#8: Green Tea Leaves / Juliana Amir to Lewis Carroll

Dear Mr. Dodgson:

Because of your presence, I imagine a green tea forest razed to the earth. All those lovely green jewel tones sipped and internalized. Now what remains? An open expanse of the brownest dirt, sprawling and dipping as far as my imaginative gaze reaches, and memories. Memories of color, of warmth, of the way leaves harnessed the light until they glowed inside out. Now the sun spills chaotically without visionaries weaving it into order, into beautiful spiraled webs, into golden ratios.

You kept seating charts, liked order, and dare I say thought kindly on fate with its steady hands and gossamer threads so fine only a select few can see. But: in your most famous piece of art, you wrote of chaos. Where hid the mercury-madness? In the misconduct of Wonderland or the order of society? In which place did freedom breathe? Did mathematicians decimate the reassurance you found in counting and multiplying when they added imaginary numbers? Did fiction swing into reality with such brute force that both shattered, blending in a way now impossible to separate?

So many lessons cast over countless green tea leaves. I now understand Orpheus and Eurydice. That wasn’t a couple you were striving teach, but that was the best part of your lessons. Sitting out for a century or so, all of your wisdom was served in tiny cups with mismatched saucers, the way lessons taste best. Your stories are sprawled upon a table stretching endlessly with broken clocks and the very best butter.

We count impossible things like we count imaginary numbers to see if the world feels less dismal. Orpheus let Hades—a trick of his mind, like a shadow in a foreign place—manifest so he could traverse a nightmarish path of healing. In his imaginative gaze, over his shoulder Eurydice smiled, following, and when he glanced behind, in a dark rush, he confirmed every worst fear struggling inside. She was never there at all. To save her was never in his musically gifted hands. Music can only resurrect a soul in a living body, and her living body had gone irreversibly cold. How helpless to have a talent that bends trees, but not time. How human heroes are.

To be truthful, I think the white rabbit with the clock pasted to his paw bothered you. Time clouded his mind, you recognized. But broken clocks were a thing of beauty that didn’t belong; you understood. In a field of broken clocks . . . that is where brilliance hides, the impossible lives, and where the curious minds that adulthood dims stay aglow.
 

For what is real, what is a dream, what is the difference? What is a thought, what is an emotion, what does it matter?

All that matters are the branches of the web stretching out to touch one another to turn the whole thing golden. All that matters is that, somehow, a brighter understanding—of everything we see, all matter, all manner, all stories—can be found.

Warm wishes,

Juliana

Little fragments of Juliana Amir’s work are represented in beautiful magazines such as Fantasia Divinity, Enchanted Conversations, and Dime Show Review. Her favorite number is eight.

#7: The Red Baron Stole My Fanfic / Angelica Julia Davila to Charles M. Schulz

I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, Chuck, but would you ever guess that I’ve been writing since I was little? That’s right! Just like most other twenty-something-year-old writers, I too thought I was special in grade school. It wasn’t my fault, though, Chuck! I swear. My fourth-grade spelling teacher made me believe I was a special writing snowflake. I could hear you from the beyond already asking “wah wah wah wah wah wah wah?” and I will address exactly how this concerns you in a second.

First, let me catch you up on a few of my latest Peanuts purchases. As a continuous loyal fan, I have discovered that the best place to buy anything Snoopy-related is at Marshall’s. Within the last few months, I have bought three plush blankets depicting Snoopy and gang in various hijinks. I should also add, I have thoroughly enjoyed sipping on the hot chocolate from the Peanuts tin can I bought, also from Marshall’s. There! Now we are all caught up on how I continue to help your estate as your most loyal fan.

I should also take this moment to apologize for the Snoopy-in-a-witch-hat plushie’s missing nose. The dog got to him just as when he had gobbled up Snoopy-in-a-skeleton-costume plushie’s eyes previously, when we last spoke. No need to worry, though, Chuck! All of the Snoopys (Snoopies?) now live in the drawer beneath my bed. Safe from canine teeth.

Where were we? Oh, yes. Look Chuck, when Ms. I-don’t-remember-her-name-for-the-life-of-me assigned our class to write a short fiction story, I knew there was only one thing I could write about. I needed to tell the story of Snoopy and the gang going camping. It didn’t matter this story had already been told in Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown because I had my own original spin on it! Remember, Chuck, I was a special writing snowflake!

