//creative//
Spring 2017
Turtles All the Way Down
Benjamin DuBow
‘“Maven walked hurriedly down the sparsely lit street and looked over her shoulder for the third time in as many minutes, unable to shake the feeling that she was being watched. She shouldn’t have felt uneasy—this was a routine job: dark warehouse, minimal security, and a hidden safe they’d found a week ago. But still, something seemed…wrong. The air felt heavy as a threat.
‘Broxen. I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ she hissed to the hooded figure skulking alongside her.
Broxen scowled and checked the sky. Judging by the declension of the second moon, they had another hour and a half before Liden and another three at least before dawn. He turned his piercing blue eyes to Maven. She shivered. Broxen’s eyes had that effect on people, even Nightwalkers like her.
‘Maven, just focus on the mission and stop scaring yourself with foolish thoughts. Nothing is going to hap—’”
“STOP. Jesus Christ, please. Just. Stop.” Kyle looked up from his page, eyes wide and hands shaking with nervousness.
“OK,” Professor W sighed with relief. “Do you know why I cut you off?”
“Ummm…no?”
The Professor paused as if to carefully choose his next words. Then he shook his head, violently, thinking better of it. “Your opening is shit. Utter and complete shit.”
“Yes, si—wait…what?”
“You heard me, Kurt.” The class giggled.
“Kyle.”
“Pardon? Listen Kurt, I need you to not take any of what I’m about to say personally, okay?”
Kurt gulped. “Uhh…”
“Because it might sound personal. But it’s not. It’s not about you. You’re here to become a better writer. And to do that, you need to get over yourself.”
“Erm…right…sure.” He gulped again. “OK.”
The Professor smiled wide. “Great. Really great. Admitting is the first step to recovery.” He took a deep breath, as if preparing to dive for a lost ring that had no hope of being found. Glancing back at the page in front of him, Professor’s upper lip drew farther up and slightly to the left like a 220-lb Rottweiler sneering at a pathetic squirrel right before devouring it for sport.
He started muttering to himself.
“Maven…what kind of name is ‘Maven’? Maayyvennnn.” Dammit—get a grip, W. Focus. Focus. It’s a perfectly fine name. Breathe.
“Kurt, when was the last time you ‘walked hurriedly’?”
The kid wracked his brain. “Umm…yesterday?”
Professor W stared. “Yesterday.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, Kurt,” the Professor said with a Snape-like hard stop on the /t/. “I’ll play along. Where were you going that you needed to hurry your walk?”
Kurt blushed. “…I had to use the bathroom.”
The Professor’s eyes widened. “YES! Exactly. Perfect. There might be hope for you yet, Kyle.”
Kyle, unsure what was happening, cracked a cautious grin.
“But that’s about it,” Professor W said as his smile turned down to a frown. “Was Maven heading to relieve herself?” he asked rhetorically. “No. And aside from the measured race to the shitter, I’ve never seen anyone ‘walk[ing] hurriedly.’ Either you walk, or you hurry. Sometimes you walk briskly. Anything more would start into the realms of pacings, stridings, and half-jogs. Got it?”
“…”
“Of course Maven is looking over her shoulder for a tail—she practically screams nefarious designs. Do you know why?”
“Because she’s walking hurriedly?”
“BECAUSE SHE’S WALKING HURRIEDLY. If she’s about to break into some magic warehouse, she should be sneaking or creeping or scurrying or skulking, like her friend…”
“Broxen,” Kyle added helpfully.
The Professor’s face dropped. “Broxen,” Whatever happened to John? Or even Roger? He shook himself, shooing away the dark thoughts and strangled images clamoring to get in. “Right. Broxen. Of course.”
He took another deep breath.
“Aside from that nauseous first verb phrase, you splatter the “foreboding” where you should be ever-so-subtly painting the faintest outlines, use words like “declension” (just say angle, goddammit), and rely on clichéd tropes of penetrating blue eyes to do your work for you. Well, guess what: they’re not. You still with me Kurt?”
The class looked back to see a sweating, shivering mass of flesh and bruised vanity that once called itself Kyle. “I think so.”
“Fantastic! Thinking is a great place to start.”
“What a fucking asshole,” Kurt thought to himself.
