Flash Fiction (Journal 27)

“When something terrible happens to someone else, people often use the word 'unbearable.'  Living through a child's death, a spouse's, enduring some other kind of permanent loss – it's unbearable, it's too awful to be borne, and the person or people to whom it's happened take on a kind of horrible glow in your mind, because they are in fact bearing it, or trying to: doing the thing that it's impossible to do.  The glow can be blinding at first – it can be all you see – and although it diminishes as years pass it never goes out entirely, so that late some night when you are wandering the back pathways of your mind you may stop at the sudden sight of someone up ahea, signaling even now with a faint but terrible light” (from The Dive From Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer, p. 9)

“An Author's Betrayal: A Story for Ann Packer”

Tossing and turning fitfully, sheets tangled around my ankles, I dreamed.  I screamed. 

“How could you let it end that way?”

Annie Wilkes challenged Paul Sheldon the way I wish I could challenge you, minus the sledgehammer, of course.  Either way, the end is misery.

“What were you thinking?”

Even in my dream I felt ripped off, bereft, and spoiled for a fight. 

“With Kilroy, she could've been happy.  She didn't even love Mike anymore, had almost forgotten her guilt, forgotten that she might burn in hell for dumping a quadriplegic.”

I had finished the novel before going to bed, and my mind was stewing; I felt betrayed. 

“You have to rewrite the ending.”

In my dreams, I confronted you.  You had ruined Carrie's life and deserved to be punished.   

“Is there a jail cell or a circle in hell reserved for authors who murder their characters' spirits?”  I asked.

“Who cares if it's mere fiction?  You forced Carrie to abandon her dreams, her ambitions, her hopes for love – all to take care of a wheelchair-bound man who could never satisfy her.”

“What were you thinking?”

“Carrie and Kilroy were two people each trying to survive tragedies named Mike, and they could have, together, but you, in all your cruelty, just wouldn't let them.  And now Carrie's left, holding Mike's sandwich up to his mouth, her other hand cupped beneath his chin to catch the crumbs.  How could you possibly think that she didn't deserve more?  Maybe he does, too, but he's not the one I'm concerned with at the moment.”

“What kind of message were you trying to send, anyway?  You can't be happy, you shouldn't leave home, you don't deserve love, you can't escape your past?  The world really isn't bigger than Madison?”

“I mean, really, authors like you should be shot.”

And then I woke up.  It was just a dream; nothing changed.  I flipped to the last page of the book, and those same haunting words remained.  Sometimes, bad things do happen to good characters.

(Note: this brief story was written after I finished reading Packer's The Dive From Clausen's Pier, not a book I would necessarily recommend, unless you enjoy unhappy endings...)