Last month, inspired by a contest on Tin House's blog, I wrote three short shorts based on prompts published by 1920s dime store novelist William Wallace Cook in a book he called Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. I will share each one with the original prompt. This is the first.
Prompt: {A}, a novelist, meets personally in real life a fictitious character from one of his stories.
To Write From the Gut
The meeting began, actually, as a stench. He jibbed the end of his pen in frustration and a stream of ink made a pattern upon the white parchment. This stunned him. As if he was in need of another shifting shape to transmute into yet another febrile, palsied, sea-rimed spume of words. But there it was— The imprecation of another sentence, written in the sheer surprise of it all.
The smell was that of darkness, of things that have died—or even lived, briefly, in the process of dying—while tipping back and forth in a rhythm only matched in age by the moon. It was of baleen, of krill, that salt sure fish, of secrets swallowed and then made flesh.
While he couldn’t be sure who—or what—had opened his chamber door, there could now be no doubt of the water pouring in. It rushed over his boots and his paper floated down to it to toss there kelp-like, all insensate and blurring the lines of his only-now-just-composed-sentence.
He was sitting, he realized, up to his knees in water, holding his arms around his limbs; he rested his head, tired suddenly; but then, this was a suddenly humid place, full of mysterious drippings and belchings like foghorns carried up from somewhere dimly remembered, like the first heraldic glimmer of a star.
Oh, darkness; oh, salt.
While he still clutched the pen in one hand, he knew that these sentences would remain inkless. There was no container big enough, he thought, no container to match that which only contains. The writer was the sort of man to always wear over-long sleeves; he frequently sneezed, impatiently wiping his nose upon the sleeve. Yes, he knew himself well. Oh he of wild beard and eyes. Oh he that stood in drawing rooms always like a metal rod, uncomfortable of divining.
It was rather a fitting epitaph, he reflected, water still rising. Here rests he that imagined a world swallower; thus he sat, swallowed in kind.
The belchings, the swaying, even the stench of salt death congealed then into a sort of song. Did a tear prick his eye, or only the seawater? For what a song it was, ancient and melancholy. He thought of stars again, calling out to one another from where they spun in a fixed vastness. All the world that he had indeed tried to put down now rocked him, not unkindly, here, in the belly of the beast. Anyhow, he would welcome a tear, he thought, now rueful. Oh he of sentiment and scurvy.
Soon, the water would rise to douse the ceiling lamp, but not yet. At the moment he was still a man living in a story, traveling in the belly of the whale and prepared to bring good tidings to the crowds assembled upon the shore. Oh he of the world-beginning story. He could almost picture their shining faces lifted up in praise.