“But you need more than just a start. The lack of a strong plot is at this point inconsequential. Until we can stomach the prose, the plot won’t even be tasted, much less digested. Fix the writing, and we’ll revisit this abortion of a story next class. Who’s next?”
The class was silent as a just-chastised toddler. Kurt’s face and posture suggested a recent colonoscopy. The others, arranged around the hexagonal mahogany table of their ancient seminar room, made themselves scarce. The golden light streaming in from the yellow-stained glass on the west wall of the room seemed like it was aiming for their eyes. (Professor W was, for some reason, exempted from the glow.) The five of them just sat there, silent, for forty-two seconds. Then, without seeming to have noticed the lack of enthusiasm in the slightest, Professor W flashed another wolfish smile. “Alright then. Charls—care to read for us next?”
“Actually, I need to use the restroom,” they said.
The Professor sighed. The nearest gender-neutral bathroom was three flights down. Or was it four? There was no reasonable way to keep track of which bathrooms were on which floors anymore. He yearned for the simpler days when the university catered only to a single gender. The modern state of affairs was agonizingly and torturously inconvenient for him. Just last week, he had walked down two flights only to remember upon reaching the end of the hallway that this floor now held the women’s room. He had to walk back up a flight to find the right one.
“Just walk hurriedly, please.”
“Dear Diary,
It was the middle of October. We had just pulled off the first efficacious protest in school history; our slogan was, ‘The Green and White is just not Right,’ and if one listened closely, he/she/they could’ve heard some traces of it still lingering around campus today, a week after it had last been chanted.
Now, dozens of forums and panels and discussions and debates later, the final vote was about to be cast. The Daily Observer (the university’s student-run ‘newspaper’) had reported early in the morning a favorable margin of only 2.7% to the frontrunner, Magenta-and-Beige, with their projected 47% of student and tenured-faculty support; an article written by one curious_gal (I speculate that this is not his/her/their real name) claimed that the remaining 9.3% would abstain in protest of the protest, saying that it offended the Irish contingent on campus. But then again, the joke of a paper had also reported that a recently departed junior had since been committed to a facility for the mentally unsettled after claiming something about ‘malevolent semicolons,’ so the actual margins of the race were largely unknown.
All we knew was that Skyblue-and-Ivory had made a last minute comeback, finding unexpected support in the nascent LGBTQ group and the veterans’ small but vocal band; Turquoise-and-Flamingopink had been quickly and righteously shunned after a spat had ended with the immediately condemning realization that it was obviously in support of the binary; Fuchsia-and-Cream had been rejected as too boring. Anyway, I was walking to the Organic Farmer’s Market to pick up some vegetarian kimchi over Fair Trade rice for lunch from the kindly old Korean man/woman/human when I realized that I had forgotten my—”
“Charls.”
They looked up with a wince. “Yes, Professor?”
“How to put this gently…” Professor W bit his mustache and chewed it over for a few seconds while staring off into the ether. Spitting out his facial hair, he returned to the classroom and said, “The main issue, aside from your god-awful semicolons, is—actually, let’s harp on that for a moment; class, listen up.”
The class blinked as one.
“There’re perhaps two or three prose-infractions that are worse even than the pathetic commas we saw in Alaria’s piece; one of these is improper semicolon use. Think of semicolons like opiates: a little bit will get you high, but overdose in the slightest and things get dangerous. Real dangerous.” His eyes flashed. “In fact, it’s best not to mess with them if you don’t know what you’re doing; Charls, you have no clue what you’re doing. No semicolons in your next piece; trust me, I’m looking out for you here,” the Professor ended with a wicked wink and a grin that would trigger Little Red Riding Hood’s PTSD.
Professor W continued: “But to come back to the other large issue: your piece, like Fuchsia-and-Cream, is just plain boring.” Here the Professor coincidentally yawned, then laughed to himself at his body’s spot-on comedic timing. “The diary format needs some more action to keep me interested. Speaking of said format, the opening sentence makes little sense given the context—diary entries aren’t usually written with such temporal vagueness, and you do nothing else to justify why this one should be different. Lastly, I get that you have an axe to grind with the binary, and you’re--WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT APOSTROPHE DOING THERE? WHO THE HELL IS WRITING THIS DRECK? DO THAT AGAIN, AND YOU’LL WISH IT WAS A SEMICOLON ERROR!!—writing is a good place to do that grinding. But there’s no need to write three pronouns each time; just write ‘they’ and be done with it. Right now, the lady/gentleman/ungendered-title-of-faux-nobility doth protest too much. Oh, and your percentages add up to 101%. Alaria, you’re up.”
