Five Stories About Money

A few years ago I found myself writing angry, sprawling stories that had tenuous logic and struggled to contain themselves. At the time, I thought I was burrowing into a future nerve or exposing unspoken truths, but now it is hard to see the stories as anything other than crude products of resentment. Because of their content, I only allowed my wife to read them, and because they were unwieldy, I never mustered enough enthusiasm to polish the stories into something better than they were. Today, I am reminded of them when an unrelated search term buoys one to the top of my email inbox or when I see a uniquely disgusting juxtaposition, like a poem written by a millionaire or a flower blooming in December.

One story was titled Killing My Landlord in Front of Their Children. The protagonist was a young man named Noah who rented a converted garage in a historic neighborhood filled with homes in the Spanish Colonial style. Tall concrete walls surrounded the neighborhood and armed guards in black tactical gear patrolled the perimeter, protecting residents from the drug addicts and trash-eating schizophrenics outside. Noah lived there because he was a Pud Whacker, a type of content creator that filmed themselves masturbating near open windows in the dark of night. Pud Whacking was a saturated field that Noah entered late, but he hoped the historic neighborhood would give him an edge over the countless Pud Whackers who masturbated in the suburbs and beyond. After weeks of struggling for a nonexistent audience, however, Noah was ready to call it quits and resume caretaking for his dying father back home when he received his first break. A mysterious benefactor caught one of his streams by chance and liked what they saw. They offered to become Noah’s patron. As long as Noah continued to preform and follow

their demands, he could expect to be rewarded according to a payout schedule outlined in a shared contract. Noah began calling this patron The Whale and eagerly awaited the next steps. The money on the table was enough to change his life.

This exposition took multiple pages to explain, during which Noah’s landlord would first appear on the periphery as a complacent bystander while their children sprayed Noah with a hose or demanded he cut his own forearms with a razorblade. There were also multiple tonal digressions, like a Fourth of July riot outside the gates where armed guards opened fire from atop the ramparts, bright bursts from their muzzles outshining the technicolor fireworks in the sky.

When the landlord eventually asserted himself as a force of action in the story, it was to hand Noah an eviction letter. One of their children had just begun oil painting and wanted to turn the converted garage into an artist’s studio. Since the landlord liked Noah, he gave him until the end of the month to leave.

Noah spent the next three nights in a state of despair, helplessly stumbling around the neighborhood in miserable attempts at Pud Whacking that primarily resulted in raw skin. He sent frantic, one-sided messages to The Whale proposing an alternative arrangement—maybe, Noah hoped, it was not the historic neighborhood that attracted The Whale, but Noah himself. Each hour that passed without response from The Whale turned Noah more desperate and angry, resentful toward what would be taken from him and fearful toward what his life may become.

As dawn broke over the wall on the morning of the third night, Noah noticed his thin semen was an unusual color. What the change might signal about his health terrified him, but the terror only served to steel his reserve. He decided on revenge.

Noah hired a group of Shit Beaters, content creators similar to Pud Whackers who instead specialized in assaulting people. Immediately afterward, The Whale finally broke their silence with a demand: Noah should break into his landlord’s house that night and masturbate to their family photo album. It disturbed Noah to think about what The Whale knew and how they knew it, but the promise of a fat payout quashed any further questions.

The two events collided. Noah was crawling through a broken window when he was confronted by his landlord and their children. Before they could harm Noah, the Shit Beaters stormed through the front door. The final image of the story was a Shit Beater kicking the landlord’s head with a wet thud while their children were restrained and as Noah climaxed before feeling the vibrating notification of money hitting his account.

When I wrote Killing My Landlord in Front of Their Children, my wife and I were renting a converted garage in a historic neighborhood. The previous winter, my wife’s mother had moved to Phoenix to live with a man and his young du who worked in the laundry room at the hospital downtown, and after visiting her for the first time, my wife returned to our studio apartment in Detroit thinking the desert landscapes would nourish her photography and the larger city held more economic opportunity to justify the increased cost of living. At the time, I was due to graduate from a state university with a literature degree and had little lined up outside a remote job I had just taken on, so I was not hard to convince.

The converted garage was expectedly small, but I had been wowed by the hallmark touches of renovation the landlord had made, like a sliding barn door and pine wood panelling on an accent wall. If my wife gently suggested we were overpaying for small garage, I’d remind her

that I never thought I’d be able to afford a place with a pine wood accent wall and it meant something to me that my data entry job could now allow such a thing. And it was true, that did mean something to me. After we decorated the space with vintage ceramics and dried bouquets of wildflowers, I’d sit on the couch reading a novel and sometimes pause to admire how things looked.

