Chapter 5: The Plot Twists

At home, Jacob trotted into the kitchen and lapped loudly at his water bowl until his muzzle was dripping with wet. Sylvia turned on the TV, watched five minutes of fluff on the local news, and flicked it off.

“I’m going to bed,” she announced and headed into the bedroom to change. 

Jacob, still panting from his night’s travels, followed her, hopped onto Colin’s side of the bed, and sprawled across the sheets that had been clean.

Colin stood in the doorway leaning against the doorframe and watching Sylvia disrobe. She took a long flannel nightgown out of the dresser, pulled off her shirt and pants, then turned toward the bed and away from Colin to remove her bra. 

Colin, perhaps overly tired, expected her to turn around, showing her breasts to him, and smile.

She didn’t; instead, she pulled the thick nightgown over her head, and crawled into the bed next to their dog.  She settled into the pillows, into the comforter, and exhaled loudly as Jacob sidled up beside her prone body.

“Some night,” she said.

“So you’re . . .” Colin paused. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing as he tended to.  He didn’t want to project an image of himself to Sylvia that was either too entitled or too needy.  He just wanted her to realize his disappointment. It wasn’t working. He could tell. “Bunnies . . .?” he stammered.

“I know. Thank goodness Jacob didn’t find one. I’m not sure I could manage cleaning such a mess tonight.”

“No,” Colin said, “as in fuck like.”

“Oh yes. I’d forgotten.”

“It’s just . . .”

“I’m sorry, Colin. I’m exhausted.  And this little beasty,” she said as she scratched behind Jacob’s flopping ears, “gave me a raging headache.”

“I understand,” Colin said, even though he wasn’t sure he did.  Still, Colin thought, the conversation was over. There was nothing more to be said, nothing that could be done. 

And within five minutes, both Jacob and Sylvia had fallen into faraway lands of snores.

He could, he supposed, take care of his frustrations himself. 
He could turn to his own fantasias and continue the writing that had begun with what he’d assumed was great promise but may have been, in retrospect, delusion. He could figure out an appropriate price for the battered clarinet he’d kept from much more awkward days as a member in his junior high school’s marching band and then post an ad on Craigslist. Or, he could look for a job.

He decided to write.  He reread the first chapter he’d written and found himself fighting the impulse to dismiss all he’d managed to write as thinly veiled autobiography. Worse, he realized that the inclusion of a selkie, even if only for a paragraph or two, in all likelihood, limited his audience.  How many people could possibly know what the hell a selkie was? And of those who did not, how many would bother looking it up?  Worse, he realized that the pacing was all wrong. Nothing, aside from psychological development of his protagonist had yet happened. This, alas, was turning into a character-driven story. It was turning literary, and Colin had no idea, other than beginning Andrea’s novel, what to do next.    

But there was something about Andrea that he liked, almost adored.  He was curious to see what she would do next, whether or not her sudden entrance into a world where she made her own stories, rather than replaying and reliving those that were handed to her, could sustain itself. He wanted to know whether her nascent efforts would flail into failure as his so often did—as his were doing now.

Maybe, Colin reasoned with himself, tonight was just not the night.  Too much had happened. His mind, like the stomach of a child who’d ridden one too many roller coasters after one too many ice cream floats, felt uncertain if stability could ever exist again. He gave up on the idea of writing, opened another browser window, puttered around MySpace, and then checked his email. 

Nestled between Viagra spam, a “job offer” that probably came from a Nigerian cybercafé, a brief, pleading note from his ever-worried father that was signed with a verse from Revelations, and a reminder from his friend Rick that Colin had promised to feed Rick’s cat while he was on vacation in Tokyo was the first comment on Commercial Novel. Colin took a deep breath, as if to steady himself before opening the message that he couldn’t quite bear to read. He replied to Rick’s email instead:

Rick, he wrote.

It’s on my calendar, man, but don’t forget about the 5 bucks you promised for making sure your cat don’t die.

Colin’s stomach churned as he pressed send. Then, before he could talk himself out of it, he opened the comment message:

hey. this is a pretty cool idea so far its all wrong tho. these people are useless and should just get jobs or something.  i know its hard and your hurtin tho so im donatin like 50 cents but sh*t man you gotta make us feel. like what if that michael guy got shot and was like couldn’t really work or something? then that andrea would have a real reason to lay in bed all day and then id believe it and then id pullin for the girl like rocky. yeah that’s my suggestion michael should get shot.

Colin couldn’t believe it. He reread the message twice. It was, he knew, an awful suggestion that violated what little plot development had already been established. He could see such a twist leading to nothing less than sentimentality of the worst kind—the sort you see in a rejected after-school-special script. It would be virtually impossible, Colin thought, to build any legitimate emotional resonance after Michael—whose character was little more than a skeletal sketch—came up lame.

Colin fought the temptation to punch his computer screen. He could feel tiny hairs on the back of his neck raise like a razorback’s. He snorted and shoved himself away from his desk. He paced the room, brushing his fingers through his hair, mumbling to himself about art, integrity, politics, and the manufactured whims of the masses. He told himself that he was better than this, that all he needed was a little more time. He felt like kicking the television. He felt like punching a hole in his desk. He felt like shattering each and every one of his possessions—all the pointless knickknacks he’d bought before the unfathomable became fathomable. He pictured himself descending into the garage, taking the tin of gasoline meant for mowing his lawn, and splashing the caustic liquid up and down the flowerbeds edged against the house. He pictured the house and everything it held crackling, buckling as support beams popped, sparked and the glowing flames writhed upwards into the rafters and onto the roof. That, he told himself, would be a world he could believe in, a world where violence was beautiful, a world where match led inexorably to flame. The mortgage would ignite as well, leaving him with little, other than his wife, his dog, his car to care for.

But Sylvia was sleeping. And he didn’t want to wake her.

He would do it. He had to. It was a promise, like his vows to Sylvia, like their adoption of Jacob, like their damned mortgage, that he had made. He would do everything that he could to keep the commenter happy, but he would do it on his terms, because—he realized slowly—there was little else in his life that he could still do on his own terms.

Colin sat back down and began to write.   

That night, the selkie swam through Andrea’s dreams, and Andrea’s dreams became those of the selkie. She saw through her eyes, felt currents of chill depth caress, pull, and push her small body down, down into depths illuminated from below by scaled bioluminescent bodies, bubbling fissures of steam and heat.

It was a fitful night’s sleep. Andrea woke certain that she was alone.