Cat got out last week, the gray one with the orange and brown spots, the one I found in the alley behind my apartment a few years ago, the one I lured inside with the rest of my turkey sandwich, I’d gone out to eat a sandwich in the park and I couldn’t finish it, I wasn’t hungry but I’d wanted to eat because it was something to do, and on the way home I took the alleyways like I usually do and there she was, but last week she got out, slipped past me when I was coming in with the mail, and it wasn’t my mail, it was Bill and Judy’s mail, I always bring up their mail with mine but that day I didn’t have any, it was only an electricity bill for Judy and a phone bill for Bill, they’re an old couple and they live above me and they fight all the time but I don’t worry about them, they’re better off than I am, they have each other, I don’t have anyone, I had the cat but she slipped right past me, out the door and down the metal stairs and now she’s gone.
So many verbs in the following sentence. I’m in the kitchen, thinking about the cat, putting the kettle on for coffee, waiting for the water to boil, walking down the hall, sitting at the desk, writing the story.
The thing is I wanted to meet some people, people like me, people who like to read, I guess that’s all I like to do, and I tried a book club at my local bookstore but I’m not any good at discussing books. I used to talk about novels on the phone with my father, in fact literature was the only thing we discussed on the phone, but after we read Madame Bovary two summers ago his eyesight began to deteriorate and his new prescription gives him a headache whenever he tries to read, that’s what he said, so he mostly just looks at the television and I don’t know if I believe any of this about his eyes because when he hands the phone to my mother I no longer hear the TV in the background, he’s either turned it off or muted it, and I can almost hear the sound of pages turning, because he’s sitting there right next to her in bed, and they’re not newspaper pages he’s turning, but the pages of books, of novels, if you listen closely you can tell the difference, and whenever I ask my mother what my father is reading, she puts her old fingers over the receiver, and I hear her panicked, muffled whisper and the volume of the TV goes up, louder than it’d been before, so loud I can hardly hear her when she says, “Reading? Your father isn’t reading. It hurts his eyes to read,” and so I don’t call very often anymore.
It was December when I went to the book club, and it was only a group of old ladies whose husbands had died or who didn’t talk to them or look at them anymore. We sat in a circle on the patio and the propane heaters pumped out enough heat to remind us that we were cold but not enough heat to keep us warm and they discussed Middlemarch and many of them probably wondered why I was there because I didn’t say a word because, like I said, I’m not any good at discussing books and because I have never read Middlemarch.
I was there to see if I would enjoy the book club or if I would enjoy meeting people who like to read and I did not enjoy the book club and the people who liked to read were old ladies and we did not have a lot in common, I’ve never had a husband who died or who wouldn’t talk to me or look at me anymore, but they invited me to lunch after the book club, and one of the old ladies, Linda was her name, paid for my french onion soup and when everyone else stood up to leave the table I stayed behind and drank the rest of my coffee and Linda stayed with me.
“Petracelli. Linda Petracelli.” She held out her hand.
I shook her hand and then put my hands back where they’d been on my lap and then used them once again to lift the cup of coffee to my lips. After swallowing the rest of the coffee I said, “Italian. That’s an Italian name. I read a book earlier this year by Primo Levi.”
“It was called Earlier This Year? I haven’t heard of that one.”
“No, no. It was a memoir, he was in Auschwitz, and I read the book earlier this year. You made me think of it because he was Italian.”
“He was Jewish.”
“Italian and Jewish. You can be both.”
“Well I’m not. Not both. I’m not even Italian.”
“Petracelli?”
“My husband’s name. When he died I kept it. Why would I change it? Back to Smint? Anyway, who cares what my last name is or was. I certainly don’t.”
“Linda Smint?”
“That’s me. Was me. When I was a kid, a girl, growing up. Until I met Peter.”
“Peter Petracelli?”
“Good name right? Why I married him.”
I nodded—and this is the only time I’ll nod in this entire story, others may nod, but not me—and looked around at the other tables. Every table had a muffin on it and none of the muffins looked the same but I won’t describe the muffins anymore other than by saying that they were muffins.
“I’m kidding,” she said. “I married him because he had a big pecker! Peter Petracelli with the Big Pecker! Kidding again. I married him because I liked him. So what’d you think of the book?”