That fall, an old friend from home stopped by. They were in Arizona visiting family, as one of their grandparents had a large vacation home in the mountains north of town. Instead of giving a tour, I simply waved my arm in front of me and narrated the features—the Ikea cabinets with custom handles our landlord installed, the sleek split air conditioners seen in Japan, the TV mount against the pine wood accent wall, our bed near the refrigerator, the sliding barn door to the bathroom. His eyes widened as his smile froze, so I let my voice trail off and suggested we go out to eat. Over sandwiches, we reminisced and caught up. He and his wife had just bought a home with five bedrooms they planned on filling with children. We drove out to the desert to see a particular view I admired, and as we looked across the vast red landscape he asked what I planned on doing with my life now that I finished grad school. After we said goodbye, I felt as if I reappeared in his life momentarily to teach him a lesson about gratitude. I began noticing how certain portions of the pine wood paneling were bleached from the sun.

In September, our landlord informed us they’d be selling their Arizona properties in the new year. They’d had enough of the rat race and wanted to reconnect with what mattered out on a ranch in Utah. We had three months to leave. I told my friend from back home about this, hoping for some sympathy. He didn’t blame the landlord for cashing out. In fact, I should look

into buying property of my own. His home value had already gone up in the short time he had owned it.

I spent evenings on the couch with my wife as she looked for a new place to live, garages or otherwise. Adding hypothetical move-in costs to our current balance sheet of car insurance, student loans, credit card debt, and high-interest personal loans I’d taken out to pay previous credit card debt made me sick to my stomach.

My wife eventually found a small house for rent near the train yard that was only marginally more expensive than our garage and owned by an older man who was flexible with things like security deposits. We made arrangements to move-in as soon as possible. When I told our current landlord we’d be leaving sooner than expected, they threatened legal action unless we paid for the remainder of our lease. After pleading and negotiating, I agreed to pay half of what was asked, which I was able to make by selling plasma and all my books.

Between moving out of the garage and into the small house near the train yard, I wrote Killing My Landlord in Front of Their Children. I emailed it to my wife when I considered it finished. I took her out to dinner later that week with the intention of hearing her thoughts, deciding to try a Mexican restaurant that advertised cheap dinner specials. Our waiter was a hulking man with bloodshot eyes and long hair tied back in a bun.

The story was disgusting, my wife said after we sat down. It was not the product of a sensitive, artistic mind. There was nothing but hatred, greed, and a contempt for the meek. Worse yet, I seemed to disregard everything we had built together. Because we didn’t own property, did our life not have beauty and meaning? Was our only purpose masturbation and murder? Did I want a big, ugly house with five bedrooms? What about the pine accent wall I was so proud of?

I told her I found it hard to find value in things that could be taken away so easily, including a life that was in the hands of others.

Your life will always be in the hands of others, my wife said in response. There will always be someone who can ruin things for you, or someone who is more quick to the draw, or someone who was just born lucky. That’s how it works. At least the person in your story still has a family.

I should note my wife grew up bouncing between parking lots and weekly rate hotels with the occasional season in a shelter, often losing what little she had to repo men or pawn shops. When we first met a decade ago, she had to cash her checks at liquor stores because she wrote too many bounced checks as a teenager trying to cover the bills her mother couldn’t pay, and she taught me how helpful clove oil could be for toothaches or what foods were safe to eat past their expiration date. This is why I was equally proud and sad to hear her say that while her life had never been so stable as it was now, it didn’t seem to be enough for me. A light shame washed over me as the waiter brought our dishes.

The cheese on my wife’s enchiladas was lukewarm and congealed. Tiny bits of unrendered fat sprinkled my tacos. I excused myself after a few bites, wanting to see if the bathroom mirror reflected these revealed parts of myself I didn’t know existed. I walked in our waiter puking into the toilet.

We spent the next two days lying on our mattress in our new rented house by the train yard. The mattress was in the middle of what would become our living room, having not yet had the chance to unpack the bed frame before we got the flu, just as we hadn’t yet set up the TV. We stared at the ceiling between naps, sometimes turning to the nearest window to admire the deep

orange leaves of our new neighbor’s birch tree or to count the number of boxcars on trains passing the distant mountain range. At night, little lights would dot the mountain, signs of the sprawling mansions on the foothills. My head heavy with cough medicine, I’d wonder if I was not groveling before these tasteless shrines of capital. Was I too dull to imagine a future beyond that of wealth accumulation? Did my hate contain admiration?

When she was finally on the mend, my wife made excited preparations to decorate the house for Halloween. It would be her first time.

The following spring, we adopted a dog. I’d been awarded a small promotion in the new year and we used the extra money to buy plenty of plush toys and a quality leash. With the few dollars left over, I began buying books again, though instead of literature I found myself buying books on current events and political theory, little ways of understanding how the world worked around me.

I took the dog on long walks in the morning, usually alone while my wife slept in. Our walks always took us past a nearby house with a dirt yard surrounded by a chainlink fence. A dozen small dogs in a dozen varieties poured out the door whenever we walked by, hurling themselves at the fence and gnashing their teeth. The owner always ran out after them, screaming the dogs names. The only name I ever caught was Rosie, so I took to calling the owner Rosie, too. I liked Rosie and made an effort to wave whenever I saw her on a bike with a trash bag of empty cans slung over her shoulder, trailed by the sugary scent of stale beer. Once, she stopped me to say they found a dead body in the alley, someone who had a heart attack or overdosed. The

ambulance has already been called, but she just wanted me to know. I felt touched by the camaraderie.

Further away from Rosie’s house, the dirt patches were replaced with artificial turf or xeriscaped yards with native species and low-flow sprinkler systems. I rarely saw the people who owned these homes, but did learn to recognize the faces of the cleaning crews for the short-term rentals or the laborers for the large-scale renovations. The houses themselves weren’t any different than the one we rented, but sometimes I’d see For Sale signs from boutique real estate firms and my heart would skip a beat, hoping my landlord wouldn’t get any ideas or find one of the mailbox flyers advertising cash offers before we had a chance to throw them away. Once, my dog took a misstep while lifting his leg on one of these For Sale signs and a stray nail on the lawn lodged into his paw. Little drops of blood flecked the pavement as I carried him home, and the three of us spent the rest of the afternoon at the emergency veterinarian. Our walks together were put hold while he healed. My wife tried to track down the person behind the LLC that owned the home while I used the extra time to read and write another story.

The protagonist of Sucking Dick in China was an overweight, sickly man named Terrance who taught English in a fictional Chinese hypercity with anonymous superstructures and endless pillars of housing set alongside hulking factories that manufactured microfiber towels. The school was second-rung, the students children of middle managers, the teachers graduates of state universities. The atmosphere at the school was one of striving resentment that erupted in cruel barbs from impenetrable cliques. Terrance would leave a classroom of students snickering about his sweating problem only to enter a faculty lounge and hear veiled comments about his body odor. He found solace in one friend, a man named Federico from Argentina who taught a

remedial class and would sometimes accompany Terrance on a cheap tandem bicycle to bars near campus or sit with him eating sloppy meals the cafeteria provided.

Terrance’s favored topic of conversation was a mysterious place downtown he dubbed The Club. The mystique of The Club came from the limousines and private cars parked outside the nondescript facade every night, the bouncers outside the door who stood like sentinels, the wealthy magnates and foreigners wearing sleek tuxedoes and sapphire nightgowns who elegantly slipped in and out, and the silence that surrounded the building on a quiet street in the hypercity. Terrance didn’t know anyone who had been to The Club, not even in the second or third degree. Just once, Terrance would tell Federico over a plate of stringy chicken, he wanted to go to The Club and see what it was. Drinking at the bar, he’d ask Federico what he thought happened in The Club. On the way back home, he’d catch a glimpse of it. In bed, he’d dream about it.

The proceeding pages of the story oscillated between Terrance’s sadness and ambition. He lost track of time staring at a student who wore open-toed sandals. He found a cartoon someone drew of him as a pork bun. He attended an awards gala in a stained t-shirt after his suitcase was stolen only to learn he was not nominated. His fun fact for the faculty newsletter was just his age. Meanwhile, he unsuccessfully bribed bouncers at The Club to learn about dishwashing positions. He ordered a police uniform that was too cheap to be believable and laid behind the tires of a limousine until the driver gave him more information. He considered guerrilla tactics but couldn’t afford to rent a truck. He’d interrupt drunken games of Go Fish with Federico to say life would be so much better if he could get into The Club, it would almost be worth living again. Federico would nurse his drink while Terrance admitted The Club was, frankly, all he had in this life.

