I’m having triplets!

Let me clarify…

My wife is pregnant with a single human baby, and she’s begun the ninth month. We wave at him on the screen of the ultrasound machine. He waves back at us through the skin of my wife’s abdomen, like a tiny Freddy Krueger.

Now the caveat: my other two “babies” are books. Admittedly, less dramatic.

But the clock is ticking on my free time!

Near the end of last year, I aimed to keep the rhythm of posting a new short story every week. Then to make room for submitting to literary journals, assembling a book of the 2021 stories, and revising my novel, I dialed it down to a story a month.

…and wrote only one.

Listen, the feedback I got from beta readers of the novel had pulled me so deep into that headspace that when I sat down to write new stories, all I could think about was the massive literary tangle on my desk. All my fictional powers—conscious and unconscious—focused on that project.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few months, it’s that in my personal projects I’m a terrible creative multitasker.

The best visual aid I have is from an old Looney Tunes cartoon. Imagine that Cal the Chameleon is me, and each color is a different story I’m writing…

But my hands have not been idle.

The illustrated book of last year’s stories is almost DONE!

Subscribers to my newsletter get the ebook for free, so if you’re not already subscribed, sign up below.

The twenty-nine stories are all very different, but I found a common denominator (and title):

PEOPLE WITH PROBLEMS

I commissioned fourteen illustrations from talented artists I know. The rules were that the image had to be a certain size, and somehow inspired by their chosen story. That’s it.

The resulting art is as wildly diverse as the stories themselves.

Check some out for yourself.

More info soon. Thanks for your support.

This led to the second way in which she was now stuck: Her brilliant idea to use washers, yarn, and thumbtacks to build a 3D model of book fifteen’s outline in her studio apartment. It was a wall-to-wall, criss-crossed web of events, relationships, themes, and symbols, and it had her literally cornered.

The nodes hung in the air like the stars of her fictional galaxy, pulling at each other with visible threads of gravity. She worried if she cut something, the whole thing would come apart.

She had to keep the side romance between the pit mechanic best friend (the large washer hung over the TV) and the butcher of exotic meats (the medium-sized washer under the desk), because that was the only way to trigger the Le Mans banquet horse meat scandal at the climax (hung like wind chimes by the bathroom door), bringing Marguerite’s journey full circle.

But the other major thread blocking her way was the series of flashbacks when Marguerite’s brother Clifford teaches her to cheat at cards, which details her adolescence at the Jespers estate, and leads to the fateful poker game when she loses her prize stallion to an opposing card shark, gets chased by bookie thugs, and escapes in a stolen ’66 Mustang convertible—without which part three of the book can’t happen.

She decided to move the knife fight in part four, when the bookies catch up to Marguerite, from the café in Monaco to the romantic beach scene with the Algerian jockey, so as to open up a spot by the coffee table for her to slide under the scene when Marguerite first meets the pit mechanic, and get to the couch to rest for a moment.

This put the jockey in peril and pulled the slack out of their romance, which had always felt a little forced.

Satisfied, she sipped from the mug of coffee gone cold and saw from a new angle. There was a large open tunnel between Marguerite’s decision to throw the final race in Le Mans and a cluster of thumbtacks in the kitchen cupboard representing Marguerite’s lifelong desire for her parents’ approval.

A thread hung over her head.

She reached up to take it. But then stopped and sighed, watched the thread sway in her breath. If she ever wanted to escape this mess, she’d have to leave one or two loose ends.

My foot was asleep, buzzed and stung like TV static, so I fell into my bookshelf, got the corner of it in my eye. I assumed my right arm was asleep too, which explained why I hadn’t caught myself, so I turned on the light and saw the problem: my right arm was missing. The shoulder was round and smooth except the patch of pit hair sticking out.

By the time I got to the living room, my arm was folding and scratching in the corner like a long, hinged mouse trying to escape.

I watched it, waiting to wake up. The sharp throb in the bony edge of my eye socket was too real to be dreamt.

*

Mother called my arm a blessing. It had stopped growing when I was a baby. She and her friends, who blew hazy smoke and pored over large, beautiful cards in the basement of our house, touched it with icy hands, drew patterns down its flesh with their fingernails, and whispered into its palm cupped over their large creased mouths.

I was suspicious of them, because all their effort made my arm feel weaker.

Then suddenly, overnight, it grew.

My mother kissed it and promised to keep me strong.

I was afraid but relieved. I questioned nothing.

She disappeared after that, and my father refused to speak of her.

*

The bell startled me, and my arm stopped scratching. It turned and used the grip of its fingers to pull across the wood floor.

In the entryway it tapped on the door.

I picked it up by the bicep and pressed it to my shoulder. The arm jerked and punched, hit the fresh bruise on my eye. I dropped it, and it writhed to flip itself palm-down.

Tapping came from the other side of the door. A light, clustered sound like gentle rain.

I ran cold water in the bathroom sink, splashed my face, smeared it on my neck, splashed my shoulder and concentrated on flexing the arm that was no longer there.

I slapped myself very hard, four times.