“It was about Auschwitz. It was sad. I liked it but it was sad. It was difficult to read,” I said. “Actually, it wasn’t difficult to read. I’m only saying that because I think I’m supposed to. It read like a page-turner. When bad things happen to people in books it’s interesting.”
“No, Middlemarch. The book we just talked about for an hour. The reason we’re sitting here right now. You didn’t say a word in that thing.” Linda pointed her thumb over her shoulder, as if right there behind her was the bookstore patio where we’d just sat for an hour and not a preteen picking muffin out of his braces.
“Oh, right. I didn’t read it. Have never read it. I was just trying to get out of the house. The apartment. What’d you think of it? You said you liked it. You said you liked a lot about it but that you thought she could’ve used an editor.”
“I said I thought he could’ve used an editor.”
“But George Eliot—”
“I know who George Eliot is. Was. I know who she was. But they don’t. No one corrected me. When I said ‘he.’”
“Maybe they didn’t want you to feel stupid. Maybe they knew and they didn’t want you to feel stupid. Or they thought you misspoke. They were giving you the benefit of the doubt.”
“Maybe.”
“But what’d you think of the book? Off the record.”
“I haven’t read it either,” she said.
Linda Petracelli drove me home and that was the last time I saw her. I should have seen her again—I liked talking to her and I think she liked talking to me—but I never did. I did use her last name in a short story I wrote about a year after meeting her. Smint, not Petracelli. Petracelli has too much of a ring to it. You can’t put a name like Petracelli in a story, it’s distracting. On the way home it occurred to me that she’d never asked me what my name was and that I’d never bothered to tell her. And I don’t know why I asked her to drive me home that day. My car was parked in front of the bookstore and I lived two miles away from the bookstore so the next day I had to walk two miles to retrieve my car. I don’t like how I used “car” and “bookstore” and “two miles” each twice in the previous sentence but I don’t dislike it enough to spend the time reworking the sentence, and I’ve now used “sentence” three times in this sentence (now four times), which is also an issue but one I won’t correct. I guess I liked being in the car with her, I guess that’s why I let her drive me home. I guess a lot.
I started writing stories about a month after I went to the book club. I’d joined “social media”—a euphemism for all of the apps I don’t want to put in my story, a euphemism that is somehow as offensive to me as the names of the apps themselves—looking to find others who cared about the books I cared about, and I found many of them, but none of them simply cared about books, they wanted to write them too. This seemed naive to me. I watch baseball but I don’t have any notion of becoming a professional baseball player and I like to eat a good meal but I don’t plan on opening a restaurant. Why couldn’t they just enjoy the books without attempting to write their own sorry knockoffs? Why was it always this way? But maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to want to create. It was probably a good impulse and I was probably just in a bad mood. Probably, probably, probably. But I noticed that the people I gravitated toward, who read similarly to me, they always wanted to know what I was working on and if I had any writing published, online or in print, that they could read, and when I said no, I wasn’t a writer, only an enthusiastic reader, our conversations tapered off and I rarely heard from them again. It seemed the only thing left for me to do was to write.
I’d noticed that these people, the ones I’d interacted with, had a habit of sharing their stories with each other before they were published. Many times I’d been asked if I’d like to trade stories with these people. They emailed their writing to each other, asking for general feedback and line edits, but of course all they wanted was to be told that their story was brilliant and there wasn’t anything to be done to it, it was perfect as is and would surely be published. If you gave harsh criticism you’d be excommunicated or ignored and then you’d be alone, surrounded by the books you didn’t actually like to read and with no one to motivate you to write the books you so desperately wanted to write.
And it was around this time that someone I’d met online, a guy named Frank Giblin, who’d self-published a couple novels and hadn’t been satisfied with the experience—he wanted the real thing, he wanted someone else to publish him—posted about wanting to have a space to share his writing with others. A handful replied to his post expressing a similar desire and so they decided to create an online writing workshop that met, virtually, once a week. By this point, many of these people had lost interest in me, they’d unfollowed my accounts, it was clear I wasn’t a writer, and I’d stopped contributing to their feeds by sharing the book covers of the books I’d been reading, and screenshots of quotable passages, and what I thought of said books. It felt like my last chance.
