“Fiction/Fiction” (for D.F.W.) | by Jezy Gray

How could I ever tell you about the way the smoke snaked† around the winking radio tower? Or how the room was so quiet you could hear a book of stories†† slide out of its sleeve? If I sat here at the keyboard††† pecking away forever I’d never even come close. Maybe if you could sit with me at my desk we could suss this thing out††††. I wouldn’t just talk, I’d listen. I can only imagine the things you would have to say.  

† Maybe it was a plume, a devastating black cloud that swallowed me up on my way to the post office. I was going to deliver a letter, an archaic little testament of some love for some woman. Maybe it came pouring out from an open door to a fiery building. The last time I saw this woman we were dancing in my living room to a record by Enoch Light and His Orchestra. I called her mother who said that her daughter never wanted to speak to me again. Maybe what happens is I go into the building to investigate. Maybe the whole place is burning up and I can hear a man gasping for air. If she gets my letter in time, maybe I’ll see her again. Maybe we’ll dance to Dexter Gordon’s The Sophisticated Giant. Maybe I get down on all fours and crawl through the plume to where the gasping is. Maybe I can just start to make out his face through the smoke. Maybe she can still love me. Maybe this man is alive but just barely, and maybe I can pull him out into the safety of the afternoon air. Maybe he’s already dead.

†† I once read Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones in Spanish.

††† My mom gave me a typewriter for my 15th birthday. She told me that I should write the world however I wanted it to be. I used to get home from school and re-make the day I’d just had: 3/10/93 -- Got a perfectly respectable score on my Geometry exam, the cafeteria served double-fudge sundaes and Lisa McDaniel gave me a blowjob in the boys’ bathroom – J.G. I used to clean my typewriter every day with a can of condensed air, spraying under the keys until the can was cold to the touch. My mother was killed years later in a kayaking accident.

†††† The man in the building is still alive! I have to be quick on my feet, and I sling him over my shoulder like he weighs almost nothing. I charge out of the building like Howie Long in Firestorm (1998). A crowd has started to gather and someone points up to a window on the building’s 2nd floor where a panicked little baby cat is desperately pawing at the glass. “Someone give this man mouth-to-mouth!” I shout at the roaring throng. I lay him out on the sidewalk and as luck would have it an off-duty, CPR-certified lifeguard steps out from the crowd and begins to pump the dying man back to life. I look up to where the cat is mewing silently, the flames beginning to lap up the background. What I say is “Don’t worry, little guy!” and like a tight end I rush back into the burning husk where I might very well meet my end. The smoke is thicker now, more pungent, and you won’t believe what happens next: