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Hypocrite Écrivain, Hypocrite Lecteur: a Letter to the Editors of DailyCabal.com
by Trent Walters
Note: This fictional creative-nonfiction comments on the underlying aspect in the Anan Muss series [click this link].
Dear editors,
Since its christening, I have faithfully read your zine. Its vessel has at times thrust itself into amazing worlds and has at times scraped its barnacled hull through narrow wormholes. SF Poet Anan Muss, however, has shipwrecked and should no longer captain your masthead (or even swab the decks).
His themes tend to be Darwinist variations on the idealistically fit who are actually unfit because of their idealistic naïveté, which causes them to be buffeted by the supposedly unfit (according to standards humanity claims to uphold) but who are truly fit because they obey an unspoken social Darwinism. While the themes should disturb the blithe and, indeed, deserve to be heard, it appears the poet himself does not abide by his implicit ideals: All have worth and ought to be treated as such.
Last year, I paid to attend a benefit for the SF Poet Society because Anan, a man of self-purportedly high principle, was the guest of horror--pardon, honor--teleported in from Jac-Sun V. He spent the late afternoon swilling a dozen Chardonnay and swallowing more than his share of salmon. Many tried to discuss literature, to stroke his ego discussing his work. He actually glared when I brought up his thematic disposition. He had eyes and words only for a third-rate poetess a third his age. One might surmise where he spent that night.
I do hope you’ll take a billy club and knock that man between his lustful, blue-speckled eyes.
Humbly yours,
Nobody the Poet
#
Dear Nobody,
Thank you for writing. My first reaction is “That’s not me.” But how many times have we gazed in the mirror--especially as we age--and been deluged in a self agnosia?
I could make excuses: Dionysia dissed me again, and I desired revenge (but that’s petty and not me). You or whoever else appeared sycophantic (but that’s egotistical since we all start somewhere). My only hope lies--hope springs--in misperception:
1) It wasn’t me you saw, or
2) you saw me but my mind was elsewhere (if we trust your version, we cannot but be disappointed in any writer who claims objectivity, to see all angles, to peer into the hearts of all characters with equanimity), or
3) my identity was mistranslated through quantum entanglement--maybe the distance between a good person and a bad takes very little leap (a quantum leap, if you will--another perennial concern).
You do realize your perspective is hopelessly idealistic: Most would merely blink after getting kicked in the teeth by someone bigger than they. That is why I thanked you. People should hold more mirrors and, using their senses, stand up to their own standards.
Bless you, dear poet of incorporeality. Let’s pray the slitters made his death excruciating.
Anan
Assume
by Trent Walters
Raven-haired from the womb, Anan Muss was a swimmer, circling the same lane eleven months out of twelve for a dozen years. The pool chlorine bleached his hair. After high school, he quit. The hair on his head went back to its natural color while his eyebrows remained a bleached sandy blonde. His classmates asked why he dyed his hair, or had he received gene therapy to look more like Lizard Breath? His brothers thought his eyebrows were turning gray.
Was it Anan’s imagination, or were his eyes now covered in scales? Perhaps the increased number of Lizard Breath spottings made him nervous. What at first seemed simple petty arson was now looking more complicated and sinister.
Anan Muss jogged long distances, slowly. He plodded through quiet, unpopulated industrial districts to soothe his mind. In case thieves happened by, Anan left his wallet at home, giving no one any reason to molest him. One night, after three years of jogging the same route, Anan was arrested. The cops escorted him around town, to an officer who didn’t think Anan was the suspect since the suspect wore different clothes and was of a different species—if not phylum. The friend of the suspect did not recognize Anan (nor did Anan recognize the friend). However, since Anan did not have a wallet on him, ergo, he must be the arch-criminal, Lizard Breath, who exhaled methane gas and set it ablaze with his cigarette lighter. When DNA samples came back negative, the cops let Anan go, with reluctance. As Anan waved goodbye, he found two pits where his ears had been. Where had he last seen his ears, the cops wanted to know.
From vending machines, Anan picked up a newspaper at a café and, like everyone perversely fascinated by the criminal element, bought a cigarette lighter. Idly, he flicked the flint lighting mechanism. It took more dexterity than he had supposed. He spread the newspaper before at one of the tables under the glare of the sun. The misdeeds of Lizard Breath were now ubiquitous as well as notorious. Entire buildings had gone up in flames. Criminal profilers suspected a syndicate. Anan raised his head from the newspaper accounts of Lizard Breath to contemplate why someone would do such a thing. A woman slapped him for scoping her out. He belched and lit his breath on fire.
This Is Not a Love Song
by Trent Walters
“Ours is
a love that
swills the black
milk of twist
galaxies,”
the SF Poet Anan Muss had transom-entangled to his lover. Responding to its fifteen seconds of fame, critics responded: “What lovesick, cornball hack hasn’t thought-twittered something to that effect?”
The difference here being that Anan’s object of affection was none other than the lovely Dionysia, recently loosed from a marriage contract to King Ash--he who decimated planetary kingdoms remotely with a tap of his pinky fingernail-chip. As one of Dionysia’s comrade lovers of the arts, Anan once had the displeasure of meeting King Ash--obesely lounging on a mountain of oversized cushions amidst a cacophony of incense. King Ash sneered at Anan as the power-jaded king sneered at all of Dionysia’s thinly disguised “art-loving” friends to mask their night-emission desires.
Despite rumors to the contrary, Anan Muss never intentionally found a loophole in their marriage contract. In fact, being rather outmoded in sex transactions, he sought ways to patch the contract for Dionysia. Nonetheless, when Dionysia uncovered Ash’s harem secreted into a pit beneath the mountain of cushions, his first target was none other than Anan Muss. One tap of his royal pinky: Slitters zipped across the rolling desert on autobikes, arc-blades slapping their mighty thighs.
Trip-lights warned Anan of the intruders, which gave him time to scramble-translate himself to Jac-sun V, a sparsely populated planet full of jutting buttes, tumbleweeds, and sand--a land where few of the sane would choose to stay. Anan wrote Dionysia to come live with him in the wilds--a world where their swelling love could engorge the empty spaces. After sufficient time to show that she and she alone was in control, Dionysia wrote back, “You’ve got to be shitting,” and chose a sycophant, the intrepid Captain Skylark, who gave her extravagant if impoverishing gifts, but who had the physique of one who had valiantly survived a famine and now lived to eat at USA Steak Buffets.
To this day, Anan translates copies of himself back to the home planet--in the vain hope that she might find her way to love him--only to watch his copy get diced by a slitter’s arc-blade on pirated vid-feed.
Anan refuses to write sad SF love sonnets since truth and justice triumphed in the end. No one likes to spoil a happy climax.