Finally, convinced I was awake, I went back to the door where my arm waited. I unlocked and opened, and it dragged past the doorjamb, across the porch, and fell into the bushes.

On the doormat lay a small, puffy thing, like a doll’s arm. Its hand lay on its back, flexing its wrist reaching up to me.

I picked it up, feeling its cool flesh wrapped in my large hand. I held its end to my shoulder, and it joined. It stung and tingled all over, its muscles responsive to my will. I held it against me to warm it, and its fingers touched my ribs. The patch of pit hair itched and tickled it.

The water chilled on my face and neck.

The bushes at the side of the house rustled, and I watched a dark shape run across the yard and down the street.

Wherever she was, my mother was dead.

I kept the plan secret, assuming my parents would laugh and say, “That’s ridiculous, you’re not doing that.”

I spent my days thinking about all the swim meets, karate lessons, piano recitals, and soccer games all the other kids would have to go to—wake up early, get dressed up, pack into the minivan with a string cheese and a Capri Sun for breakfast, and rush off to this or that obligation with a bunch of other loudmouth kids.

But me, I’d wake when I wanted. Sit on a rock, whittle a stick, strip bark to weave, and stare through the endless trees between trees between trees.

If I saw a neighbor walking their dog on the trail, I’d slip beneath the ferns and wait until the collar’s jingle faded.

A big tree fell in a storm that winter, and the crater beneath its suspended root ball would make a perfect shelter. I’d use my knife to cut pine boughs and make a bed. Maybe a conical roof of boughs secured around the root ball.

Birds and squirrels were plentiful but difficult to catch. I imagined traps I could make from branches, rocks, and pinecones. I’d strip ivy vines from tree trunks for cordage.

I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to build a fire to cook what I caught. There were some burnt pits, but they were behind the high school, littered with empty bottles and crumpled cigarette packs, and the trees around them were spray-painted with penises, so I assumed fires were probably illegal.

In the absence of meat, I knew spots for huckleberries and blackberries.

There was a muddy clearing far back, almost through to the next neighborhood, where a caravan was parked and taking on moss. Next to it was a chickenwire enclosure with a couple of decaying geese. When I discovered them, one goose’s feathers were still mostly white. There was a pitchfork leaning against the cage, and I used it to stab the dead goose until its head separated from its long neck. A waste of good meat, I thought.

The person who lived in the caravan had been so close to living the dream, but never connected the dots. Imagine, keeping geese in a man-made cage when there were plenty of birds all around them! The blackberry ravine was just down the hill. Surely in the caravan they had tools to do all the jobs a Swiss Army knife could do, and they hadn’t had to waste their energy building and maintaining a shelter.

Despite these concessions and cheats, this person had failed. I pitied them.

*

I didn’t get the Swiss Army knife for my birthday that year.

I mentally prepared myself every spring to receive that multifaceted key to my survivalist dream, but spent every summer without it resigned to my domestic existence.

By the time I got it for my thirteenth birthday, years of rain had filled in the root ball pit. My perfect shelter was ruined.

In one of the places I’d scouted, sitting on a fallen tree, I used my new knife to whittle a stick into a spear. I got it sharp enough to draw a bead of blood from my fingertip.

Cody and Eric held one arm while I zipped up and buttoned—it was hard because of the cup, but I’m glad I wore it, because otherwise the jeans would’ve cut me right in half. I had a pad on my butt for chafing too. And I just sat there. That’s all I had to do, all night. Two hundred bucks.

*

They set up camp below me. Cody kept shouting “Time!” and I’d be like, “Nine-oh-nine and all’s well!”

The campfire smoke kept blowing in my face.

I could see the tops of the trees, like they were just staring at me.

*

I had to pee. But I had the cup on, so I couldn’t really do anything about it besides just let go. They heard the trickling and saw the jeans were wet, so they took a bunch of pictures. Eric told me the pee would dissolve the epoxy, and I believed him.

They had a bottle of Jack, and Cody came up and poured some in my mouth, but then it mostly got in my eyes, totally on purpose. I told him I’d break his nose when they pulled me back up.

He was like, “You could just stay up here.”

I said, “Fucker,” and laughed so he’d think I was less mad.

*

“Time!”

“Two forty-seven and all’s well!”

“It’s pretty late, I think we’ll sleep in tomorrow!”

*

My calf cramped up, and I couldn’t fix it because my legs were just straight. I yelled, and they came up to the cliff and said I was faking to get out of being there all night.

We argued for a while, but they wouldn’t pull me up, and they went back down and I still had this like rock in my calf. I stared at the moon and tried to think about how I’m up in the sky like the moon, and the moon doesn’t have legs that cramp up.

*

The trees watched me the whole time. They were all grouped up to stare at the human stuck to the rock. I kept feeling like one was gonna grab me.

*

Every time I started to drift off I felt like I was falling. And I’d wake up and feel the ground coming fast and the trees spinning, and I’d try to grab the rock behind me, and I felt like I still had to wake up to stop falling.

*

Sunrise was the warmest feeling. Everything was pink and red, and then too bright for me to stare directly at it, so I blocked the sun and looked at everything else.

The trees looked like they’d all turned around to watch the sunrise too.