“But I don’t want—buzz—to go to school today!” whined Barry sullenly.
Bernard rolled his faceted black eyes as he sipped from a mug of hot nectar. “Honey, you have to—buzz—go to school.”
“BUZZZZZZ—Whyyyyyy?”
“Bernie,” he called over his back, “it’s your turn to—BUZZ—explain.”
Bernie, opening the refrigerator, buzzed back: “Listen Barry, all kids have to go to school. It’s the—buzz—law. If you don’t go to school, your father and I will get arrested.”
“Bernard!—BUZZBUZZ!”
Bernie looked back and saw on his partner’s face an admonishing look. Sighing, he poured some water into his nectar and shut the fridge. It closed with a waxy thump. The golden light streaming in through the translucent yellow comb formed a hexagonal grid on the wall of the kitchen and seemed to be aiming for his eyes.
“Barryhoney,” he said with a squint, “if you don’t go to school, you won’t—buzz—learn how to be an effective contributor to society.”
Barry buzzed with confusion.
“Bernie, the kid is—buzz—three weeks old.”
“What, you want me to speak to him like he’s daft? How else is he going to learn how to —buzz—talk like an adult?”
“Buzzzz—he’s three.”
“Bernie, we’re not tortoises. How long do you think we’ve—buzz—got?”
Bernard sighed. The truth was, he himself was starting to doubt the purpose of it all, his mind abuzz with existential angst. He, and his family, were but cogs in the machine. Completely and utterly replaceable. In a month, maybe two, he and Bernard, along with their entire generation, would all be dead, their carcasses used as fodder to keep some nosy dragonfly away from the hive. Bernie was right, Barry didn’t have that much longer than that. So, then why spend his precious youth preparing for a future he would barely enjoy? Why bother contribut—“
“Alaria.”
The Professor paused. After a moment, his brow suddenly furrowed and his eyes drew into a squint. “What was that?”
Alaria flushed, dangerously, with anger. “It’s a story. About bees.”
“Yes. I think we’ve realized that much...” Professor W paused. Alaria fidgeted in her seat. Kurt gave her a sympathetic glance. To his left, Charls steeled themselves and took a deep breath.
“Both the parents are named Bernard?”
Alaria swiveled her seat and smiled her thanks for the save. “Yep. Actually, all the parents in that generation are named Bernard.”
At this, the Professor’s ears pricked up and his eyes flashed to life. An indeterminate emotion began to creep onto his face.
“So are all the kids named Barry?” Charls followed.
“Exactly. I thought that giving them all the same generational names would heighten the emphasis on the whole replaceability aspect.”
By now it was clear that the thing emerging onto Professor W’s face was a grin of some sort. Alaria was not relieved—the grin was teetering and could just as easily fall into a sardonic one as it could into one of appreciation.
Leaning forward in his padded, black-leather rolling chair, Professor half asked, half declared, “So the parents are all men, gay except for their monthly romp with the Queen. The names, they all begin with B. That’s because they’re bees?”
Alaria blushed. “…Yeah.”
The grin resolved. “Brilliant. I love it. Completely unnecessary, and hilariously so.”
The class sat in flabbergasted silence, Alaria most silent and flabbergasted of all. “It adds a touch of daring to your otherwise uninventive narrative and almost makes up for the incessant and decidedly unfunny buzzing. Almost. Alaria—the buzzes.” The Professor shook his head with fly-evicting vigor. “They’re psychosis inducing, and not the good kind, either. You need to get rid of the buzzes.” A fluorescent light buzzed overhead. “YOU NEED TO GET RID OF THE BUZZES!”
He coughed.
“Finally, that last paragraph has some of the most improper and offensive commas I’ve ever come across. I don’t know where you ‘learned’ the basics of English grammar, but you should unlearn them, then start again.”
“The man’s just such an asshole,” Kurt thought loudly.
Professor W paused briefly to glare at Kurt before turning back to Alaria: “For next week’s story, you’re limited to 15 commas. Got it?”
