Genre: metafiction
Length: 1500 words
Tense: present
POV: 1st
Well, I didn't revise this much, mostly just the beginning. Length went from 1200 to 1500 words.
Well, here's my first story. I don't want to give anything away in the summary, but there really isn't much to give away. It's mostly expository. Tense shifts, but is mostly present. I don't know about genre, so I'm going with metafiction.
As a disclaimer, I certainly do not endorse any of the views of these characters. A story is not interesting without flawed characters, but I certainly don't encourage others to take up their flaws.
Another disclaimer: this one's a little weird.
I believe in happy endings.
I never understood the notion of the Sad Story. It implies the creation of a moment, abstracted from all other moments, isolated in a world where the net value of everything done, thought, and loved is nothing but tragedy – but this is not my world. In my world a story is only a point along a continuum, where on either side there is sadness and trial but love, too, and hope and joy and a wavering redemption. Look, the grass is greener here, indeed! and still life goes on.
The Sad Story does not end with the sadness, not unless all consciousness is annihilated to utter ruin, each being destroyed, the devastation total and eternal. For each tragic fin there is a survivor, a character who learns and understands and grows, and passes the memory down generations, until one day a grandson however great escapes the legacy of struggle and bursts free into a better life. Those are the untold stories, the saving ones. The End is just another roadblock, just another obstacle soon to be overcome as ever life continues.
I believe in resolution. Where the printed text ends, the healing begins. Happily ever after is not a moment, but a continuum of moments, a kaleidoscope of joy both timeless and infinite. It is a profound, lasting delight. It is quietude, an attainment of peace within oneself. It does not die away.
When my children hear the first notes of a sad story, sometimes they cry. They wail in the middle, trembling – “Father, father, stop! I no wanna hear the rest!” I quiet my youngest one in my arms. “But wait,” I say. “It gets better.”
And it does. I turn the last page of the book. I keep reading. I read them stories of lost love regained, of fallen hope arisen. I read them stories where the hanged man redeems himself before the execution, the lion calms after the strike. He heals the knight he has wounded – look, they are friends now! I read past the letters on the page, into their heart, into my soul.
I believe in heaven, freely, but I don’t believe in Hell. My father did, fervently. He was a preacher. He was one of the good ole fire ’n’ brimstone sort, the species long since dead in too much of this state. He believed in rie-shus-ness. He believed in jis-tiss. He believed some sorts were damned, “Jis’ plain dambed” is how he said it. One-way ticket to the pit in the center and no questions asked. Murderers, Rapists, Terrorists. Suicides.
“But father, why it gotta get sad? Why not like the beginning, always? Why the hurting before the good?”
He’s said it so well and simply that it’s caught me for a while. Give me time to answer. There’s always a reason.
I tell my sons that maybe the suffering is a sort of happiness, only maybe they don’t know it. I tell them that sometimes it has to hurt, but that it will end up fine. My kids glower at me. Johnny, he doesn’t know why he’s glowering. He does it because Ben does. Johnny’s more like me – he believes. He doesn’t notice the moment I leave the script of pictures and words and embark down the paths of my own imagination. He follows.
Ben’s a cynic. He takes after my wife too much. I see in his eyes that same spark, that bridge, that November night. I’m afraid of him, sometimes.
Ben confronts me. It’s after bedtime, but he’s got that resolute fire in his eyes, the rage I know I cannot fight. I dare not scold him.
He takes his sweet time, his overanalytical brain scouring my defenses. At length his questions come like daggers. “Why’s the last page always take so much longer than the rest?”
He lets me have a minute, so I can gather the answers, perspired, from the nervous depths of my murky mind. “The last page is the most important,” I tell him. “It’s in those final moments that everything gets better. But sometimes that takes a while, that’s why it’s long. Sometimes in the middle it can look like everything’s bad, like there’s no hope. You have to trust, know, wait.”
But he’s hardly listening. He’s searching me, looking for a crack in my shield. “There’s the same number of letters! Look, there’s less than on the page before!” He’s shaking the book. The picture tears, a rip decapitating the princess lying lifeless on the castle floor. Ben thinks he has me. He’s grinning, in a way a kid his age should never grin. I fluster.
“It’s complicated, writing. You wouldn’t care. Sometimes a very few letters can say a lot, and a lot of letters can say so little. Like this word, here. It’s thought. See how many letters, but hear how short it is. And this one, so much shorter on the page, but it’s ev-er-y – so long to say.”
I look into Ben’s wide eyes. They fade to a soft blue. He nods.
Ben doesn’t read, of course. I’m not going to have my children read. There’s no point, not when you believe like I do. No ending can be more fulfilling than the catharsis we can imagine.
My wife read. She read everything. Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Dickens, Orwell, Swift, Shakespeare, you name it. “How many people die?” She’d ask the bookseller.
“Pardon?”
“In this story.” She wags it before his nose. “How many people die?”
Three or four, she’d think about it. Five or more, always. And it wasn’t only death, but also drugs, rape, torture, grief, disease, misery… She ate it up.
I sold most of her collection. Got a fair price for all the pain doled out in slashes of black on white. I don’t read novels.
I kept only her children’s books. Books as sad and hopeless as the endings we read are joyful. Those at least I can explain to my kids.
I once asked my wife why, why read only stories that cut off while the real tale is but halfway through? I forget her answer. It was not very good.
I believe that story is timeless. There is always something after that final page. The world never ends, time will not stop, but always people will keep on living. For every night there is a day that follows. Even in the bleakest final chapters lies a spark of hope – no, more than a spark! The hope drives the story, lifts it and carries it to sky-castles far away where princes and princesses are loved forevermore.
I like to think that our lives are like stories. I write Ben’s, on the back of his little note, making my letters tinier and tinier so they will fit, scrunching them into dots, overlapping, indistinguishable. I write it in the hypothetical.
Maybe Ben will grow up believing in his mother. Maybe he will see love, hope, reconciliation in the story that is his own, her own, my own. Maybe, even now, he is not taking secret reading lessons in the house of Mr. K—, growing ever closer to the dark and bitter man. Maybe he does not sneak out of school to listen to the gossip in the streets. Maybe he refuses to believe the ending they feed him. Maybe he sees past the end they tell, maybe he believes she will return as a princess, some day down the road into the mountains. Maybe he feels her, like Johnny, like me. Maybe he’ll never stop believing.
I know he’s going to live happily ever after. I know he’ll find her, her hair shining like the image that returns from memory long lost but unforgotten. I see her rise before me, shivering, out of the sea. A wave had knocked her under, loosening her bun, and her long black hair has spun out and wrapped itself around her face. She is shaking, but laughing. Benny’s running over to her, now. He’s pulling hair off her face, and she’s tickling him. He laughs in relief.
He has found her, I know it. I believe. He is with her now. They are happy, together.
I stand on the bridge with Johnny, watching the river pour out from the mountains, watching the sun set again. Cars whisk by, going too fast. But they won’t hit us, Johnny and I. We’re not going to be hurt, not up here in the twilight, while the river gurgles below. Another car whizzes past, and Johnny trips in the wake, he teeters on the edge of the bridge. But I catch him, and a small laugh escapes him as he smiles at me. He’s not going to fall.
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