I didn’t have anything to say, I wasn’t particularly upset about anything in my life, other than the fact that I was bored and alone, and I didn’t know how to write a story about being bored and alone. I loved my cat but I was beginning to realize she wasn’t enough for me, she had beautiful green eyes and she was always at the door when I came home from work but our conversations were one-sided and it was time I heard from someone, or multiple someones, on the other side of the conversation. So I sent a message to Frank Giblin. I asked him if there was any room left in the workshop, lied and told him I had a story I’d been working on for months and just couldn’t figure out how to end it, I was never any good at endings. He said of course there was room for me and that I’d make the group an even eight.
And since I’ve joined I’ve had a handful of stories published in some pretty good places, nowhere anyone actually reads, but respectable places, places I can tell people I’ve been published in and they’ll nod and say, “Oh, I love that publication,” which only means they’ve heard of it, and every few months I get a check in the mail for a story I don’t remember writing and it makes me feel good about myself. Sure, it’s not enough to live off of but I don’t need the money. I have a day job that I can’t write about because one day my managers caught me writing one of these stories—I didn’t know they were behind me, they move so quietly, and always together, and they stood behind me watching me type away at the thing, it was only when one of them leaned in to try and read over my shoulder that I noticed them—and the next day I came in to work and there was a form they wanted me to sign, on my desk, right on top of the keyboard, something about how I must not, under any circumstances, write about the company. I signed it and gave it to them but at the end of the day, I’ll write about what I want to write about, because what are they going to do? I’ll say it was all fiction, I’m a short story writer after all. Some other time I’ll tell the story of my coworker, Edward, and our furtive friendship, and how he was goddamned unjustly laid off because they caught him multiple times reading paperbacks at his desk, while on the clock, and they searched the desk and found more paperbacks, which led them to believe he’d been reading at his desk, on the clock, for years, and how he had to move back in with his aging, widowed mother and get a job brodarting books at the local library. It is a moving and tender story.
In the meantime, I get the ideas for my stories from reading other people’s stories in the online workshops. It’s not the same as picking up a published book for inspiration, it’s better, because no one is quite done with what they’re writing and they haven’t shown it to hardly anyone, but the ideas are there and every once in a while you get a line or two that’s perfect. Sometimes all it takes is a strong opening line and then it’s go, go, go, run with it, stamp my name on it and send it out, it’s mine now, finders keepers. And usually, by the time the story is published—if it’s published—the person I stole from has forgotten their beautiful sentence, they’ve forgotten their unforgettable premise, and they’re happy for me, and in a way, they’re happy for themselves, because they were in a workshop with me, and now my story is being published in a physical magazine, and they think they played a part in my acceptance by encouraging me to keep working on the story and to move that paragraph over there and add an extra beat at the end and tweak that sentence here, but they don’t remember what I took from them, they’ve forgotten about their story, the one that’s gone unpublished, the one that will never be published because mine has been published, and if theirs were to be published now, it’d look like they’d stolen from me. I’ve gotten emails, I’ve received physical letters in the mail from these people, congratulating me on my acceptance, and oh how wonderful it will be to see the story in its final form, in print, oh how they can’t wait to hold the magazine in their hands. I pity these people, I do. And I’m grateful for them. Take Greg—he’s a mechanic, he gets up early and climbs underneath all kinds of machinery and fixes things and he comes home from work in the afternoon and washes the grease off of his hands and he writes. He writes stories about the things he fixes and about the guys he works with and it’s better than anything I can do. He logs on to these online workshops and he says hello and he’s got an accent—I think he’s from North Carolina—and everybody loves him and wants to hear what he has to say and I love him too, I want to hear what he has to say. I love his accent and I love his story from last week about Chuck the mechanic who spills coffee on the book he’s reading while on his lunch break and how he puts the book on the hood of a jet-black 1991 Chevy Silverado that’s waiting on a repair. The Silverado’s been sitting in the sun all day and it’s so hot that the coffee dries up in just a few minutes but then the dust jacket of the book sticks to the hood of the car and Chuck doesn’t want to ruin the book, any more than it’s already been ruined, by tearing it off the hood because it’s a first edition of The Wild Palms by William Faulkner—I haven’t read that one, haven’t read any Faulkner, so I don’t know the significance of it being that particular book, and while we’re at it, I don’t know the significance of the truck being a 