Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 by Gavin J. Grant Kelly Link

Author:Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link [Link, Gavin J. Grant, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: zine, Science Fiction, Short Fiction, LCRW, fantasy
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2010-08-17T17:21:22.708682+00:00

Self Story

Carol Emshwiller

How did this begin? We must have thought she'd be a good choice. We should have checked her out first. We should have spent a few hours with her to see how it was going to be, spending the whole summer shut up here in the middle of nowhere. We'd have seen in half a day how soon we'd tire of her smiling. Nobody smiles this much except out of fear and embarrassment and there's not a moment when she's not embarrassed. Embarrassed to be herself I suppose. Whoever she is.

Well, the summer will be over, and thank goodness. We'll go back to our regular lives. And better that she go back to living by herself as she's used to. Back to running in place or riding her stationary bike, lifting those little weights that she never does often enough to get any better at it.

If we'd seen her home before, we never would have taken her class. Piles and piles of papers on every flat surface! We'd have known her mind has got to be just as cluttered. People are always all of a piece.

She's called the class a title with no dignity: SUMMER FUN WITH FICTION ... as if it was for children. Fun! We're not here for fun. Except ... well, it could have been. Maybe. With anybody else but her.

We won't say who it is. Suffice it to say her initials are C. E.

She's old. At her age you can't help but be out of date. But she doesn't suspect it. Hasn't she, she says (and she says it over and over): “Haven't I always been right on the cutting edge of everything? Haven't I even gone beyond the so-called New Wave? On into the new old things? Back to the old rules, but back in an entirely new way?"

She says, “A story should be this and this and not that and that and the other. A story should curve and stop and struggle, turn around in the middle and tell the opposite. Have guts and sweep and go somewhere with gusto. élan,” she says. “A story should always be more than itself. A story should end only a few inches from where it began. A story should fall over the edge. A story should be a bundle of foreshadowings. Should vouchsafe itself to the reader from the very beginning that it is, in fact, a story."

She never would say, “Write what you know,” like everybody else does. She never would say, “Write, write, write, and keep on writing.” If she doesn't say that, we guess she thinks she knows more about it than Hemingway. Well, she says she does right in front of us. What she says instead is, “Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent."

She thinks she might have already written the very twenty-five words that could change the whole history of writing but she knows, as we do also, that nobody will ever read them.

She says she knows nothing about poetry but she doesn't mean it.

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