This admission was solidified when Terrance ran into a fellow teacher one afternoon who said he was surprised to miss Terrance at Federico’s going away party. Federico, it turned out, had suddenly moved back to Argentina. He hadn’t even mentioned it to Terrance.

Terrance showed up drunk to class the next day and made comments both lewd and vulnerable to the female students. He leaned against a desk to look nonchalant and broke it. He started to cry and the class laughed. Later that afternoon, Terrance learned from his supervisor that he’d be transferred to a satellite campus next semester. He was not worth the trouble of disciplinary action.

That night, Terrance rode his tandem bicycle through the city, tears clouding his vision, legs burning, breath exhausted. He eventually found himself in an unknown part of town where cluttered laundromats sat alongside shoe stores, darkened window displays showcased garden fixtures that glistened from the streetlights outside, and stray cats meowed as they climbed in and out of dumpsters. Near the end of the street, a bright yellow sign advertised a noodle shop with steam billowing out the front door.

Terrance walked in to buy a meal but instead met a student from one of the first classes he ever taught at the school. She recognized Terrance before he recognized her. He was always her favorite teacher, she told him. She used everything Terrance taught her to pursue an arts career abroad. But things didn’t work out in London, she said with a dark inflection, which is why she was back in China working at her father’s noodle shop. Her father owned quite a few buildings on the block. She tried to tell Terrance what happened in London, but he was more interested in her father. If he’s a local magnate, does he have access to The Club? The student

handed Terrance a small medallion emblazoned with the word Friendship in colorful letters. It was all he needed to get in.

A private, unmarked cab collected Terrance outside. The ride was smooth, quiet, and climate controlled. Outside The Club, Terrance handed the medallion to the bouncer. Inside, an attendant, a young woman, grabbed Terrance’s elbow with a tenderness he’d rarely known and guided him among the elegant furniture and understated decoration, the hushed conversations near oil paintings and low tables. People looked him in the eye and nodded while another attendant handed him a drink. He was led upstairs and shown the first room. Through a small window, he observed people fucking a dog. The men stood in an orderly line to fuck the dog from behind while the women stood in line to suck the dog’s dick. Terrance nodded, the attendant smiled, and they continued. In the next room, more people were fucking a dog or letting a dog fuck them. Terrance nodded again, this time unable to hide his smile or the tears in his eyes. He was finally at The Club, and it was more than he thought possible. The attendant then led him to a dark, quiet room that guests and performers used to rest. Terrance could hear the labored breathing of a dog in the corner and the groans of satisfaction from a man against the wall. The attendant would be back to collect him as soon as a space outside was available. After a moment alone, the excitement and realized fulfillment was too much for Terrance. He approached the dog in the corner, now breathing silently, and stuck his dick in the dog’s mouth. It was warm and moist. Terrance’s tears now flowed freely. He felt the urge to call his dead mother. He wanted to be kind to others and spread love. Downstairs, the attendant learned the dog in the room was pulled aside because it was dying.

I turned 30 that summer. On my birthday I was coming home from a work trip and took a taxi back to our house in the late afternoon. I was still wearing my suit when I came through the door with my suitcase in tow, my faux-leather shoes cutting into my heels. Sweat beaded across my forehead from the short walk in the heat. The dog ran to see me. I’d never been away from home so long before and he exploded from the excitement, barking so expressively it sounded like he was talking to me.

We’d recently begun letting a feral cat inside, and the cat was there to welcome me, too. He jumped on the counter and rubbed his head against my shoulder. I called my wife’s name and turned the corner, only to find her at our dining room table wearing a party hat. Big mylar balloons hung over the table and small pieces of confetti were scattered across the floor. In the corner was a pet-sized party hat that had been ripped to shreds. In the center of the table sat a delicately frosted cake with candles. My wife sang Happy Birthday to me and cut the cake to reveal it was rainbow colored with seven individual layers. She had baked it herself that afternoon.

We ate the cake together as the desert sun set through the window, turning the room pink and gold. I told her about the work trip and she gave me a card she wrote, her words taking up so much space that an extra sheet of notebook paper was needed. I let the dog and cat lick frosting off my knuckles. When I went to throw a napkin away, I saw the trashcan was filled with discarded layers of cake, discolored and burnt. There was something so typical about the whole affair, but in a way that I never thought would apply to me, as if my life had transformed from sketch into painting.

As dusk transformed into night, we opened a bottle of wine and poured some into coffee thermoses before taking the dog on his last walk before bed. Passing Rosie’s house, my wife

mentioned she had read Sucking Dick in China. I had emailed it to her some days prior and hadn’t mentioned it since. I asked her what she thought. We could hear the symphony of dogs barking through the windows as we moved on.

