Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

Author:Megan Kamalei Kakimoto [Kakimoto, Megan Kamalei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Aiko, the Writer

Had spent the last decade drafting a Night Marchers–themed collection, so you can imagine her surprise and her horror when, a day after its completion, the papers on which she’d penned her masterpiece began to vibrate. She’d never seen printer paper vibrate before, much less without provocation. Possibly she was hallucinating, her sleep as of late errant and unresponsive, her attentions everywhere and elsewhere. Wary, she tucked the pages into the Ewa-most drawer of her desk before endeavoring to pack for her upcoming travels, yet another benign task on which to waste her time.

Admittedly, she was bad at doing things that were not writing. Which was why she’d made such a conscientious effort to fill her hours with writerly events, with deadlines, with anything germinative and relevant to the writing craft. With speaking engagements centered on the writing life. The day her draft collection began to vibrate, Aiko was scheduled to board a plane for Austin, Texas, where the literary community of Austinites was waiting to sop up her brilliance at a writers’ panel titled “The Art of Place.” It would be her first engagement since the sales disaster. She took comfort in the fact that no one in the audience, not her fellow panelists or likely even the conference director, knew of her literary troubles.

After several hours of deliberation, Aiko resolved to bring the manuscript on the flight. Likely she’d imagined the pages’ strange undulations, wild and wily was her capacity for creation. And even if the pages vibrated a bit, so what? She could sit on them if she had to. Plane seats were incommodious anyway, always deficient in tailbone support, in the casting of one’s coccyx. A chunk of papers might do her perch on an eight-hour flight some good.

Aiko hole-punched then bindered her manuscript, slotting the pages in her carry-on between speaking notes and an advance copy of her colleague’s memoir, through which she had yet to make her way. She honi’d farewell to her husband, the physicist, then snaked through the taxing security line at HNL, removed her laptop and her shoes for the screening checkpoint, presented then pocketed her ID and boarding pass, bought a Starbucks coffee, filled her water bottle, charged her phone. Several emails from her agent awaited her attention. By the time boarding began, she had answered none of them, she had forgotten about the manuscript entirely.

The flight was unexceptional—cramped quarters, several downed lorazepam—and when she arrived in Austin later that afternoon, Aiko was positively certain her brain had fabricated all that vibrating nonsense, possibly from her lack of sleep but also as a defense mechanism against touching the collection too soon. Yes, she had her agent to answer to, but more than that was the throbbing hum of her late mentor Lacey’s sage warning about approaching a work before it has fully steeped. You mustn’t, under any circumstances, broach revisions to your draft until it has adequately collected a scrim of dust in “the drawer.” Yet Aiko was pleased.

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