Soon, my young career as a fanfiction writer took off. Ms. I-don’t-remember-her-name-for-the-life-of-me kept asking me to write more about your beloved Peanuts and write I did. I became the most prolific writer I have ever been in my entire life, which is to say my writing career may have peaked within in the fourth grade.

I don’t know what happened to the binder with a terribly drawn Snoopy on the cover (I was a writer, not a writer AND illustrator like you) containing volumes one through four of my Peanuts fanfiction. It may have gotten lost amidst all the moving my family did when I was a child. Though to be honest, I think perhaps the Red Baron swooped in and stole them one night.

Look, Chuck, my tangent has gone on quite long enough. I know you’re a busy man. You taught me how to craft a story. Having been an English-as-a-second-language learner, your work helped strengthen the foundation that would train my non-native tongue to pursue a newfound passion. I hope the lost fanfiction binder finds its way to you in the beyond someday. I know, Chuck, I know. You say “wah wah wah wah wah wah,” but you’re being too modest. Looking forward to our future correspondence, Chuck!

As Marcy would say, “Goodnight, Sir.”

Angelica Julia Davila is currently working on her PhD in Creative Writing at University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also a comedian and improvisor.

#6: #metoo & Vengeance / Brooke Wonders to Edgar Allan Poe

Dear E.A.P.:

You are the influence I don't name because it feels obvious, because you remain widely taught in US high schools, because you don't need my help, and not just because you're dead. I don't know how to square your abject racism with your ability to capture the precise shape of my adolescent angst. You were my cloak of shadows, and I hid beneath you for years. How many outcasts sheltered beneath your expansive black wings? 

Freshman year of high school I was harrassed by a skunk-haired boy in biology class. Every time the lights dimmed so we could watch a movie—asexual reproduction versus sexual reproduction—he'd begin masturbating under the table. "Do you know what this is?" he asked me, flinging something liquid across the tiled floor, where it narrowly avoided spattering my shoe. I did not know. When I asked to be seated next to someone, anyone else, I was told by the young TA (I knew the elderly man who grumbled through lectures wouldn't help) that boys will be boys—that exact phrase, which still tastes like burning in my throat. So in English class, when it was time to give presentations, I dressed up in all black and drew red dots on my face. Dimmed the lights. Read "The Masque of the Red Death" aloud in its entirety. 

I was not a popular kid.

Which perhaps explains why I loved your revenge stories so, especially "Hop-frog." At 5'2", I was used to big people flinging me around—I received my first concussion from my first boyfriend, who threw me across the choir room in a failed attempt to flirt. "I didn't know you were so small," he said, and made it up to me by taking me to homecoming.

In "Hop-frog," a diminutive man survives by humor, until he's pushed to his limit, at which point he strings up his tormentors and burns them alive. Skunk-haired boy, biology teacher, accomplice TA—dress them in suits of flax and let them swing from the chandelier.

"Ah, ha!" said at length the infuriated jester. "Ah, ha! I begin to see who these people are now!" Here, pretending to scrutinize the king more closely, he held the flambeau to the flaxen coat which enveloped him, and which instantly burst into a sheet of vivid flame.

The problem with reading your work while growing up in the Southwest, and mildly dyslexic at that: I misread it as Amontadillo, which my pattern-seeking mind became convinced was some kind of armadillo. So what could this mysterious, desirable liquid be besides the milk of some ant-eating vertebrate, its tiered shell the visual echo of those bricks that wall up poor Fortunato?

"Armadillo!"
"I have my doubts."
"Armadillo!"
"And I must satisfy them."
"Armadillo!"

And is it better that we never discover the crimes our narrator has suffered at Fortunato's hands? And what of the masons, a mystery called up partway through—a pun on the bricklayer's work (masonry, hawhaw), but also a secret society, the likes of which fascinated you, and me?

I had finished a portion of the last and the eleventh; there remained but a single stone to be fitted and plastered in. I struggled with its weight; I placed it partially in its destined position.  

I do not know how to fit you into my pantheon. Angela Carter, Ursula LeGuin, N.K. Jemisin, China Mieville…you don't fit (quoth the Raven, anymore). Writing a dead letter to you is writing a letter to a dead self, a girl who would shut up and listen when a boy decided her body and attention ought belong to him. I don't miss her.

