There's A Place in Hell For Me And My Laptop


I took a fiction workshop this semester. We wrote a lot of short stories. The final project was to rewrite one of the assignments-- we were to expand the piece into a length of about twelve pages. Not so bad.

To start the assignment I went to the library with my laptop and opened up the folder of stories. I decided to reread them all to figure out which one I wanted to rewrite. As I combed through the files, a weird feeling accreted in my stomach.

Something fishy was going on. A handful of motifs repeated themselves over and over again, consistent no matter what the range of the assignment. It was uncanny. In every file, there they were. Sometimes loud and clear. Sometimes in the quietest whisper of an allusion.

Spotting them became a spooky game. I had simply never noticed. Are these the elements that people my subconscious? If I could remember my dreams, would I find them there too?

From the rubble of first drafts loomed the following tokens:

-Boobs
-References to Moby Dick
-The word "baggie" (as in a miniature bag, not baggy as in the style of pants)
-Puke: verb and noun
-The dissonance between thought and action
-Teenage self-absorption
-The word "zit"
-The phrase "I love you".




click hurr