I sit, assessing the damage. The dry grass is like tiny blades cutting into my thighs. The front tire is out of true. I wonder vaguely whether I have a concussion, but seem unable to fully form the question. I sit for a long time and consider napping, just for a minute. The block is family houses. Someone will see me if I die.
The cat approaches and rubs against me. I push it away. It rubs me again and catches my bleeding arm with its tail. The pain starts me awake, and I push the cat, harder, then look at it, suddenly sorry. It’s skinny, flea-infested, its paws matted with tar. A Creamsicle tabby. It looks like my childhood cat Skittles. Skittles died tragically of renal failure when I was fifteen. I have always blamed myself for failing to notice sooner that she was sick.
I swear under my breath and decide I’m not going to cry. I resent Seth for failing to be here to help me. I peel myself from the ground and lean against the bike. The cat follows me for a block and then walks in front of my foot. I stop to avoid kicking her. I squat and look at her more closely. Her eyes are clear blue. I pick her up and carry her against my chest.
Three
Soon after the aborted drawing session, Jared invited me to his home. I arrived in the early evening, chained my bike to his fence on the brick street, and proceeded up the paving stone walkway through a sandy garden of wilting bromeliads. The house was Spanish-style, eggshell-colored, with a screened-in side porch. An old bathtub filled with potting soil housed weeds. Jared answered the door shirtless. He wore a knee-length floral skirt. His hair was pulled into a bun, and a tattoo of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa covered his left shoulder. “Welcome, Nina,” he said. “Come in.”
The entrance was partially lit by an antique floor lamp draped in red silk. I eyed the bookshelf and recognized many of the authors I’d read in my undergraduate gender studies and African American literature seminars. Through an open bedroom door, I could see a man with a Jew ’fro sleeping beside a skinny white woman covered in stick-and-poke tattoos.
“So, you’re a writer?” I said to Jared.
“I’m an artist. One of my media is text.”
“What are your other mediums?”
“Media. Carpentry. You may have seen some of my work at Black Box.”
“Did you have a show?”
“I made the benches.”
We proceeded past the open bedroom and onto the porch, where an old corduroy sofa shared space with a particleboard coffee table, a grill, a dusty workbench, and several unopened cardboard boxes sagging under stale rainwater. It was carpeted pool table green.
“Tell me about your writing,” Jared said. He opened a cigar box on the coffee table. It held four Swisher Sweets, a sandwich bag of dry shake, an X-Acto knife, and a lighter. I sat on the couch.
“What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you see fit to tell me.”
“Well, the book is loosely based on my life.”
“I had wondered.”
“But I mean, it’s fiction.”
“What’s true and what’s not?”
“None of it is technically true.”
He rolled the blunt silently as I watched. He licked it, dragged his thumb lengthwise down the paper, spun it, then stuck the whole of it in his mouth and pulled it out again.
“I look forward to talking with you about your novel,” he said. “First, I need to pass some items along to a friend who has just arrived.”
A black Beetle pulled into the driveway. A petite Latina climbed out of it. She wore pinup shoes, black-and-white polka-dotted shorts, and a lime halter top. She teetered up the walkway and across the yard.
“Hang on, Claudette, let me get them,” said Jared. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said to me.
“No problem.”
The woman opened the screen door and held her hand out for me to shake it. There was something hostile in the gesture. “How do you know Jared?” she said.
“Seth introduced us.”
“Why?”
“I’m a writer,” I said for the first time. “Jared is reading my novel.”
She looked at Jared. He was just returning with a shopping bag of women’s lingerie, which he handed to her.
“No, Claudette,” he told her, reading her face. “She’s sleeping with Seth.”
“We should hang out sometime.” She smiled. She seemed to be saying this for Jared more than me. I listened as she segued into a story about a love triangle at the coffee shop where, I gathered, she and Jared both worked. The full version involved a lot of characters, some of whom were as yet unidentified. Jared sensed that I was waiting and lit the blunt. He passed it to me on the couch. I passed it back to him. With the blunt, we were passing back and forth the understanding that Claudette was intruding on a conversation that was only just beginning.
He took out his phone and nodded to show her that he was listening. He began to move his thumbs across the screen. Claudette continued. She was speculating about the possibility of the coffee shop’s management disapproving of staff affairs. Whether it was possible the owner would fire someone. She didn’t seem to care that Jared was openly talking to someone else while she was talking to him. I took my phone out of my purse and texted Seth a heart emoji. I kept my hand on top of the phone afterward in case he responded. It vibrated.
Nina, your ideas are good but you let them stew too much upstairs without getting out and getting examined. Many of your sentences are long and awkward. Your metaphors are frequently mixed, and lose potency as a result. Your voice is good, but gets muddled and lost when you reach for big ideas. You rely too much on staid literary mechanisms that no longer have currency. You have a tendency to tell instead of showing. Unresolved plot holes and inconsistencies riddle the story line, though you do some skilled foreshadowing. The story attempts to be at once gritty realism and patent romanticism, but ends up being effectively neither, while its overblown descriptions of good and evil give it a moralizing tone. This story feels raw, like it hasn’t gone through a drafting process yet. You seem not to be able to see the forest for the trees, and there are some lovely trees, but they just don’t make a forest. You obviously have a good grasp of language, but you need to work on some of the basic nuts and bolts of storytelling before attempting to build anything as grand as you’re doing, otherwise its structural integrity cannot hold up even a well-wrought facade. Things you can work on include: making your world logically consistent; making sure all things, actions, places, and names have both context and causation; getting rid of unnecessary verbiage, especially words whose duty is being done by other words; working to eliminate clichés and overused literary mechanisms; and using the right word instead of several close approximations all lumped together.
I closed my phone and returned it to my purse. I stared at the arm of the sofa while Claudette finished her story. It took her ten or fifteen minutes. I sank into my body. I felt at once far away and painfully present. I considered the attractiveness of vanishing. I would leave Jared’s porch, walk to the water, and continue walking until I was submerged.
Claudette reminded Jared about dinner at her mother’s house tomorrow. “I love you,” she said.
“You, too, kid,” he said.
They kissed.