My most vibrant memory of loving your work is of reading the following as triumphant fantasy:

Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form. 

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. 

I want to read this image as self. As the stand-in for what and who I would have to become to survive. A pure threat. A costume, a false self, with nothing underneath that anyone could harm. And I want to read this as an image of #metoo.  The revelers who have cut themselves off from society. Let them catch plague, I've got mine, so why should I care about your suffering? And then into their midst comes this figure—despite the fact that it is described as wearing the visage of a corpse, I've always pictured it in a plague doctor's mask—who casts a pall on their revelry, who reminds them people are dying that they might enjoy excess.

So despite your flaws, I offer up sincere thanks for your words, lo these many years after they shaped me. Thank you for giving shape to horrors that protected me, at a moment when I needed protection. Thank you for giving me an imaginary in which the outcasts win.

—Brooke Wonders

#5: Sorry You Had to Miss Out on Goth Music/ Claire Dockery to Sylvia Plath

Dear SP,

I recall reading, in the first installment of Meg Cabot’s lauded Princess Diaries series, a letter from the protagonist to Carl Jung. Mia, our beloved everygirl-turned-princess, asks Dr. Jung if writing to a dead person makes her crazy.

That series was my first proper introduction to diary-style writing, fictional or otherwise, and here I am, ten-odd years later, and your Unabridged Diaries is one of my most worn paperbacks, and should I ask you if I’m crazy? Because I can’t top you. I probably couldn’t even top Mia Thermopolis, who is fabulously and lovably neurotic.

You’re the first person who ever made me wonder if I wanted to be crazy. If it could make me more interesting, maybe in an internalized why am I not as beloved as your average John Green manic pixie dream girl character? sort of way. If the fierce flames amid which it can be planted are what make the golden lotus special, to riff on your tombstone (Did you laugh? I know you like black humor).

“The blood jet is poetry” — a blood jet necessitates a wound. I have feared not being wounded enough. You dredge up the dregs of my Catholic upbringing, the idea that suffering brings saintliness. Brings poems. Brings eternal life. Once, in a makeshift confessional, i.e. an empty classroom during CCD, the priest told me I needed to think of more sins to confess when I trailed off, unsure what more I could express contrition for. Even to the Catholics, I made no great Confessionalist. Was I not crazy enough?

An abridged CV of neurotic habits: I have a substantial personal history of assigning magical qualities to inanimate objects. Or to intellectual property. At its longest, my list of songs I couldn’t listen to because they were cursed and would surely invoke the wrath of the gods, i.e. intestinal illness, numbered around one hundred. Miley Cyrus’ hit single “Party in the USA” still makes me want to flee buildings. I still make sure to acknowledge the possibility of my imminent death in a freak accident before a given event is set to transpire when I make plans with my friends. They find this eccentric. My former therapist called this “likely obsessive compulsive disorder” and referred me elsewhere. Meanwhile, I haven’t written a poem in weeks. My journal is dusty. My room isn’t quite Hoarders-level bad, but give it time. Why is it not enough?

Let me take a moment to quote Morticia Addams: “I’m just like every modern woman trying to have it all. A loving husband. A family. I only wish I had more time to seek out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade.” This is you, is it not? You and me both. Your journals, your novel, your poems, they reek of ambition, of wanting to have it all (dark forces included). Sometimes I resent you because you were so open about ambitions I’ve been ashamed to quietly foster. And then I remember I’m reading your diary. Add voyeurism to my list of sins. I hope that when I die, someone will care enough to read mine. 

I love you. I resent you. When I read your poems, I get the tingles, not just from the assonant, chanty sort of cadence that reminds me of saying the rosary or reciting the Nicene Creed in church, but from the sheer power of your voice, of your holy rage, which is what everyone says, but with good reason. Your voice is like a wine stain slowly widening across a white tablecloth  — brilliant, moving outward, outward, until it’s everywhere you don’t want it to be. Those BBC recordings get stuck in my head. You’re a bee flying next to my outer ear, poised to burrow inside it.

I’ve lost count of how many times my workshop partners and friends have called my drafts “Plathian.” Is that a reflection of me wanting to be like you? Wanting to be worse off than I am? Or a better writer? Still can’t find my own sins to confess. Not beautifully, anyway. My rage has no handholds. And it irritates me that you found what I can’t seem to locate. My brand of crazy is not fruitful. Unable to find my own shoes, I walk around in yours. They don’t fit quite right.