1991 Chevy Silverado, but that’s not the point of the story as far as I can tell—and it was Chuck’s father’s favorite book and this was his father’s copy, and his father recently passed away and Chuck is reading the book because he’s trying to get closer to his father, even though his father is gone and even though Chuck doesn’t like to read, so when the owner of the truck comes by to pick it up, Chuck offers to buy the truck from him for a flat five grand. The owner is so sick of the way the truck keeps breaking down on him when he needs it most, the last time it broke down he was miles away from a gas station and his pregnant girlfriend started having contractions, so he says, “Sure, you’ve got yourself a deal. It’s about time I got rid of that cursed thing,” and the story ends with Chuck at the bank, withdrawing the five thousand dollars in cash and thinking about how it’s the most expensive book he’s ever bought and maybe the only book he’s ever bought and how the hell is he going to get it off the hood of the truck. Greg’s story is called “The Wild Palms” and the one I’m working on doesn’t have a title yet. I can’t share it with the workshop on Monday because they’ll know exactly where it came from. I’ve got to give it at least a couple months, these things take time, and once I feel it’s done, as done as I can get it, I’ll send it out to some places. It’s about a guy named Stanley who repairs refrigerators. He’s a devout Christian and he carries around his great-grandfather’s Bible in the back pocket of his Levi’s wherever he goes. There are a couple of Christians in the workshop and they seem to be doing pretty well in terms of publications, better than me, and one of them—Devin—had a novel come out last year and people are excited about it, they’re still talking about it, and he’s got this great web presence, sort of a combination bodybuilder-minister thing going on and every Sunday he posts a video of himself doing pushups with a stack of Bibles on his shirtless back while he recites the Nicene Creed. The other Christian in the workshop—Grace—she’s from a small town in Canada and she’s soft-spoken, what I imagine an angel must sound like if an angel must sound like anything, and I can’t quite put my finger on what’s so special about her but there’s definitely something there, she’s mysterious and guarded, severe and playful at the same time, and she’s articulate, more articulate than I’ll ever be, maybe that’s what it is, she’s one of the only people in the workshop who gives real feedback and I guess people don’t mind hearing her criticisms because she makes it sound like she really cares about everyone’s stories, and maybe she does, and anyway, according to her, she was this close to going into a convent before she met Devin and fell in love with his brain and his biceps. I don’t know if they really believe in God or in Jesus Christ, and what the hell, Christianity looks good on those two and what they do on Sunday is none of my business, for some reason my business these days is writing short stories, and if putting a Bible in one of my stories will help it to get published, then so be it. If I’ve learned anything in these workshops, it’s that if you somehow include, in the story you’re writing, the names of authors and titles of books that have inspired you, readers will, often unconsciously, begin to conflate your fiction with the fiction of the authors you’re attempting to emulate. I did it earlier with Primo Levi, when I was talking with Linda Petracelli, I stuck him in there. I did it with George Eliot too, but it’s true I’ve never read Middlemarch, never read anything by her. Greg did it with Faulkner in his story. And, in a way, I’m doing it right now by letting you know that I’m typing this on Stephen Dixon’s typewriter. Do you know who Stephen Dixon is? He published thirty-five books of fiction in his lifetime and he didn’t use a computer when he wrote, only this typewriter I’m typing on right now. He died a couple of years ago but before he died, I wrote him letters because I liked his work and felt he was underappreciated and he wrote back to me, and we had a back and forth like that for a while. He was the last friend I had and after he died, when his daughters were cleaning out his house, they found the letters I’d written him and they wrote to me and asked if I’d like to have his typewriter, and of course I said yes, yes I wanted his typewriter, not to use it, just to have it. I’d been in a bad mood for weeks before I got that letter. I’d gone to the corner store to buy the newspaper with his obituary in it and inside the store I had to dig through the papers to find the right paper and while I was digging a man with a beard and a bald, freckled head said, “Excuse me?” And I kept flipping through the papers, looking for my friend’s name or his face, and I said, “Yes?” without looking up and the bald man said, “Look at the sign.” I stopped flipping through the papers and looked at the man. He was pointing at a sign above the papers. BUY BEFORE YOU READ. I said, “Oh, I’m not reading. I’m looking for an article. I want to make sure I buy the paper that has the article I’m looking for.” He sighed and gave me a look like, Okay, buddy, yeah, sure. “Look at the sign,” he said. “If you’re going to read the papers, you need to buy them first.” I said, “Look, I didn’t want to get into it but my friend died and I’m trying to find the paper that has his obituary in it, okay? Is that okay? Or do I need to buy all of these