Alaria responded with a silent, close-mouthed scream. “The Professor is such a prick!” she thought. But what could she do but utter a squeak of acquiescence? Though she bristled at the lack of tact and emotional delicacy with which Professor W ran his workshop, he was by far the best. Risking the opportunity to learn under him just wasn’t worth it.
There were legends floating around the school of the handful of students who, over the years, had challenged the Professor on a point of prose or grammatical nuance. The overwhelming majority had been kicked out of the workshop, their only consolation a thorough and dispassionate explanation of why their argument was faulty and their prose pathetic. Only one had ever dared stoop so low as to try and complain to some administrative higher-ups. He withdrew from the university a week later citing an inability to focus on his studies coupled with increasingly disturbing thoughts. Said that the semicolons were out to kill him. The episode was quickly buried, the campus much more interested in what colors the school would pick for that year’s seminal rebranding effort. As far as the university was concerned, this room was Professor W’s demesne; in here, his word was law.
“I suppose it’s possible that I’m not real. As in, real in the sense we traditionally mean when we say that something is real. As in, that tree outside my window is real, or, this glass of water is real (the jury is still out re: the ice). Though if I’m not real, then I suppose it’s misleading to say “we.” Can the real and the not-real collaborate? Though if I’m not real, I suppose it’s just as likely that ‘we’re’ not, too. And not just because one of us isn’t real, like how when you multiply differently signed numbers the result is always negative. (Division works that way too.) No, I mean that if I’m not real, who’s to say that anyone is real? In fact, if I’m not real, I would be inclined to say that my conception of the existence of others is unreal as well. Actually, the conception might still be real. But the others wouldn’t be. Because they wouldn’t be. But what does it mean to say that a conception isn’t? If a thought is thought, then it’s thought. It shouldn’t matter if the one doing the thinking isn’t. Should it?
But let’s not get away from ourselves, since all evidence points to my realness. At least, all the evidence I’ve seen. I think “raise my hand,” and I see my hand raise. I smash my fist into the tree outside and it bleeds. My fist does, that is. If the tree had bled, then you might have a point. Of course, the old brain-in-vat idea can account for these little seemingly reality-affirming indicators—”
Like a spider watching its web come to life, the students’ eight eyes widened.
…
…
...
‘Okay, B. Thanks for sharing! Who would like to start us off?’
C’s hand shot up immediately (and, I might add, unnecessarily, since they didn’t bother to wait for recognition). ‘Umm, okay. For starters, how is Charls pronounced?’
‘Like Carl, but with a /ʃ/ (as in ‘shoe’) at the beginning and a hissing /s/ at the end.’
‘I love it!’ C smiled a rare smile that quickly turned down to a frown. ‘Anyway...the Irish flag has orange, too. Maybe try Nigeria or Saudi Arabia instead? (You Eurocentric prick.) Also, I think you did a great job of making a completely unlikeable character in Professor W, but I think you went a little too far at some points. I personally was uncomfortable with the "abortion of a story" and "PTSD" lines; I don’t think it’s okay to make light of other folk’s trauma.’
‘Of course,’ B thought to himself with a smirk.
A chimed in: ‘Listen, C, I understand that this might make you uncomfortable, but that’s not a bad thing. This is prose—if it’s not making you a little uncomfortable, then it’s probably not worth reading. There’s no room for imposing safe spaces on fiction; should we stop reading Ovid because he writes of rape? Or Twain because he uses the word "nigger"?’
C stared daggers. ‘But there’s a difference between using prose as a tool to criticize the existing sociopolitical matrix of domination and taking advantage of the shield prose supposedly offers in order to get a cheap guffaw! Also, due respect (read: not much) to B, but he’s not Ovid or Twain.’
‘Not yet!’ B thought arrogantly. He coughed. 'If I can defend myself for a moment, I didn’t write those to get ‘cheap guffaw[s]’—I wrote them to get guffaws that can’t really be evoked any other way. To quote Twain: "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." If you felt as if struck by lightning, then that’s a good thing.’
D snickered for a moment at B’s bombastic self-praise, then spoke up. ‘I agree. Writing should constantly challenge the existing language game—it should prod for weak points and replace stale phrases with new and often uncomfortable metaphors. Not that these necessarily qualify as Davidsonian slaps in the face, but they’re a good start. I did think there were some iffy words, though. I’m as down for a good "demesne" as the next guy, but "there’re"? It’s a bit gratuitous if you ask me…maybe if W was making fun of Charls’ contractions instead of their semicolons? Also, "forty-two seconds" is oddly specific; is that a shout-out to--
Buzz.