Did you know that one hallmark of OCD is measured repetition? A prominent feature in your poems. Love, love. Empty? Empty. I like it.

Your work makes me question the relationship between happiness and success.

You didn’t have it all. You could’ve had it all. But you’re dead. Some speculate about whether you did it as a sacrifice to your art, anticipating the sensation. No one talks about you without talking about suicide. One of my neurotic habits is rumination. Specifically about death, how I fear it. I am not willing to sacrifice myself at the altar of art. Not yet, when I like to presume I have a good amount of time left (provided I don’t perish in a freak accident in the near future to join you in the Great Beyond).

Tactile, I cling to the world physically, always touching something, like the pages of your Collected Poems. You’ll never know you won that Pulitzer, will you? Did you anticipate it? Would it have been enough to comfort you?

By now, I’m coming to my favorite of your poems, one I find woefully underrated: “Poppies in October,” its last stanza: “Oh my God, what am I / That these late mouths should cry open / In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.” You, with your notorious contempt for life, remind me once again of the beauty that surrounds us, a beauty that makes it hard to breathe sometimes. 

I must confess, I have a quote of yours tattooed to my wrist. “I am, I am, I am.” I got it when I was 19. Probably unadvisable. In the context of this letter, probably creepy. It’s blurry now. I got it as a small encouragement to myself to stop ruminating about death, to actually see the world I’m so eager to touch. To take note of my heartbeat, evoked in the rhythm of the quote itself, before it stops.

To treasure life over posthumous success. To write from life. Because what makes your poetry beautiful, what makes me envy you, is not your famous pain, but the immediacy of your expression. Your words aren’t moored in time and place. They’re everywhere. They’re immortal. They’re movement: “in blue distance the pistons hiss.”

I think it’s time to close this letter, step over the mess on my floor, and spend some time looking out the window.

Wish you were here and sorry you had to miss out on goth music.

Your not-so-secret admirer,
Claire

Claire Dockery is a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Dortmund, Germany. She was the 2017 recipient of Tulane University's Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Madcap Review, Tulane Review, Helen Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. In her free time, she likes to hide from reality via Sonic Youth and Stardew Valley. 

#4: Soft, She Answered No / Madeline Kennedy to Leonard Cohen

Your death, as I remember it: a flash across the screen, The New York Times, a shot through the suburban near-dark, catching me off guard as I was mourning something else.

Why was I surprised? I’d known you were sick, having read your letter to Marianne that made its way into my online world. “Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.” I think of her often: how it might feel to live and die as muse; to be known largely for having been in love, in the sixties, that undead decade. To be lit by myth.

And the myth is bullshit, but it’s hard sometimes to resist seduction. Greek summers in sun bleached houses, days and nights wine drunk and fever dreaming. Poet’s monasticism: the instrument hung lonely, the manuscript a mess on the table by the bed. The rooms bare, the windows open.

I am writing to you from a room of my own. The floor is fake wood, and the door triple locks. I don’t worship knowingly, but was characterized as a maker of shrines by someone I really loved once. It’s November, it’s January, it’s the middle of June. I look at my empty vase and my Bernie Sanders pin and feel a little ridiculous for having ever believed that anything could end well.

I look at a book of your interviews, marked but unfinished, one of the only things packed when I went to France at 23. At 604 pages, it’s an absurd indulgence, and I am trying to think of when I would have seen so many pages of a woman speaking, perfect bound. But for this reason, for me, you are forever inseparable from the hotel in Tours, the countryside by train, the sensation of being the sole unsleeping passenger on a darkened plane, floating through a space ruled by no true time.

I started this thinking I’d write about how good you are, which is way better than most. I have difficulty thinking of anyone with a comparable ability to articulate the sacred-seeming parts of that place beyond sadness, of sex, of being a person alive in the world. Your way of unpacking love and war and other problems, all the ways we hurt ourselves while sometimes wanting to. But you don’t need anyone to sing your praises—first, because you’re you, and second, because you’re dead.

Today I read a story about a boy who wrote pussy all over the back of his prayer book, like the word of God or the name of a crush. I was exhausted, and I thought of you. Lord, let me never be reduced to fruit or prayers or dripping honey ever again, amen. I want to be adored, but I want more: “to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.” I would also like a living wage, and a president who has never sexually assaulted anyone.