papers, bring them home, and look through them there?” I thought he’d let up but he didn’t. “I’m just saying, we have that sign there for a reason.” “You’re one of the most bald-headed people I’ve ever met,” I said. “What? Bald-headed?” he said. “And later tonight, after you’ve closed and gone home and you think the worst part of your day is done, I’m gonna throw a brick through this goddamned plate-glass window, I swear to God.” I threw the papers back on the rack and he shouted, “Don’t come back,” and as I was walking home I thought about how it probably wasn’t a good idea to threaten my corner market and how I have nothing against bald-headed people, one day I’ll be bald if my mother’s father’s head is any indication, and now I wouldn’t be able to shop there when I needed a can of crushed tomatoes or a lemon or lime or a newspaper with a friend’s obituary in it and I’d have to walk about a mile to a different grocery store where there was only one cashier and the line was a mile long and everyone hated everyone else for buying groceries and being in each other’s way, but the good news was I never saw the bald-headed man ever again because the corner market went out of business a few weeks after our altercation and it was replaced by a new market where college students worked the registers while listening to their headphones and it’s great because they let you look through the papers before you buy them and they don’t say anything to you when you’re checking out, they don’t even tell you how much you owe them, you just give them your card and they give it back to you with a receipt, and you can kind of disappear for a while when you’re in there. But I was telling you about Stanley. Do you remember Stanley? He’s the refrigerator repairman in the short story I’m working on. So, one day Stanley’s in somebody’s apartment fixing a leaky refrigerator and he bends over and his great-grandfather’s Bible pops right out of the back pocket of his jeans and lands in a puddle that’s formed around the refrigerator. Stanley’s quick and the first thing he thinks to do is to put the heirloom Bible in the freezer of the refrigerator. So that’s what he does, and he slams the freezer door shut and continues working on the refrigerator. And here I had to research refrigerator parts, not a big deal, we’re all a Google search away from knowing how to repair refrigerators. There are four main types of refrigerators: compressor, absorption, Peltier, and magnetic, and I had Stanley working on a faulty expansion valve in a regular old compressor refrigerator. Do you see where I’m going with this? While he’s working on fixing the expansion valve, the leatherbound Bible freezes and sticks to the bottom of the freezer next to an old Popsicle and a half-eaten pint of ice cream. When he’s finished with the repair, he opens the freezer door and there it is, a frozen Bible block. Stanley’s afraid if he tries to break it off the bottom, it’ll crack the frozen book into pieces. So what does he do? He decides to leave the Bible in the freezer and tells the customer he’ll buy her a new fridge if he can take her old one home with him. She doesn’t care about the fridge, she just wants one that’ll keep her desserts cold, she’s had it up to here with this refrigerator, you should’ve seen what it did to her coconut cream pie last week, so she says, “You’ve got yourself a deal. It’s about time I got rid of that cursed thing,” and the story ends with Stanley and the woman in a Sears picking out a new refrigerator. Of course he knows a lot more about refrigerators than she does because refrigerators are his life and he’s trying to tell her which one will give her the most bang for her buck and I’m still deciding whether or not they’re going to get together, maybe he’ll take her out for a slice of coconut cream pie and coffee from his favorite diner, or maybe I’ll just keep it simple and Stanley is strictly business. At this point it doesn’t matter. The clock is ticking. I’ve got to send this one out soon or next thing I know I’ll be congratulating Greg on the publication of “The Wild Palms,” and I’ll be in the magazine section at the Barnes & Noble down the street, struggling, unable to find a copy of the magazine Greg’s story appeared in—I’m not going to read it, I just need to see the damn thing with my own eyes—until a bookseller asks me if I need any help and I’ll say no, well, yes, yes I do need help, do you carry such and such magazine, expecting the bookseller to say no, of course not, we’ve never carried that magazine, but the bookseller will find it almost immediately, somewhere between Harper’s and the New Yorker, how could I have missed it, and when he hands it to me—it’s always young men working in this Barnes & Noble, young men who look like me only they’re wearing name tags—instead of looking at the magazine, I’ll bring it straight to the counter and buy it and take it home with me and read Greg’s story in one sitting in the armchair by the bay windows, wishing the whole time that I’d written it, I should have written it, it should be my name on that story, my name in that magazine, and I’ll close the magazine and stand up and go to my desk and open the bottom drawer where I keep the others, drop it in and close the drawer, and type up an email to Greg, telling him how special it was to see the story in its final form, in print, and I’ll keep the email brief and read it over twice to make sure there aren’t any typos or grammatical errors and then I’ll send it off.