‘Broxen. I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ she hissed to the hooded figure skulking alongside her.
Broxen scowled and checked the sky. Judging by the declension of the second moon, they had another hour and a half before Liden and another three at least before dawn. He turned his piercing blue eyes to Maven. She shivered. Broxen’s eyes had that effect on people, even Nightwalkers like her.
‘Maven, just focus on the mission and stop scaring yourself with foolish thoughts. Nothing is going to hap—’”
“STOP. Jesus Christ, please. Just. Stop.” Kyle looked up from his page, eyes wide and hands shaking with nervousness.
“OK,” Professor W sighed with relief. “Do you know why I cut you off?”
“Ummm…no?”
The Professor paused as if to carefully choose his next words. Then he shook his head, violently, thinking better of it. “Your opening is shit. Utter and complete shit.”
“Yes, si—wait…what?”
“You heard me, Kurt.” The class giggled.
“Kyle.”
“Pardon? Listen Kurt, I need you to not take any of what I’m about to say personally, okay?”
Kurt gulped. “Uhh…”
“Because it might sound personal. But it’s not. It’s not about you. You’re here to become a better writer. And to do that, you need to get over yourself.”
“Erm…right…sure.” He gulped again. “OK.”
The Professor smiled wide. “Great. Really great. Admitting is the first step to recovery.” He took a deep breath, as if preparing to dive for a lost ring that had no hope of being found. Glancing back at the page in front of him, Professor’s upper lip drew farther up and slightly to the left like a 220-lb Rottweiler sneering at a pathetic squirrel right before devouring it for sport.
He started muttering to himself.
“Maven…what kind of name is ‘Maven’? Maayyvennnn.” Dammit—get a grip, W. Focus. Focus. It’s a perfectly fine name. Breathe.
“Kurt, when was the last time you ‘walked hurriedly’?”
The kid wracked his brain. “Umm…yesterday?”
Professor W stared. “Yesterday.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, Kurt,” the Professor said with a Snape-like hard stop on the /t/. “I’ll play along. Where were you going that you needed to hurry your walk?”
Kurt blushed. “…I had to use the bathroom.”
The Professor’s eyes widened. “YES! Exactly. Perfect. There might be hope for you yet, Kyle.”
Kyle, unsure what was happening, cracked a cautious grin.
“But that’s about it,” Professor W said as his smile turned down to a frown. “Was Maven heading to relieve herself?” he asked rhetorically. “No. And aside from the measured race to the shitter, I’ve never seen anyone ‘walk[ing] hurriedly.’ Either you walk, or you hurry. Sometimes you walk briskly. Anything more would start into the realms of pacings, stridings, and half-jogs. Got it?”
“…”
“Of course Maven is looking over her shoulder for a tail—she practically screams nefarious designs. Do you know why?”
“Because she’s walking hurriedly?”
“BECAUSE SHE’S WALKING HURRIEDLY. If she’s about to break into some magic warehouse, she should be sneaking or creeping or scurrying or skulking, like her friend…”
“Broxen,” Kyle added helpfully.
The Professor’s face dropped. “Broxen,” Whatever happened to John? Or even Roger? He shook himself, shooing away the dark thoughts and strangled images clamoring to get in. “Right. Broxen. Of course.”
He took another deep breath.
“Aside from that nauseous first verb phrase, you splatter the “foreboding” where you should be ever-so-subtly painting the faintest outlines, use words like “declension” (just say angle, goddammit), and rely on clichéd tropes of penetrating blue eyes to do your work for you. Well, guess what: they’re not. You still with me Kurt?”
The class looked back to see a sweating, shivering mass of flesh and bruised vanity that once called itself Kyle. “I think so.”
“Fantastic! Thinking is a great place to start.”
“What a fucking asshole,” Kurt thought to himself.
“But you need more than just a start. The lack of a strong plot is at this point inconsequential. Until we can stomach the prose, the plot won’t even be tasted, much less digested. Fix the writing, and we’ll revisit this abortion of a story next class. Who’s next?”
