Three samples

Dear Anon,

Please find below samples of three stories from Fictions, each equally representative of the story they are from:

Sample One

"Before he draws his last breath, Cyril Johnson does not seek nor does he find the precise redemption that is expected of him. He has stumbled upon a greater revelation, one in which not only vindication for himself, or Smith, was possible but also a quiet, unheralded heroism.

The old man dies at home at 5 o’clock on an ordinary Thursday afternoon in November. After he expires, the wraith which haunted him remains. It remains because it believes that, according to its understanding of balance in the universe, its counterpart should return so that their debate could continue, maybe even to a resolution.

It does not see that when Smith, as an agent of the Machine, destroyed its former body, he also initiated his own gradual annihilation, a mortification of the soul which preceded by almost 22 years the final mortification of the flesh. It does not see that Cyril Johnson was already essentially as spectral as it was, that Johnson existed within the body of Smith simply because he was trapped within that vessel.

From, “The Last Assassin”

Sample Two

“Will I become one of your stories in – what’s it called?”

“Fictions.”

“So, will I become one of your stories in Fictions?”

“Yes.”

“Make sure you make it a steamy one then.”

“I’ll make it as clinical and un-erotic as possible.”

“Why?”

“For spite.”

“You’re not spiteful, you’re sweet. Why?”

“Because the recreation of the sex would dwarf everything else. The story should be a monument to this moment in my life.”

“The moment included sex.”

“Yes, and it was great but this, what we’re doing now, talking, that’s what’s important in the long run for me.”

“There is no long run. Don’t do this. Don’t make this more important than the new and the sex.”

“I’m not trying to make anything more than what it is to me. But I won’t make it less.”

“Then make the sex steamy.”

“I don’t want to. I won’t. It’s my story.”

“No. It’s our story.”

“Listen. The last story I wrote that had a lot of sex in it, people either hated it for the sex or loved it just for the sex. Anything else I wanted to say was hardly noticed.”

“Is it more research material that you need? Is that it?”

“Research material…”

“Research…material.”

“Oh…hmmm…Persuasive…but it’s no good.”

“How about now?”

“My mind’s set. I’m not going change it. There’s nothing you can possibly do to make me change it.”
From, “Eden Revisited”

Sample Three

The clearest memory I have of Peter in his youth, before the bitterness, was from those blackout nights with our mother quizzing us from that handed down Student’s Companion. I hear my mother’s voice, thin and echoing, ghostlike, fading away into its own ellipsis. “A place where birds are kept…”

And Peter’s image stands out in dramatic candle-lit relief, surrounded by the haze of the rest of my siblings, as he asserts without fail, “An aviary!” So it would go, through apiary, aquarium, hutch, warren, sty, insectarium…

It is not that the rest of us did not learn all the answers over time – we did. But long before we did, and long after, our original ignorance and relative ineloquence had become incorporated into that familial ritual. In the end, Petamber became the spokesman for all of us.

The single correspondence between Peter and I in the nine years since I left for Canada was a short cryptic letter he sent me just as HAWK had entered its infancy. I have it in my Toronto apartment still; indeed I know it from memory by now:

“What is an aviary, Prakash? An aviary is a place where birds are kept, where birds are kept together despite plumage and temperament and origin. All that is important is that they can mutually tolerate their capture, for no greater purpose than that of some perverse and unnatural exhibition.”
From, “The Aviary”