She thought the story was revolting and racist and begged me not to show it to anyone else. We walked in silence for awhile, sipping the wine from our thermoses. Out of curiosity, I pressed the back of my hand to the pavement to see how hot it felt and made a note to buy the dog a pair of moccasins.

I told her it was meant to be shocking. We were now near the house with the stray nail. All this striving and resource hoarding, these feelings of greed and inadequacy, it all amounts to nothing more than sticking a dick in a dead dog’s mouth. The output of arcane private equity mechanisms, I said, is the same as the goal of every entrepreneur: they want to fuck something until it’s dead. It really was that obvious. Allegory was becoming social realism.

My wife paused at an empty house under continuous renovation. The landscaper had just planted adolescent citrus trees along neat rows in the front yard. They were in bloom now, and the white petals nearly glowed in the moonlight, their fragrance delicate and sweet. Why don’t you want to write about anything beautiful, she asked me. Why don’t you want to write about something besides money, her voice serious as it trailed off.

Our thermoses of wine were unfortunately empty. It would have been great to drink them near the citrus flowers. I didn’t know what to say. I thought the story was beautiful in its own way and about so much more than money. But then again, maybe it wasn’t.

My wife broke the silence by asking our dog if he knew the nasty things I was writing about. We both laughed, but I was surprised to find myself slightly embarrassed in front of the dog.

Maybe you just need to think things through a little more, my wife said as she grabbed my hand and headed toward home. The influence of the wine and my birthday made her words seem profound and almost ominous to me, as if there wasn’t much time left to figure out what I wanted to say.

The next few months went by in a flurry of work. I continued to climb the ladder at my job, if not unintentionally, and eventually I stopped paying attention to how much money we had in our bank account because I didn’t need to worry about it anymore. Whenever our landlord came by to do yard work, I’d ask about his day. Sometimes he would drop off spare loaves of bread he had baked. My wife was correct in her assumption about the desert nourishing her photography, so we sectioned off portions of the small house near the train yard she could use as a darkroom and studio. When she was busy, I read at a clip I hadn’t since school. I could buy even more books now, my interests now ranging from monetary policy to conspiracy theory, from accredited surveys of Atlanticist hegemony to self-published theses about mass shootings. The more I read, the more I questioned what I knew, and the more I questioned what I knew, the more I felt I had to read in order to figure it out. I found myself paralyzed with curiosity.

The closest I got to writing an actual story during this time happened after a dinner with my wife’s mother. The man she was with had lost his job at the hospital laundromat right as his young daughter from another woman started living with them, and I had the feeling they were

between both homes and paychecks. We ate on a folded card table in the dining room surrounded by cardboard boxes. A sticky note by the phone reminded everyone to not answer any unknown number, and a thick stack of envelopes sat beside cans of lukewarm soda cans they kept on the counter. Midway through the meal, the lamp stopped working so we finished our bowls of chicken adobo only by the light of the fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen.

Afterward, the man’s young daughter invited us to her room to see her computer game. She was so enthusiastic it made me excited, too, and for a brief moment I felt the urge to have my own child. All her classmates in middle school played the same game, the girl said. They created little avatars and ran around an online virtual world, talking to other children. You could even spend real money to buy special outfits for your avatar. My wife and I were equally bemused about the concept of an unsupervised online game like this, and later that night an internet search led me to a trove of articles about the grooming and abuse that can happened in those virtual online worlds, with horrifying stories of children meeting strangers in the game that later coerced and threatened them into cutting phrases into their skin on webcam, eating their own vomit, or doing things that involved family pets and their even younger siblings.

The story I wrote was called Ritual Suffering in Hell, and it centered around a man who was a delivery driver for an app and aspired to be a vigilante that caught child predators. The story was meant to culminate in an orgy of blood and violence during a pizza delivery to a party at the home of a software engineer behind a platform like the one described above, but midway through drafting it out, my father was diagnosed with brain cancer. Our relationship was not in a repairable state, at least not in the time we had left, but I flew home as frequently as I could to be with him. Everything else fell by the wayside, including my writing.

When my father died a few months later, I wrote a small trilogy of intimate stories about my father, our relationship, and what it was like to watch him die. To date they are the only stories I’ve gotten published.

