This is a short short story I recently entered into a short short story contest. For some reason, I took the contest guidelines very seriously.
A Short Short Story
by Jack Neary
The story had to be short.
It had to be very short.
It had to be short short. (Was that an adjective and a noun, or a compound noun? Was there such a thing as a compound noun? Didn't matter. Short. It had to be short. Short short.)
Not only that, it had to be postmarked by December 3.
He looked at his watch. Everything he needed to know about the date and time stared him in the face on the face, round and blatant like a close-up of Rosie O'Donnell. 2:37 p.m. Monday. December third. The post office closed at five. He did the math. Two hours and twenty-three minutes was all the time he had left. And all he had written to that point in time was a hundred thirty-two words. A hundred thirty-six. One forty...
Stop! Stop counting and write!
The question was--could he write a story about writing a story? Could it be suspenseful in any way? Would it be pertinent? Would it be insightful? Would it be insouciant? (He didn't know what 'insouciant' meant, but Tom Wolfe used it all the time so it must be a good thing for writing.) Would it speak to the nobility of the human spirit? Or, more to the point...
Would it win the fifteen-hundred dollar first prize?
Or one of the top ten prizes?
Or merely one of the eleventh through twenty-fifth place prizes?
The pressure! Cripes!
And what--don't even think it!--what if he didn't even win one of the fifty-dollar prizes? Would there be any reason to continue his writing career?
Probably not.
And who would read his entry?
Some intern, probably. Some pursed-lipped, pinched-hipped, poverty-challenged Winter Break part-timer from Vassar or Mount Holyoke or Smith.
Yeah. Smith.
Some politically-correct, Greenwich-born, Gap-haunting, veggie-consuming Comparative Lit major weaned on Shakespeare and Beowulf and Henry James and Susan Sontag. And him weaned on Moe, Larry, Curly and William M. Gaines. Doomed! Defeated! Decimated before his short short even made it past that chic chick's cramped temporary cubicle just outside the WD mailroom!
He had to hope for the best. He had to gamble that his first reader featured the occasional slice of red meat in her diet. He had to pray she would struggle beyond Page One and venture into the guts of the meticulously processed words to recognize that he meant business. That he meant to win!
But he had spent some time at Smith. His cousin Miranda went there and he had visited her a couple of times because of the girls and the Northampton restaurants and the girls and the classy movie theaters and the girls. He had met enough of them to know what impressed the Smithies and it sure wasn't him or any of his ilk. (In fact, it was at Smith where he was informed that he had an ilk.) And if this SmithieTemp in the cubicle couldn't stomach him or his ilk, why in God's name would she pass his story along to a second reader?
He looked on the bright side: Perhaps his story would fall into the 'in' box of some guilt-ridden, Irish Catholic intern from Dorchester at Smith on a field hockey scholarship.
One problem was, he had put it off for too long. The actual writing of it. He had known about the December 3 deadline for months, but he'd thought it best to let the idea simmer for a while, let it cook, let it bubble, let it boil--and then, he reasoned, the story would burst out of him one day like...like what?...like projectile...whatever.
(Would the intern know what 'whatever' referred to? Sure! Well, maybe. But the imagery was perfect and precise and, damn it, if she was a Smithie she should be able to get it. Sheesh!)
So the first problem was that his writing method of Simmer and Explode had forced him to compose under the gun.
And the other problem was that he should have written the piece directly onto his G3 Powerbook in his office at home rather than scribble it longhand on a yellow pad at the Starbucks Cafe attached to his favorite Barnes and Noble at the mall. He liked to work at the Cafe because he enjoyed looking like he was working especially when he really was working. He enjoyed looking like a writer. He always packaged his work-in-progress in a manila folder displayed prominently on the squat, square, green Formica-covered table next to the railing that separated the Cafe from the Biography section and the rack of celebrity postcards. He'd sit there for hours nursing a $2.75 Godiva Hot Cocoa (not Hot Chocolate, Hot Cocoa--the Hot Chocolate was cheaper), and crank out stories and plays and whatever he thought might pay the bills months and years down the line when the stories and plays might find publication or production somewhere. (He always knew, as he wrote, that he was writing to possibly inject cash into his bank account five to ten years from the moment at hand. He never wrote for fast money. Fast money and Fiction were the strangest of bedfellows.)
And when he tired of writing at the Cafe, he could raise his woozie eyes and see racks and racks of fresh, clean, unsold books and magazines and it would give him...hope. Something to anticipate, to dream about, to crave. It provided him with, at least, the veneer of optimism.
Plus, on occasion, pretty young women would occupy a green Formica table in the Cafe and sip a Godiva or a latte or a Stewart's Cream Soda. And that was a good thing, too.
The Cafe had a soul and he was part of it and he was working!
But then he always had to go back to his home office and transfer all the writing to the computer and while it then looked professional and real and authentic as writing is supposed to look, he knew that he could have easily started right at the computer and saved all that time he wasted gaining veneered optimism and looking at pretty young women at Starbucks. It was time that he needed, and it was time that he didn't have. Not now. Not with the deadline for postmark forty-seven minutes away.
He counted the words again. One thousand seventy-seven.
That left him about four hundred words to get himself to the post office.
He printed out the manuscript while he warmed up the Sentra. After Halloween, the Sentra always needed to be warmed up for five minutes before use. That's just the way it was. At 4:36 he...
Oh, my God! He had forgotten to fill out the Entry Form! There it was, sitting naked on his desk partially hidden under a pile of rejection slips from the New Yorker! He located a leaky Bic and tore into the form, line-by-line. Fortunately, it wasn't too complicated. Would he like a list of winners via email? No. Why the hell would he want to know who won if he didn't? Check or credit card for the entry fee? Check. Wouldn't want to max out the Visa for a short short. SASP for acknowledgment of receipt of story? Why not? He'd send along one of the post cards he'd commandeered from the theatre lobby when he saw SCREAM a few years ago. He had tons of 'em. High School dropout Drew Barrymore's bulbous baby blues starin' that Smithie intern down. Beautiful. Signature? But of course. He loved applying his signature to official forms. His nun-trained Palmer Method John Hancock was described by a sweet young co-ed in a simpler, better time as belonging on a golf ball. Bang! Entry form complete!
4:48. Thirteen hundred forty-six words.
And the Sentra running.
He removed the seven pages from the printer, then clicked on the G3's 'stationery' icon to compose the cover note to Writer's Digest. Name, address, email info--everything was already there on the stationery. All he needed to add was a brief 'Hello,' and the word count. He added the 'Hello.' He'd add the word count at the post office. He slid the story and cover letter into the previously-addressed envelope.
Hmm. Cincinnati. Maybe that intern wouldn't be from Smith. Ohio State, maybe? Hey! Things were looking up!
4:51. Usually took him four minutes to drive to the post office. This time, he made it in three. 4:54. Only one person in front of him. But...NO!
EBAY! It was an Ebay freak mailing off six fat, shoddily-wrapped packages! He'd never make it in time!
But it was so close to five, the Supervisor emerged from the office he never emerged from and said, 'I can help you with that.' The 'that' referred to his entry envelope.
He did a fast hand count of the remaining words, printed the count on the cover letter, slipped the manuscript into the envelope and handed it to the Supervisor.
Postmark 4:59 p.m., Monday, December 3.
The End.
Copyright 2002 by Jack Neary