I wrote the first short story I knew to be truly good in the spring of my first year at university. I was in a creative writing class, and the piece in question was written towards the end of the semester. That class was the first time I'd ever tried writing prose (I'd made a few tepid attempts at screenwriting--best we never mention this again), and I could tell I was good at it, though how good exactly was unclear. Back then I was even more neurotic when it came to appraising my own work, constantly see-sawing between thinking it was the shit and thinking it was shit. I'm still on the see-saw to this day, though it's less frenetic. I also know to expect it.
The professor took me aside after a class in which my final piece was workshopped (not the piece I was talking about before, mind you) and told me I was good and should consider applying for my school's writing program. He said something along the lines of this: "There aren't any other professions where you can think about doors that up and disappear. That's how writers think." The story was about a door that up and disappears, by the way. I looked...well, I don't know how I looked. Maybe embarassed, a little afraid. I don't know. However I looked, he felt compelled to hastily add: "Not that you couldn't do something else. I'm sure you could be successful at other things."
But I digress. The piece I started this post talking about, the one I knew with (relatively) unwavering confidence to be good, was a 500-word thing about a young girl and her uncle going to a carnival. The main seed was an experience I had after moving to a new country as a child. I was riding a ferris wheel in an amusement park at sunset with my father, and I began to cry. My dad seemed to think I was scared of the height, but I wasn't. I was just...sad. Two other important touchstones for the writing of this piece are two songs by 90s indie bands: "Breadcrumb Trail" by Slint and "Ferris Wheel on Fire" by Neutral Milk Hotel.
The prompt was to write a prose poem. Here, unabridged, is the story:
THE WORLD FAIR
The world fair is in town and Emily’s uncle promised to take her! He reminds her that it’s just a carnival and that the real world fair should sue. Emily nods her head and stops talking even though she doesn’t quite understand. She falls asleep in her mother’s childhood bedroom and dreams metallic dreams about cars and rockets.
The man in the ticket booth gives Emily a silly smile. He says that he’s friends with Emily’s uncle. When we were in high school, the man says, we would go to the carnival every year and see this fortune teller. Do you remember her, Tommy? God, wasn’t she something. She always gave me a better fortune than you ‘cause she liked me more.Tommy doesn’t say anything.
Inside, Emily asks her uncle why his friend is missing so many teeth. He tells her that all the people in this town rot away and that their teeth are the first to go. He adds that she should leave here and live by the sea when she’s old enough. Emily thinks about the whales rotting at the bottom of the ocean. Do whales have teeth?
Time for some games! Emily holds up a cork gun and takes aim at the little aliens that dangle from the ceiling. Some of her shots get pretty close but none of them land. She doesn’t give up and tries again and again, never improving. She wants one more try but her uncle can’t stand watching her lose, so he buys her some cotton candy instead. Emily doesn’t like cotton candy because it reminds her of the pink stuff in Grandma’s attic. She eats it anyway to be nice, unaware of her uncle’s own distaste for cotton candy. He saw the pink stuff in the same attic as a kid and made a similar connection.
Emily wants to ride the merry-go-round. There’s no merry-go-round at this fair, so she must mean the ferris wheel. The sun is low in the sky when they reach the front of the line. Emily kicks her feet as their seat makes its way to the top. Once there, the ride stops so they can take in the view. Beneath them is the carnival, the town and the endless farmland that extends beyond it all. Tommy stares into the grassy abyss and forgets who he is. The little stranger next to him starts to cry, her sobs soft and mournful. This isn’t the tantrum of a frightened child. This seems more important than that. He was never told what to do in this situation, so he pats her on the head a few times. It doesn’t seem to help.
END
That's it. There's a tweaked version of this that I submitted to a student lit magazine, but that's not this. The above text is what I turned in for the assignment. And whatever. It's not the best thing I've ever written, but in a way it's the most important.
But so then listen. I'm interested in writingg a hypertext fiction thing. I thought it would take the form of a twine game or something, or maybe a series of word documents. Probably if I do attempt such a project the format will be html. The youtuber hazel's video on the PS1 Serial Experiments Lain game is what sparked my interest, or at least fueled it. Actually that's not true. What really good me thinking about this were the various annotated versions of James Joyce's Ulysses that exist on the web. joyceproject.com is perhaps the most extensive. https://www.columbia.edu/~fms5/ulys.htm is also pretty good, though it is incomplete. So Joyce was the spark, hazel the gasoline.
I have probed around Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse, a thing impenetrable and compelling. What I best remember is this quote: the bigness of america is bigness --joyce
^From Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse. I took this screenshot in 2022.
Last year I had the idea of using THE WORLD FAIR as backbone for a hypertext novel. Select words would be links to other short pieces of fiction. I'd even written a few snippets. They revolved around Emily's dream the night before the fair and Tommy's interaction with a girl in high school. Emily's dream featured a boy, and a link would lead to a story about the boy who in fact is a real person who just happens to be sharing a dream with Emily. Also Tommy was to have a female doppleganger of sorts, a window into an alternate life where he's a woman. I recently watched I Saw the TV Glow and am tempted to rip it off some. Is it really ripping off, though? A big part of trans experience is a sort of dissociation, a mute and distant alternate life playing out overhead somewhere. Also I got the title before Schoenbrun's other film, We're All Going to the World's Fair, was even a thing. So there.
Maybe someday I'll settle in and actually give this idea a serious try. I don't know. Right now I'm reading Lolita and loving the hell out of it. Probably I'll read Pale Fire next, which as I understand it is a precursor of hypertext fiction in a way similar to Joyce.