Parse This!
/The story of a D+ Writer
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A long lifetime of stringing paragraphs together, justified ones even, and not one character—in his case represented as a fictionalized person, letter, or punctuation mark—in his entire slush pile was deemed a literary masterpiece by anybody but himself. One late evening, a thunderstorm striking his imagination, the old and frail failed horror story writer sat stiffly at his attic office computer, at long last ready to write the grisly tale that would even surpass his idol’s best grisly tale, at least in his humble opinion.
“Finally! All my toil and trouble will pay off!” he rasped and wheezed from a lifelong Pall Mall habit. “this baby will be on the New York Times’ bestseller list for a long, long time, at least in my humble opinion! Ha, ha, ha! All those book agents who rejected my other thousands of submitted queries over the decades will be remorseful they didn’t sign me, especially when they gush about the new genre I’ve created I’m calling, autobiographical slasher flash fiction!”
He took as deep a breath as he could muster, coughed up some phlegm, and typed out this story, casting himself as the protagonist:
One dark and stormy night when the sky was as dark as a dark and stormy night, a highly successful horror story writer who wrote scarier stuff than even Stephen King, at least in his humble opinion, was inspired.
Thurston Theodore Wicket was as busy as a bee in the attic office of his two-story house, painted as white as a cloud, now as dark as a dark and stormy night, only as white as a cloud again when the lightning flashed. He was biting at the bit to peck out the best short story ever, at least in his humble opinion. His eyes, blurry with glaucoma, were pasted to the screen, his hands, rusty pliers stiff with arthritis, clawed the keyboard. He took a deep shallow breath, heaved his lungs out, and typed out this story, casting himself as the imagined victim:
The creator of the revolutionary literary genre taking book clubs by storm called autobiographical slasher flash fiction sat at his computer in his attic office one dark and stormy night crafting another masterpiece, when a sudden disturbance filled the air. His eyes flew from the screen to the window. It didn’t exactly sound like thunder cracking like a whip, it was more of a distant creaking sound, like the front door being slowly opened and then being gently shut, but then again his ears were as deaf as doorknobs so it could have been anything.
Thurston’s peepers again were drawn to the screen like flies to honey and crafted that scene into his masterpiece-becoming WIP until the house, quiet as a mouse, creaked again, sounding almost as if someone was tip-toeing up the four flights of old wooden stairs that were as rickety as his legs that had less muscle on their bones than an Ethiopian chicken. The intruder was sneaking his way up to his attic office, he thought, then developed the idea, his peepers again drawn to the screen like more flies to stickier honey.
He wrote two perfectly-worded justified paragraphs inspired by this imagined scene of a possible break—in of his two-story house; of someone sneaking up the stairs to his attic office, but then he was interrupted again, this time by what sounded like a corpuscul of old bones rattling up to the attic office door–and who was now rattling the old knob that once was as shiny as a brass band.
“Awesome! Now the skeleton that I just wrote about has come knocking. I was just thinking of adding this kind of scary situation to the storyline, after all I am a pretty darn good horror story writer, at least in my humble opinion!”
His jaw dropped on the plank floor that was as dusty as a cattle stampede when the attic office door flew open! The blood in his veins ran cold! He was shocked to his very core! Standing underneath the threshold was not the skeleton he had created as a scary literary fragment of his imagination, but his old high school English teacher holding a meat cleaver with a blade as sharp as steel.
“Why Miss Higgins, what are you doing here? You look—“
“Shut the hell up, you grammatical-challenged idiot who I gave a benevolent D+ to for four long years!” she belted out loud and strong because she didn’t smoke Pall Malls all her life. “How in the disgrace of Stephen King could you murder our language, our syntax, our imaginations with your really horribly written horror stories?” she fumed, swirling the meat clearer around in loose figure-eights. “Why in the hell, a place as hot as a barbecue briquette, have you been sending me your turgid drivel all these years? Why????”
“You told the class to keep in touch, so I took it literally since we were literally in a literary class,” he justified. “I figured you’d be interested in following my writing career through life. You know, be one of those proud mentors who could crow like a blackbird one day: ‘yep, I knew Mr. Wicket way back when. He was my prize student for four short years!’”
“That’s why I’m here, paraphrasing Sandburg, you word butcher to the world! Enough is enough! Knock it off, already—you graduated the class of 1968!”
She snarled as much as she could with her teeth out, growing as agitated as a washing machine on the wash cycle. “All those decades of going to the mailbox first thing in the morning, then later, hearing the ping of my email notification first thing in the morning hoping for a post from a friend or something important, but no, it was always just one of your, what you would call, at least in your humble opinion, the short story masterpiece that you sent overnight. Sometimes two or three at a time if you were so inspired. Your confusing jumping-heads POVs, tell-don’t-show descriptions, structures built on a house of cards, plots six-feet under, run-on minefields strewn with cliches, senseless similes, characterless characters—oh! my! gawd!”
The wannabe author wore a disappointed hound dog face at her critique. And a worried face, too, when his eyes flew back to the meat cleaver. He quivered like a mechanical paint shaker, now getting "Misery" uncomfortable.
“At first your excremental scribblings I suffered through perused at the breakfast table were just annoying, then they became so poorly composed that they ruined my appetite, and thus my breakfast; then they started to stick in my head the whole day like indecipherable earworms. I became depressed, unhinged, ruing why I ever decided to become a high school English teacher in the first place. The one you sent this morning with the subject line: NEW GENRE—autobiographical slasher flash fiction! drove me to the breaking point. Every teacher has one and I’ve finally reached mine.”
She approached him, crazy as a loon.
The End. Enjoy!
In 2021, noted true-crime author Susan Breckenridge published her seventh book, "Parse This - The Butchery of a Word Butcher," about a 101-year old former high school English teacher named Elise Higgins who wandered from the nursing home she escaped from one dark and stormy night and slaughtered one of her former students with a meat cleaver as he was writing another masterpiece, at least in his humble opinion, in his attic office.
The victim, a 78-year old failed horror story writer who wrote horror stories even better than his idol Stephen King, at least in his humble opinion, a decrepit physical wreck named Thurston Theodore Wicket grew helplessly winded as he fought off the non-smoker, and lost the battle when old Mrs. Higgins tied him to the chair, then hacked off each one of the hacks ten fingers, she later told police after turning herself in, “so he could never denigrate another sentence ever again.” She then finished him with several blows of the meat cleaver to his D+ brain. Then for good measure she maliciously chopped up his computer keyboard, sending random letters flying everywhere. The perpetrator muttered as she was led away in cuffs, “every teacher has a breaking point and I’ve finally reached mine.”
The crime was so sensational, so odd, that "Parse This - The Butchery of a Word Butcher" was on the New York Times’ bestseller list for a long, long time. Thurston Theodore Wicket's dream of becoming a famous author at long last came true . . . in a figurative kind of way.
By CraigE
From: United States