I have a brand new short story out today online at the estimable UK magazine Minor Literature[s]. Story called “Angle of List” (you can read the entire story here). This is an event because mostly I am writing nonfiction these days.
Here’s a taste, the opening paragraphs. A bit of commentary follows.
Moss woke at 6am to the din of pots clattering in the kitchen below. The dog scratched urgently to get out. Wind buffeted the windows. The house shook, tilting like a ship at sea. He had forgotten who he was.
There were books stacked beside the bed, a spiral bound notepad on top open to the first page. “Moss, Your schedule for today. Don’t skip ahead. Please cross each item off when completed (yesterday you phoned the funeral home 16 times).” Followed by a bullet point list.
The house trembled and heeled like a ship at sea. The dog scratched furiously to be let out. In the distance there was a regular metallic thumping like the sound of an industrial anvil. Sometimes it would stop only to resume a few moments later. The blankets felt like concrete slabs. Moss couldn’t move. He had forgotten when today was.
The red book just beneath the notepad caught his eye. He reached for it but then forgot what it was he had wanted.
There was a red book just by his hand now. Curious, he picked it up.
Moss woke at 6am to the din of pots clattering in the kitchen below. He knew it was 6am because there was a clock next to the bed. It always said 6am, which puzzled him a little. The dog scratched insanely at the door to be let out. The wind shrieked against the window panes. There was an insistent metallic pounding in the distance. He had a red book in his hand.
He felt like a man in a box. He had a red book in one hand and a notepad in the other. “You need to pee. The bathroom is straight ahead when you go out the door. Put on your slippers. It’s cold. Keep the notepad with you.” The handwriting was exuberant, plunging descenders, extravagant ascenders, generous vowels like small breasts, tiny hearts for dots and periods. But the tone was imperative, even mildly coercive. “Don’t turn off into any of the other bedrooms or you’ll get lost again.”
A man named Moss wakes up at 6am with the wind blowing outside and a dog scratching at the door. He has a notebook in his hand with a list of instructions. He keeps waking up at 6am, over and over, relentlessly, forgetting everything that’s happened before he wakes up, trying to decipher his life from the enigmatic (to him) notes and a red book at his side. The book is called Angle of List. List refers to the tilt of a ship at sea, its deviation from the perpendicular. Angle of list is the angle of deviation from the perpendicular. If the angle of list is too great, the ship capsizes. Because of the wind buffeting his house, Moss has the idea (over and over) that he is on a ship at sea.
For me, the writer, the entire story takes place in the study where I work. We’re on a high ridge in Vermont. The wind hits this house like a hammer sometimes, ripping off shingles and shrieking in the windows. I often think it’s like being in a sailing ship on the ocean. It has such a dramatic effect on my mind that I thought I should do something with it.
The dog also is mine. And, yes, the bathroom is down the hall from my study with bedroom doors leading off (though, unlike Moss, I have not gotten lost on the way — so far).
So the story is very much assembled out of bits and pieces of my day to day life, but the assemblage seems decidedly surreal.
The story is governed by recursion. Everything repeats and Moss has no memory. So, technically, it has no plot — because time doesn’t flow (only repeats), nothing happens. Here and there, tantalizing hints of another reality emerge from the text, but nothing conclusive until the end when there is a point of view shift and another character takes over (similarly stopped in time, waiting for something to happen).
There are plenty of comic (and disturbing) surprises and reversals, plus a subterranean erotic component — Moss keeps thinking the letter O in the handwritten notes looks like a breast, pages full of breasts, and there is a mysterious female presence in the kitchen below. Someone keeps coming to the door.
There is a sense in which language is both his enemy and his only ally. He vainly tries to replicate memory by keeping notes (think: Freud’s “Mystic Writing-Pad”), but written down the words become enigmatic clues that he has trouble deciphering. The written words assault him with contradiction and sexual innuendo. Real things, like the female presence hovering outside the door, terrify him. The words imply everything he does not know; language inspires paranoia (as it should). Besides the words, he has no self, and the words are mostly written by someone else. His life is governed by a literary technique.
Story of my life…