The Old World and Other Stories by Cary Fagan

Author:Cary Fagan
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2017-02-10T19:07:17+00:00

INSPIRATION

So, let me get this straight, it was your couch but also his. A shared couch.

First of all, it’s a sofa. I hate the word couch. It’s ugly. You want to be sly or hedge your bets, you couch your words. There’s nothing sly about that sofa.

All right, a sofa. Belonging to the two of you.

Technically, yes. We got the sofa when we decided to share the apartment. It belonged to the person who lived there before us. We bought it from him.

For how much?

What does it matter, how much?

Out of interest.

Twenty bucks. We paid twenty.

And whose wallet did it come out of?

Well, his. But that’s because he actually owed me sixty dollars. So he was paying the guy with my money.

And it stayed in the apartment for the whole time the two of you lived there?

It should take a vacation? Yes, the sofa stayed. Two years we were there. Well, twenty-two months. We got the place cheap because it had no hot water.

No hot water?

The owner didn’t want to pay for hot water. He claimed to have some wacky belief about the healthfulness of bathing in cold water. Actually he was a skinflint.

What were you doing those twenty-two months?

Writing for television. Or trying to. For a show called Out of Time. You ever heard of it?

No, I haven’t.

Doesn’t surprise me, only lasted three seasons. It was basically a Twilight Zone except the idea was that every episode had to do with the concept of time.

So you were writing for it.

Like I said, trying to. Harry knew somebody on the show, an assistant to a producer. So we would write a script and give this guy a few bucks to show it to somebody.

How many scripts did you write together?

Let me think. Eight, maybe ten.

What were they about?

One was about a guy who gets into an elevator and when he comes out he realizes that for everybody else time is moving backwards. Only he can’t talk to them because he’s moving forwards.

That’s a little hard to imagine.

Okay, maybe it was a little high concept. We had another about a kid who, by shooting his toy gun, can make time stop for four seconds. That was a good one.

And did you sell any?

Not one. I’m sure Harry’s friend showed them to somebody. The janitor, maybe. We were getting nowhere. I started thinking about trying to go a different route but by then Harry had met Harriet.

Harry and Harriet?

No kidding. She was a secretary at the network. She read some of our scripts and agreed to meet us to say why they were no good, like her opinion was worth anything. I couldn’t go because of my evening job working the slicer at the deli. But Harry went and I guess the two of them fell hard for each other. I have nothing against that, I’m not the anti-Cupid.

But something happened.

Sure. Harry and Harriet went to city hall and got married. Then Harriet’s dad, who’s some advertising big shot, bought them a house in the suburbs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.