The class was silent as a just-chastised toddler. Kurt’s face and posture suggested a recent colonoscopy. The others, arranged around the hexagonal mahogany table of their ancient seminar room, made themselves scarce. The golden light streaming in from the yellow-stained glass on the west wall of the room seemed like it was aiming for their eyes. (Professor W was, for some reason, exempted from the glow.) The five of them just sat there, silent, for forty-two seconds. Then, without seeming to have noticed the lack of enthusiasm in the slightest, Professor W flashed another wolfish smile. “Alright then. Charls—care to read for us next?”
“Actually, I need to use the restroom,” they said.
The Professor sighed. The nearest gender-neutral bathroom was three flights down. Or was it four? There was no reasonable way to keep track of which bathrooms were on which floors anymore. He yearned for the simpler days when the university catered only to a single gender. The modern state of affairs was agonizingly and torturously inconvenient for him. Just last week, he had walked down two flights only to remember upon reaching the end of the hallway that this floor now held the women’s room. He had to walk back up a flight to find the right one.
“Just walk hurriedly, please.”
“Dear Diary,
It was the middle of October. We had just pulled off the first efficacious protest in school history; our slogan was, ‘The Green and White is just not Right,’ and if one listened closely, he/she/they could’ve heard some traces of it still lingering around campus today, a week after it had last been chanted.
Now, dozens of forums and panels and discussions and debates later, the final vote was about to be cast. The Daily Observer (the university’s student-run ‘newspaper’) had reported early in the morning a favorable margin of only 2.7% to the frontrunner, Magenta-and-Beige, with their projected 47% of student and tenured-faculty support; an article written by one curious_gal (I speculate that this is not his/her/their real name) claimed that the remaining 9.3% would abstain in protest of the protest, saying that it offended the Irish contingent on campus. But then again, the joke of a paper had also reported that a recently departed junior had since been committed to a facility for the mentally unsettled after claiming something about ‘malevolent semicolons,’ so the actual margins of the race were largely unknown.
All we knew was that Skyblue-and-Ivory had made a last minute comeback, finding unexpected support in the nascent LGBTQ group and the veterans’ small but vocal band; Turquoise-and-Flamingopink had been quickly and righteously shunned after a spat had ended with the immediately condemning realization that it was obviously in support of the binary; Fuchsia-and-Cream had been rejected as too boring. Anyway, I was walking to the Organic Farmer’s Market to pick up some vegetarian kimchi over Fair Trade rice for lunch from the kindly old Korean man/woman/human when I realized that I had forgotten my—”
“Charls.”
They looked up with a wince. “Yes, Professor?”
“How to put this gently…” Professor W bit his mustache and chewed it over for a few seconds while staring off into the ether. Spitting out his facial hair, he returned to the classroom and said, “The main issue, aside from your god-awful semicolons, is—actually, let’s harp on that for a moment; class, listen up.”
The class blinked as one.
“There’re perhaps two or three prose-infractions that are worse even than the pathetic commas we saw in Alaria’s piece; one of these is improper semicolon use. Think of semicolons like opiates: a little bit will get you high, but overdose in the slightest and things get dangerous. Real dangerous.” His eyes flashed. “In fact, it’s best not to mess with them if you don’t know what you’re doing; Charls, you have no clue what you’re doing. No semicolons in your next piece; trust me, I’m looking out for you here,” the Professor ended with a wicked wink and a grin that would trigger Little Red Riding Hood’s PTSD.
Professor W continued: “But to come back to the other large issue: your piece, like Fuchsia-and-Cream, is just plain boring.” Here the Professor coincidentally yawned, then laughed to himself at his body’s spot-on comedic timing. “The diary format needs some more action to keep me interested. Speaking of said format, the opening sentence makes little sense given the context—diary entries aren’t usually written with such temporal vagueness, and you do nothing else to justify why this one should be different. Lastly, I get that you have an axe to grind with the binary, and you’re--WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT APOSTROPHE DOING THERE? WHO THE HELL IS WRITING THIS DRECK? DO THAT AGAIN, AND YOU’LL WISH IT WAS A SEMICOLON ERROR!!—writing is a good place to do that grinding. But there’s no need to write three pronouns each time; just write ‘they’ and be done with it. Right now, the lady/gentleman/ungendered-title-of-faux-nobility doth protest too much. Oh, and your percentages add up to 101%. Alaria, you’re up.”
“But I don’t want—buzz—to go to school today!” whined Barry sullenly.