In the wake of this disaster, omnipresent and multifaceted, I realize I’m losing interest in the words you might have had for this. To me this feels impossibly heavy and as big as the sky, and I’ve mostly let go of the idea that you’d say something to reassure me as America gets much worse. Maybe there is no comfort now, maybe I should stop looking to men provide it. I’ve been digging around, thinking of how to render this poetic but not romantic, lyrical but not less urgent. My tolerance for guys with guitars and a way with women diminishes further with each passing day. I get older, and I sit with this, and I become less certain of the use I have for you.

Leonard, why is her body your searchlight? Why are you the crucifix to which she clings? I know you read Andrea Dworkin, and I know you had a daughter and a son. When you said, “I wish the women would hurry up and take over,” how much of you was kidding? It has been my experience that men will say a thing like this and maybe mean it and still not text back.

What I am trying to say is that I am tired of taking it in all the time: watching women die, or get fucked, or fucked gently, placed among sirens or placed among saints. But women are not all Joan of Arc, or angels who sing backup and sometimes fall into your bed; they’re blood and bones and feelings, and—yes—flesh. But maybe you knew that; after all, when you reached your last chance to write anything, you wrote this:

“I’m so sorry for the ghost I made you be.

Only one of us was real and that was me.”

I say sometimes that I’ll go to Montreal; it seems beautiful and sane and manageably foreign. I haven’t left, not yet, though whether my reluctance to break the lease lies more in political conviction or a fundamental inability to direct myself toward happiness is anyone’s guess.

Madeline Kennedy lives in Chicago, IL, and listens to Joni Mitchell a lot these days. Her poems have appeared in Vagabond City and Persephone's Daughters, and she is a staff member at Winter Tangerine.

#3: Dear Mr. Bulsara / L.T. Patridge to Freddie Mercury

Dear Sir:

If you are reading this, I can only suppose that you have been cast into some deepest hell or purgatory in which you have to serve out your time by reading your fan mail. It must be a stack of infinite torment and weariness, of constant sickmaking praise and yawing depths of human need. I am sorry for your trouble. I do not wish to trespass on your time by telling you just how wonderful you are; I expect that you have been reliably informed upon this point. Instead, I want to tell you a story about hope. It starts with the National Lampoon.

I do not know whether you ever read the National Lampoon, although, if you are indeed in hell, I am sure it is available. When I was a little girl and I ran out of Mad magazines to laugh at, I found a number of my father’s National Lampoon magazines, and since they said they were humor magazines, I read them instead. They were where I first learned what was really funny, what men considered more hilarious than anything: women’s bodies. Women. Girls.

Girls were the joke; women were the joke. That was what I had learned on the playground, too, in the Mississippi Delta. Boys threatened me, hit me, pulled down my underwear, laughed at what they saw there. I wished more than anything that I was like Wonder Woman, that I had been born out on her magical island, where mothers asked the goddess for a daughter, and no one suffered boys.

There was, shortly after you left us, a great resurgence in interest in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I do not know if you ever heard it was going to be in the “Wayne’s World” movie, or if you ever heard of “Wayne’s World.” You did not, in that respect, miss much. But it was very popular, and the characters in the movie loved that song; thus it was that young idiots such as myself, all over America, discovered it, and you. And I fell madly in love.

Of course, it was not you I loved. I loved Freddie Mercury. I did not and do not know you. It was only a course of a childhood disease, but I was twelve, and what could I do? You were magnetic. You were more of a man than I could bear to look at, almost. That did not stop me from buying magazines specifically to cut out the pictures and tape them to my wall. One of them I taped between the bars of my bedstead, where I could see it from my pillow, even reach to touch it. I knew my mother had to see where this was, and know why it was, and I did not care. So much was I in love, so much. I would listen to “Mustapha” with the lights out in my room, just to feel the keening in my skin.

The first man I had seen in such long black hair, such glittering outfits, and such stacked heels was Tim Curry, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But unlike Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who was cruel — who punished with sex, and was punished for it — the joy you offered was openhanded, without threat. Young Freddie Mercury was an emissary to me from another world, a place where sexuality was not mean or degrading, but exuberant and glamorous. I was surrounded by the indifferent, the lecherous jackasses of Mississippi, the cowboy hats of all America, and Freddie Mercury was a comet hanging Halley-distant in the sky.