I need to go for a walk. Bill and Judy are fighting above me and Bill’s playing one of his jazz records and I think I like jazz but I don’t like the way it sounds coming through the ceiling, I don’t like the way anything sounds coming through the ceiling, and I know I need to go for a walk. I put a jacket on even though it’s hot in my apartment and probably near as hot outside. I don’t like carrying things in my pants pockets, they fit better in my coat pockets, so I put my wallet in the left coat pocket because I may want to buy an ice-cream cone and I put my phone and keys in the right coat pocket and I leave the apartment. I’m halfway down the street when I realize I forgot to lock the door but it’ll be okay, it’s always been okay, no I’m not going to return to my apartment and find it’s been burglarized, that’d give me something to write about for Monday and I have nothing to write about for Monday. Nothing ever happens to me. Nothing I can write about for Monday. I walk to the park two blocks away. I see a lot of dogs in the park and none of them are dogs I want to pet but when I pass them the owners give me that look, Yes, go ahead, you can pet my dog, even though I’m not interested in petting their dogs, any dogs, but I do. I pet every dog I pass. And I say, “Isn’t she cute,” and the owner says, “It’s a he,” and I say, “Well, isn’t he cute,” and I force a smile and keep on walking until again, “Isn’t he cute,” and, “It’s a she,” and, “Well, isn’t she cute,” and I keep on walking until I climb the stairs that lead out of the park. I take the side streets and alleyways home to avoid other pedestrians and dog owners and dogs. I don’t stop for ice cream. I need to get home. I have to write something to show these people on Monday. I think maybe I’ll see a cat, not my cat, any cat, pop its head out of a dumpster or a trash can—that’s good luck—but I don’t, only garbage. A warm breeze blows a chip bag and it follows me for a few feet before I turn the corner. The last story I wrote had “chip bag” in it and here it is again, it must mean something to me, there must be something I like about the phrase “chip bag.” I should’ve named my cat but I could never decide on a name and then it was too late, she was “cat,” just “cat,” just “my cat.” I’m the same way with my stories. I can never come up with a title I like, one that fits, I usually just pick a word or a line from the story and then if the story gets picked up, the editor changes the title to something else, something that makes sense and doesn’t feel forced. But I should’ve named her, she wasn’t a story. I walk up the steps to my apartment and turn the handle on the door but it won’t turn because it’s locked. So I didn’t forget to lock it. I reach into my left pocket for the keys but they’re not there. They’re in my right pocket. I unlock the door and open it and go inside and it smells like something’s burning. I go into the kitchen and the kettle is on the stove and water is bubbling out from beneath the lid and hissing on the burner and I turn off the stove and move the kettle to a different burner. I go into the living room. Bill and Judy aren’t fighting anymore, at least I can’t hear them, they must’ve gone out or gone to bed, but Bill left his record player on and he didn’t flip the record and the needle skips and skips at the end of the record and it’s about time he got rid of that cursed thing. 
Joseph Grantham is the author of two books of poems. His fiction has appeared in Bennington Review, New York Tyrant, Autre Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in America.
Illustration: Rae Buleri