Bernard rolled his faceted black eyes as he sipped from a mug of hot nectar. “Honey, you have to—buzz—go to school.”
“BUZZZZZZ—Whyyyyyy?”
“Bernie,” he called over his back, “it’s your turn to—BUZZ—explain.”
Bernie, opening the refrigerator, buzzed back: “Listen Barry, all kids have to go to school. It’s the—buzz—law. If you don’t go to school, your father and I will get arrested.”
“Bernard!—BUZZBUZZ!”
Bernie looked back and saw on his partner’s face an admonishing look. Sighing, he poured some water into his nectar and shut the fridge. It closed with a waxy thump. The golden light streaming in through the translucent yellow comb formed a hexagonal grid on the wall of the kitchen and seemed to be aiming for his eyes.
“Barryhoney,” he said with a squint, “if you don’t go to school, you won’t—buzz—learn how to be an effective contributor to society.”
Barry buzzed with confusion.
“Bernie, the kid is—buzz—three weeks old.”
“What, you want me to speak to him like he’s daft? How else is he going to learn how to —buzz—talk like an adult?”
“Buzzzz—he’s three.”
“Bernie, we’re not tortoises. How long do you think we’ve—buzz—got?”
Bernard sighed. The truth was, he himself was starting to doubt the purpose of it all, his mind abuzz with existential angst. He, and his family, were but cogs in the machine. Completely and utterly replaceable. In a month, maybe two, he and Bernard, along with their entire generation, would all be dead, their carcasses used as fodder to keep some nosy dragonfly away from the hive. Bernie was right, Barry didn’t have that much longer than that. So, then why spend his precious youth preparing for a future he would barely enjoy? Why bother contribut—“
“Alaria.”
The Professor paused. After a moment, his brow suddenly furrowed and his eyes drew into a squint. “What was that?”
Alaria flushed, dangerously, with anger. “It’s a story. About bees.”
“Yes. I think we’ve realized that much...” Professor W paused. Alaria fidgeted in her seat. Kurt gave her a sympathetic glance. To his left, Charls steeled themselves and took a deep breath.
“Both the parents are named Bernard?”
Alaria swiveled her seat and smiled her thanks for the save. “Yep. Actually, all the parents in that generation are named Bernard.”
At this, the Professor’s ears pricked up and his eyes flashed to life. An indeterminate emotion began to creep onto his face.
“So are all the kids named Barry?” Charls followed.
“Exactly. I thought that giving them all the same generational names would heighten the emphasis on the whole replaceability aspect.”
By now it was clear that the thing emerging onto Professor W’s face was a grin of some sort. Alaria was not relieved—the grin was teetering and could just as easily fall into a sardonic one as it could into one of appreciation.
Leaning forward in his padded, black-leather rolling chair, Professor half asked, half declared, “So the parents are all men, gay except for their monthly romp with the Queen. The names, they all begin with B. That’s because they’re bees?”
Alaria blushed. “…Yeah.”
The grin resolved. “Brilliant. I love it. Completely unnecessary, and hilariously so.”
The class sat in flabbergasted silence, Alaria most silent and flabbergasted of all. “It adds a touch of daring to your otherwise uninventive narrative and almost makes up for the incessant and decidedly unfunny buzzing. Almost. Alaria—the buzzes.” The Professor shook his head with fly-evicting vigor. “They’re psychosis inducing, and not the good kind, either. You need to get rid of the buzzes.” A fluorescent light buzzed overhead. “YOU NEED TO GET RID OF THE BUZZES!”
He coughed.
“Finally, that last paragraph has some of the most improper and offensive commas I’ve ever come across. I don’t know where you ‘learned’ the basics of English grammar, but you should unlearn them, then start again.”
“The man’s just such an asshole,” Kurt thought loudly.
Professor W paused briefly to glare at Kurt before turning back to Alaria: “For next week’s story, you’re limited to 15 commas. Got it?”
Alaria responded with a silent, close-mouthed scream. “The Professor is such a prick!” she thought. But what could she do but utter a squeak of acquiescence? Though she bristled at the lack of tact and emotional delicacy with which Professor W ran his workshop, he was by far the best. Risking the opportunity to learn under him just wasn’t worth it.