I took a long break from writing after that, unwilling to return to the themes of my father and uninspired to write about anything else. Work continued to go well for me, and while I continued to read broadly, I found myself with enough extra money to buy things like guitars and a stationary bike, so my time was spent in what I would call an ambulatory fashion. We had enough money to travel, too, so we got to visit parts of the country we’d never seen, and even spent time in Iceland. We still couldn’t afford to buy a house, but it no longer felt unreasonable to think so. We spent some weekends volunteering at animal shelters. My wife would buy her mother groceries from time to time, and we even bought the man’s young daughter things like coloring books and jigsaw puzzles.

Other changes happened, too. I lost touch with a few friends, witnessed unwelcome changes in my body, and my wife and I fought in a new way. We fought about systemic questions like having a child, the division of chores, what it meant to be an artist, or the best way to spend free time. Sometimes we’d circle the real issue, other times we’d name it directly: there was an emptiness to our lives that wasn’t there before. I don’t mean to say the emptiness arrived because we were more materially comfortable, but rather old questions became new ones, or perhaps certain questions were now just more bare. What were we doing with our lives? Now that we were older, what came next? Is this everything? Was it too late to change? These questions stretched unused muscles, leaving us with what could only be called a world weariness.

That winter, I drafted a story with the working title Deluge of Spirit. The protagonist was a man who shared my name. He lived in Toronto as a private detective with an uncertain pedigree. He was an alcoholic and a devout Catholic. The story would open at the charity dinner his church held every Christmas for the poor. This year, a waterline break in the parish forced the dinner into the rectory where the priest lived. The protagonist is helping set the dinner in the rectory’s living room, frequently hiding in a corner to take a sip from his flask. When dinner is served and the protagonist sees the homeless wearing dirty coats eating in a cozy living room with knickknacks on the wall, he is brought to tears. He runs across the churchyard and into the empty chapel, dark and flooded from the waterline break. He drops to his knees before the crucifix and prays, raw sewage soaking into his khakis.

When he returns to the rectory hours later, the clean-up work is already done. A fellow volunteer calls him Fernando Shaw. The joke is lost on the protagonist, who then learns Fernando Shaw was an international student who killed himself that summer in a Canadian prison. A scrawled a note on a page from the prison Bible said he killed himself because he didn’t want to work anymore. When the news got hold of the story, it was discovered that Fernando had recently been asked to work a four hour shift two days a week in the laundry room in exchange for room and board at a nearby hostel. A fight that broke out when he was presented with this offer was how he landed in jail in the first place. He got top marks in his engineering classes and was popular at school. There was no suspected motive other than what he had written. He didn’t want to work eight hours a week, so he killed himself.

Learning about the wider public reaction shocks the protagonist. Fernando’s suicide was met with derision across class and ethnic lines. No one felt sympathy with the poor bastard who

didn’t want to work. The donation site his family launched was left woefully underfunded. The protagonist offers his services pro bono to the family, which led to a long series of scenes that led through conspiracy, halls of power, the underworld, government agencies, and other dregs. Friends turned enemies, heroes turned villain, up became down, and morality flung beyond good and evil. The story would come to an end along the edge of a frozen pond during the first snowfall of the season. The protagonist would be resting on a bench, realizing that despite everything he had learned about things like Atlanticist hegemony, mass shootings, and how the world really worked, Fernando Shaw killed himself simply because he didn’t want to work anymore. In most drafts, this would surpass 50 pages.

I could never get Deluge of Spirit to come together the way I wanted to, so I never considered it finished enough to show my wife. There was too much throat clearing in the draft for the story to take off, or I simply didn’t have the technical acumen to make it work. Thinking about it now, it may be that I was trying to encompass too much. In capturing all that context, the writing became diluted and anemic. I tried to write about things I knew but didn’t understand. This anemia is also present when I drive around the city and see old men with scabs on their face digging through trashcans, or see photos of dead children in the newspaper, or feel my chest hurt from wildfire smoke in the sky. There is no rage, only resignation—a simple but deeply felt knowledge that things will only get worse, an awareness that constant work will not carry me forward but stopping it will slide me backward, a fear that it can all be taken away, a sadness that it was never much to begin with in the first place.

As ashamed as I am of my earlier stories, both the ones I showed only to my wife and the ones I published about my dying father, I can’t help but think that myopia is still a form of vision and that a frenzied tantrum still gets close to the heart of something. If the moment is right when I think of them, I will take the time to skim through the pages, hoping to discover an essence I may have missed originally, to regain some of the honesty found only in arrogance and immediacy, to remember what I wanted in the first place.

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