Dec. 2, 2024: "Write me a story about someone who thinks they’ve hit their limit, who feels like their work is for nothing. Show me what happens when they meet someone—human, giantess, whoever—who forces them to see themselves as they truly are."
Britt’s boots were too old for this weather. The leather sides held up well enough, but there was no tread to bite into the new layer of snow. Consequently, his hips were aching with multiple recoveries during multiple near-falls on the way to the cafe. He stamped out his cigarette—maybe the hot ash would give the rubber soles a little traction—and stepped into the warmth and smell of coffee.
The barista on shift didn’t like him. He’d come in drunk one night and tried to practice Chinese with him, and though the barista was in fact from Shanghai, apparently he wanted to put that part of his past behind him. Nowadays, when he was working, Brett tried to manifest an apology with flawless etiquette, ordering a simple drink, and tipping as much as the drink cost. None of this redeemed him, however, and he should probably look for another place.
He rounded the corner from the fancy display area to the meatier, worn-down room where students and writers hung out for hours, justifying their presence with a half-inch of unfinished latte in their cups. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs came in occasionally, as well, blaring their poorly conceived business ideas in loud phone calls, ignoring the glares they earned by this. Brett was pleased to see his usual spot by the radiator was free; he hung up his coat and set up his backpack on the chair across the table from where he’d sit, then quietly plugged in all the power cords and cables to start his work.
He recognized maybe three other people in this long, dim, rectangular room, other regulars who showed up when he did. Kitty-corner from him, however, he seemed to get a hairy eyeball from a heavy Latina in a red pullover. He tugged his lips back in an apologetic expression and redoubled his stealthy tech setup. With the coffee, a notebook, and a mouse on his right, his older-generation laptop taking up most of the table, he was ready to begin.
For he was a writer. He wrote fiction, humor, some serious political essays. He wasn’t working as a writer: he had two parallel jobs, doing stock and inventory for a liquor store and a Sudanese-run convenience store exactly opposite from his house as the coffee shop. No, he sold the occasional article to online magazines as they flared up and died away, one after the other. His humorous stories hadn’t really gotten any attention, and his fiction … well, he just hadn’t found the right market.
That’s why he was here today, instead of his apartment, where his Border Collie always needed to be walked, petted, fed, or just paid attention to. He had four hours, free and clear, to write about anything that came to mind.
Anything at all.
Ready to begin any second.
He pursed his lips and stared at the screen in smoldering anger. Someone at the other end of the room, their phone went off musically, and they scurried like a chastened underling to answer it outside. He opened up Notepad, a low-stakes, low-expectation word processing app. He opened up Calmly Online, a distraction-free writer with a few fun features. He opened up Omm Writer, which he’d stupidly paid a lot for and then never used. Brett wondered if he were a junkie for word processors, because none of them were making any difference in his writing.
He wanted to say he’d been burned out for an even year, but it was just coming up on eight months. His muse had fled, or something, maybe it was a strain of COVID that deadened the creative receptors in your brain. He didn’t know. It was just that one day, one morning, he tried to pick up where he’d left off the night before, and he genuinely had no idea where he’d been going with it. He tried to start fresh, a new story, a prompt gleaned from an inspirational paperback his mom gave him a dozen Christmases ago. They were good prompts, it was a good gift, but in that moment it failed him.
Brett rested his fingertips on the oily home keys. The C had not only worn away, but the raised letter must’ve been made of a different plastic that eroded more intensely, so there was a C-shaped divot on the key. As though a tiny horse had stampeded through, leaving only one deep hoof print on his keyboard.
He sniffed and straightened up. There, was that a story? Could it be? What if it was Spring-Heel Jack, the Jersey Devil, or something like that? A tiny little demon that showed up, challenged the writer, and burned his step into his keyboard. He flexed his fingers and started to type an intro, describing the weather. Wasn’t that one of the cardinal sins of writing fiction, to lead in with weather or someone waking up? He deleted the three words on his screen and sifted his fingers through his hair.