My fever broke, as time went on, and my crush receded in due course. What I kept from it was a shard of hope — hope that desire could be bright and untainted, that there might be such a thing as joy for me. I came to need that hope. Even today, in middle age, I still have to be reminded that once it was.

We miss you very badly here, but you are, I dare say, well out of it now. Though I know that where you are, “dust is your food and clay your bread,” at least Theresa May is not your Prime Minister. Rest easy, then, and turn to another letter.

I am and will remain always

Your obedient servant

L.T.P.

L.T. Patridge, originally from Greenville, Mississippi, is a graduating MFA student in the Writing & Publishing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She writes Lovecraftian and historical fiction. Her novel The Innsmouth Ladies' Book of Household Management is available for pre-order from Kraken Press.

#2: Keep Your Hat On / Andrew Farkas to Kurt Vonnegut

While I wait for the blue tunnel that leads to the afterlife to open, I think of the punch line to a joke: “Keep your hat on, we may end up miles from here.” I’ve never heard the joke before, though there was a time when I desperately wanted to. So I try to imagine …

I can’t come up with anything …

At a memorial gathering, Kurt, you once said of the secular humanist and atheist Isaac Asimov: he’s “up in heaven now.” So when the blue tunnel that leads to the afterlife opens (though I’m pretty sure it will not), I’ll say to you, “Being a fan of Mark Twain, who was one of the people credited with, ‘Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company,’ I hope you’re enjoying Hell,” because I can think of no better company than you.

That’s what I’ll say.

I will not say that when I lived in Brooklyn, I was positive there was no one better to hang out with than you. I will not tell you that when I moved to New York City in May 2001, I had read an article in The New York Times about you falling asleep during the Super Bowl (don’t worry, although I’m a football fan, I agree that most of the Super Bowls have been dull), about how you’d been smoking a Pall Mall as you fell asleep, about how your desk caught on fire, about how smoke started pouring out of your brownstone’s window, about how your neighbor saw the smoke and managed to get inside your home and save you, about how the article had not included your specific address, but had included the street you lived on. I will not tell you that, after moving to the Big Apple, I walked down your street, and once there were buildings that looked like residences, instead of places where people worked, I started asking passersby, “Doesn’t Kurt Vonnegut live around here?” I won’t tell you that no one seemed to know until I spotted an older guy smoking a cigarette, smoking a cigarette!, and I asked him. And of course he knew. We were, after all, standing right in front of your place.

I won’t tell you any of this because it would make me sound like a stalker. I was even aware of this potential label, this potential danger at the time. And so I didn’t bring any books with me for you to sign because I’d read a piece by you where you complained about autograph collectors (a complaint that has probably died amongst writers now). And so I wore a mostly white Hawaiian shirt adorned with a few bedraggled palm trees and I wore beat-to-hell khakis because I thought they made me look like exactly what I felt like: a big galoot of no consequence at all.

What did I plan on saying to you then?

I did not plan on saying that I discovered your work accidentally, that I’d been a night owl from a young age and had accidentally run across the film version of Slaughterhouse-five when I was an early teen up at 3am, that when I was in college I recalled seeing that bizarre movie as a kid and somehow remembered the title, that a friend of mine had told me it’d been a book before it was a movie, that I found the book in the Kent State University library and read it in the loft study room of Harbourt Hall, that it was exactly what I was looking for: a respite from what I thought of (and probably still do) as the boring realism I was being taught in many of my classes, that it’d subsequently led me on to many more works of metafiction and postmodernism, that I’ve ultimately become a metafictionist and, to a certain extent, postmodernist because of that book (and later others, especially Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle).

No, I had no plans to say any of that to you.

Instead, I thought it’d be fitting, taking my ridiculous attire and thinning hair (though I was in my early 20s) and ugly glasses and awkward physique that screamed out: I am a big lug, pat my belly condescendingly!, well I figured it’d be best if I asked for you to tell me a joke.

So now, as I stand here waiting for the blue tunnel that leads to the afterlife to open, I prepare myself to ask you what I wanted to ask you then: “Will you tell me the joke that you’ve made reference to many times in your speeches and other writings that ends with the punch line, ‘Keep your hat on, we may end up miles from here,’ would you be so kind as to tell me that joke?

“Please?”

I will ask because, although you’ve made reference to the joke many times, you’ve never actually told it in any of those speeches or writings.

