December 18th, 2023 - The Good Denis
Dear TNY,
Fuck your fuckass story “The Good Denis” with an elephant cock inflated by elephantiasis!
In the first couple of paragraphs, I thought oh so briefly that the language was crisp enough to make the story interesting. But after a thousand words, I checked the bottom of the Word doc I pasted the story into only to find that I had 6800 words left. And I wanted to puke. After 2000 words I began skimming. And then I skipped huge chunks, checking in every so often to make sure nothing interesting was happening. And I found that to be true throughout.
So there we have it. The main character is the most banal turd on the planet. The husband is a non-starter. The mom isn’t worthy of anyone’s care. And the good Denis, I couldn’t give any less fucks about his story or whatever the fuck it’s supposed to mean. This is just meandering bullshit in the mind of a boring fucko and the audience is an afterthought to the “cleverness” that the writer believes they possess. Or, this is just another story in a near perfect record of shit short fiction from the last twenty years of TNY and I wonder who we could blame. Yes, it must be hard to tell, you see? Who, of all the people at the magazine, could possibly be responsible for the selection of short fiction for the last twenty years? If only there was some person, some position at the magazine that was responsible, say…an editor maybe? Like, if maybe a person, who held that position for the last twenty years, if maybe that person had the kind of taste in fiction that ensured that the readership would rather do urethral soundings with a rusty kebab skewer, yes, that’s right, if there was a person that made the reader feel this way, then maybe that person in that position, they should know that. That it’s all been for naught. One single divisive piece in 2017 that garnered the most readership in years, and only because it validated shit behavior by shit folks and the rest was a career filled with snoozers and wasted ink.
If only there was a person or a position in the magazine we could blame. But who’s to say? Could be anyone.
On this end, I’ve been working really hard on the house. And doing some serious introspection about happiness, patience, value, self-worth, love, understanding, slowing the fuck down, and trying to enjoy being alive while it’s happening. I don’t know if it’s working. I’m wrestling with a lot of frustration but also wrestling with being frustrated with why everything is so frustrating to me. What I know to be true is that if it wasn’t “this” it’d be something else. So why am I so quick to condemn “this” thinking that “that” will be without frustration? But that feeling is there. Human nature I guess. But I feel okay. Happy doing the work. Happier when the work is done and new work comes into view. Happiest with a ton of jobs completed and under my belt and watching my special lady enjoy all the changes we are making in her home and life. That’s goddamn gold.
Last night I paused a show m’lady and I were watching because it contained a miscarriage. Really similar to the first miscarriage that I experienced with my ex wife. And as I was describing it, at length, it was like I was talking about someone else’s life. Could not have been my own. Because the pain of that experience, and then the next pregnancy-turned-miscarriage that my ex and I went through, must have been too big to bear. But I guess not too big to bear because she and I are still here, living different lives now, sure, but still breathing on this rock, flying through the cosmos, looking to pick up a handful of happiness wherever we can. It’s just so fucking sad, you know? But there it is, or there I was, rather, at 2100 on a December night in 2023 talking about bringing my ex Cherry 7-Up (complete with a hand-drawn note from our first born on a postit stuck to the side) when she got out of a D & C, an incident that happened a lifetime ago, something like 15 years now, and there I was in the living room of this house in San Diego getting choked up and crying because I loved her so much and wanted to take all her pain away and I just couldn’t, guys, I just couldn’t reach inside her and grab the most delicate parts of her and say, “You aren’t a bad mother because of this and you are still beautiful and lovely as any other day and these things happen and, honey, it's not your fault…it’s not your fault…it’s not your fault,” instead the doctors having literally reached inside her, with robot hands and a garbage disposal/vacuum cleaner, having successfully grabbed and removed the most delicate parts of her, so I feebly hefted a two liter Pepsi product down the hallway while holding my oldest’s tiny little hand, the blue horizontal vein on the bridge of his nose still visible as the day I looked upon his beautiful newborn face at the hospital two years before that, and he and I walked into my ex’s recovery room where she was a little druggy and feigning a smile and I knew she was not okay, her heart was not okay, and truth be told mine was not either, and this little boy we successfully brought forth took the bottle from me, hugging it as that’s the only way he could carry it, and waddled over to her with a big smile on his face, like the goddamn sun, bringing an immeasurable amount of warmth as well, and she reached out to him with both arms, the plastic, pulse-taking clamp still gnawing on her index finger, the cord of it draping across her hospital-blanketed body, and what the fuck do you do, TNY, what the fuck do you do with all that pain in your heart, what does she do with all that pain in her heart, what does she do with the memories of the first miscarriage being initiated by medication into a fucking toilet in our rental in Alaska, her having all those memories inside her head of watching a nonexistent baby house fall right the fuck out of her in the bowl where we shit and flushing it away to parts dark and unknown only to then come downstairs and finish the movie we were watching, neither of us talking much, her drinking a different bottle of Cherry 7-Up but serving the same purpose, what does she do with all these fucking memories of such singular horror, what, I ask you, are any of us supposed to do with memories of such terrible things that happened to us in the dark or in the light, alone or together, these silent films playing on the back of our eyes, coming for us in the night when we can’t sleep or when we stop laughing at a comedian because he’s making jokes about how funny it is to watch someone get hit by a car because their shoes fly off, some of us having seen our own goddamn brother’s shoes fly off from an automobile homicide, or sometimes we are just trying to explain our first miscarriage on a cool night in December, including the baby house concept, and it triggers these deep memories of being in the obstetrics room watching the horror of seeing what you thought was your second baby, who once had spindly limbs and a heartbeat and was moving and shaking his or her way around their own personal hot tub, but this chap or chappette was now a heartbeatless gummybear, as his or her limbs had already begun dissolving, floating in an abyss of black on a tube-type television way up in The Last Frontier, that horror soon to be followed by seeing that same horror, but then watching it grow magnitudes upon magnitudes, on the woman you love’s face…what the fuck are we supposed to do with any of this fucking bullshit?
What the fucking fuck are we supposed to do with this fucking life?
I don’t fucking know.
But it isn’t this story. Of all the things, I know it isn’t that.
Nick