There were legends floating around the school of the handful of students who, over the years, had challenged the Professor on a point of prose or grammatical nuance. The overwhelming majority had been kicked out of the workshop, their only consolation a thorough and dispassionate explanation of why their argument was faulty and their prose pathetic. Only one had ever dared stoop so low as to try and complain to some administrative higher-ups. He withdrew from the university a week later citing an inability to focus on his studies coupled with increasingly disturbing thoughts. Said that the semicolons were out to kill him. The episode was quickly buried, the campus much more interested in what colors the school would pick for that year’s seminal rebranding effort. As far as the university was concerned, this room was Professor W’s demesne; in here, his word was law.
“I suppose it’s possible that I’m not real. As in, real in the sense we traditionally mean when we say that something is real. As in, that tree outside my window is real, or, this glass of water is real (the jury is still out re: the ice). Though if I’m not real, then I suppose it’s misleading to say “we.” Can the real and the not-real collaborate? Though if I’m not real, I suppose it’s just as likely that ‘we’re’ not, too. And not just because one of us isn’t real, like how when you multiply differently signed numbers the result is always negative. (Division works that way too.) No, I mean that if I’m not real, who’s to say that anyone is real? In fact, if I’m not real, I would be inclined to say that my conception of the existence of others is unreal as well. Actually, the conception might still be real. But the others wouldn’t be. Because they wouldn’t be. But what does it mean to say that a conception isn’t? If a thought is thought, then it’s thought. It shouldn’t matter if the one doing the thinking isn’t. Should it?
But let’s not get away from ourselves, since all evidence points to my realness. At least, all the evidence I’ve seen. I think “raise my hand,” and I see my hand raise. I smash my fist into the tree outside and it bleeds. My fist does, that is. If the tree had bled, then you might have a point. Of course, the old brain-in-vat idea can account for these little seemingly reality-affirming indicators—”
Like a spider watching its web come to life, the students’ eight eyes widened.
…
…
...
‘Okay, B. Thanks for sharing! Who would like to start us off?’
C’s hand shot up immediately (and, I might add, unnecessarily, since they didn’t bother to wait for recognition). ‘Umm, okay. For starters, how is Charls pronounced?’
‘Like Carl, but with a /ʃ/ (as in ‘shoe’) at the beginning and a hissing /s/ at the end.’
‘I love it!’ C smiled a rare smile that quickly turned down to a frown. ‘Anyway...the Irish flag has orange, too. Maybe try Nigeria or Saudi Arabia instead? (You Eurocentric prick.) Also, I think you did a great job of making a completely unlikeable character in Professor W, but I think you went a little too far at some points. I personally was uncomfortable with the "abortion of a story" and "PTSD" lines; I don’t think it’s okay to make light of other folk’s trauma.’
‘Of course,’ B thought to himself with a smirk.
A chimed in: ‘Listen, C, I understand that this might make you uncomfortable, but that’s not a bad thing. This is prose—if it’s not making you a little uncomfortable, then it’s probably not worth reading. There’s no room for imposing safe spaces on fiction; should we stop reading Ovid because he writes of rape? Or Twain because he uses the word "nigger"?’
C stared daggers. ‘But there’s a difference between using prose as a tool to criticize the existing sociopolitical matrix of domination and taking advantage of the shield prose supposedly offers in order to get a cheap guffaw! Also, due respect (read: not much) to B, but he’s not Ovid or Twain.’
‘Not yet!’ B thought arrogantly. He coughed. 'If I can defend myself for a moment, I didn’t write those to get ‘cheap guffaw[s]’—I wrote them to get guffaws that can’t really be evoked any other way. To quote Twain: "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." If you felt as if struck by lightning, then that’s a good thing.’
D snickered for a moment at B’s bombastic self-praise, then spoke up. ‘I agree. Writing should constantly challenge the existing language game—it should prod for weak points and replace stale phrases with new and often uncomfortable metaphors. Not that these necessarily qualify as Davidsonian slaps in the face, but they’re a good start. I did think there were some iffy words, though. I’m as down for a good "demesne" as the next guy, but "there’re"? It’s a bit gratuitous if you ask me…maybe if W was making fun of Charls’ contractions instead of their semicolons? Also, "forty-two seconds" is oddly specific; is that a shout-out to--
Buzz.
//BENJAMIN DUBOW is a junior in Columbia College. He can be reached at [email protected].