And if the blue tunnel that leads to the afterlife existed, I can imagine you popping out, smoking a Pall Mall, coughing, and finally saying, “Really? That’s what you want to hear? As I step out of the afterlife, that is what you want me to tell you?”

And I would say: “Yes, that’s it, Mr. Vonnegut. That’s what I want to hear. I’m even willing to run off to the store and buy the most ridiculous Hawaiian shirt available, I’m even willing to destroy a perfectly good pair of khaki pants, I’m even willing to don a broken down pair of glasses, just so I can best approximate what I looked like on that rainy day in 2001 when I went in search of you, when I ultimately knocked on your door in the humblest possible manner and your wife told me that you were not home, that you were summering out in the Hamptons. Mr. Vonnegut, if you would be so kind, although I know the punch line, I’ve never heard what leads up to it. So please, tell me the joke.”

That is what I would say to you, Mr. Vonnegut.

But the reason you got such a big laugh out of the assembled crowd at Isaac Asimov’s memorial is because nobody there believed in an afterlife. Nor did Asimov believe in an afterlife. Nor did you believe in an afterlife. Nor do I. So as I wait for the blue tunnel that leads to the afterlife to remain forever absent, this is what I have to say to you, Kurt Vonnegut: nothing. Because you are no longer here. Any speech would be futile. And yet if I could somehow transmit a message to you, it’d be: I thank you for the influence, but since I never had the opportunity to hear the joke that ends, “Keep your hat on, we may end up miles from here,” from you, I never want to hear it at all.

If you could respond, you might say that’s a silly message. And yet, I do not think you’d mind. People don’t look to the afterlife for preachments, but to marvel at the unknown. Using your own words I’d conclude:

“So I thank you for your sweetly faked attention.”

Andrew Farkas' Self-Titled Debut, a collection of fictions, is available from Subito Press. He currently adjuncts at John Carroll University, the University of Akron, and Walsh University. He has degrees from Kent State University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Alabama, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at Rocky Mountain College. Andrew Farkas is attempting to do some kind of work at every single college and university in the country. Perhaps you will see him at an institution of higher learning near you soon.  

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

#1: Sacha Siskonen to Virginia Woolf

Sunday January 3, 2016

Dear Virginia,

First, forgive me for writing. I’m certain that you have better things to occupy yourself with in the Great Void than my silly letters. However, I have addressed my queries to various beings, consulted great works on this Earthly plane, found all responses lacking, and thus I turn to you, wherever you are.

I fear I am not mad at all. I find myself at this moment in time, after years and years, decades really, of discomfort, exceptionally comfortable. Happy isn’t the word, and fulfilled does not come close, but I can see now—in a way that was previously unimaginable to me—how a life of basic and reasonable comfort can lead an artist, a writer, a women to give up, and accept the dull drone of any number of acceptable days until death finds her. Is this why you killed yourself?

I have never considered myself ambitious. But once I was motivated. Now, there is no force outside of myself to spur me on to create or try or put on pants. Once you get comfortable, you forget to how to want for something. I want to want more. But that’s as far as I can get. Is it age? I’m not that old. Is it the recognition that I’ve achieved about as much as I ever will? Perhaps, I have. Am I just tired? I am.

I thought that I wanted to write a book. But now that there is nothing much in my way, I do not. I have a room of my own. I have some money. I have to work for it. That takes up a fair amount of my time, but not all. I have some time. I have time. I have a desk and if not a view, something to look at. What am I lacking? Is it the lack of lack that’s lacking in me? Do I have too much? Can just enough be too much?

I’ve read The Voyage Out. It’s really terrible. You went on to do better things, but I worry that I’ll never even manage to spit out a real mess like that. Everyone says, just start, one bird, volumes of unhelpful advice. All the little things of life. The need for toothpaste. Pay a bill. You didn’t have television. 

At a job interview for a really miserable position in Career Services, they asked me, who living or dead, do you most admire and why? I said you. A suicide. I did not get the job. And that’s another thing you’ve saved me from.

You published your first book at 33. I’ll be the same age in six months time. Gauntlet thrown.

Yours &c., Sacha

Sacha Siskonen works in an abandoned hospital. She writes because she cannot afford to do anything else. Her work can be found in that vast, perplexing realm known commonly as the internet.

Virginia Woolf is dead.