap in between. Onlookers paid it little mind until a certain fact became apparent:

This time, the substance dripping from the van was blood.

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