When he went for his coffee, he saw the Latina glaring at him again. The fuck had he done wrong? Was she a friend of the barista, and now he was just persona non grata for a slowly expanding social circle? He shrugged at the woman, and the woman made no sign of registering the gesture or any form of self-consciousness. Sighing, Brett turned his shoulder slightly, scooted in his seat, and tried to refocus on his monitor.
He should write a piece about her, a profile … but why? No one would want that.
It would be an exercise, just something to get his fingers moving, spark his imagination.
No, it would be mean. He knew nothing about her. Right, what was that his Buddhist therapist said once? Something about how everyone’s fighting a battle you can’t see, so the shit she was pulling on him had nothing to do with him. She was just lashing out and he happened to be there.
Well, that didn’t make him feel any better. He started to write about her, then agreed that it was mean and deleted the four words on his screen.
Motion made him look up. The huge red hoodie was up and coming at him. This was unusual: most people avoided each other in this room unless it was an emergency, like the poet whose heavy-handed pencil writing was about to knock her cappuccino off the edge of her table.
The woman stood behind his chair, with the coat on the back and the backpack on the seat. She glared down at him, with one huge boob resting against the tablet pinched in her arm.
Brett stared at her a moment longer, a couple creaking gasps bubbling up from his throat. Finally the muse returned in full force, enabling him to utter, “Yeah?”
“Are you Brett Calloway?”
“Yeah, that’s me. Do I know you from somewhere?” His mind was busily working through his two paying jobs, any customers who might’ve come in, trying to place her face from college several years ago, but he came up blank.
She shook her head. Her pointed nose waggled like the tip of a sword. “No, there’s no reason you should know me. I don’t talk much.”
That technically answered his question, and yet he felt he understood less than before. “I’m sorry, did I do something to irritate you? I apologize for that, I didn’t mean to.”
This sparked something in her. He only had enough time to move his drink, to avoid the slam of her tablet. She knocked his backpack aside without concern, jerked the chair with the coat on it back with a completely inappropriate groan across the floor, then sat herself down. “Yes, you did something to irritate me. Hold on a second.” The woman fished in the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a pair of large-frame spectacles in rose gold. Once these were on her face, her bug-eyed and intense expression melted into a much more relaxed countenance, almost kindly.
“Sorry, I really need these but I don’t like wearing them. They’re ugly, right?” She turned her head this way and that. Her hair fell in straight, thick locks of deep mocha, shifting only slightly on the fabric over her shoulders and breasts. She had large breasts, very large, and Brett was going to have to put some effort into pretending she didn’t.
“I don’t think they’re ugly,” he said, and this was true.
“I don’t like wearing them, but if I don’t, everyone thinks I’m mad at them, but I’m just straining to see clearly.” She laughed at herself. “But yeah, dude, you pissed me off. If I knew you better, I’d say you broke my heart.”
It was amazing how her relaxed expression seemed to change the tone of her voice, too. Now the things she was saying didn’t strike him as antagonistic: she was warm and soft and honest about whatever was going on inside her. “I’m sorry to hear that, but I really don’t recognize you. Can you explain what I did to make you feel like that?”
She gripped the upper edge of his monitor—her nails, a wet-shiny blood-red, were a little long—and jerked it back, making him rear in surprise. “Just as I thought, not a word.” Gently she lowered his laptop back down, smiling at him. “Brett, I’ve been reading your blog for years. I’ve been following your journey, from all the random dreams you used to have, to how you decided to make a contest of collecting thirty rejection letters, to reward yourself with something nice. What did you get yourself?”
“Oh, that! Wow, you remembered …” He turned slightly to the side, thinking. “I forgot all about that. I bet I’m way over thirty by now, though. I dunno, I just kinda stopped caring after a while.”
“That became apparent when you left your story unfinished right in the middle.”
Brett was astonished that someone was paying attention to his ridiculous little blog, just a place where he’d clear his head between submissions. “What story was that?”
“The girl who goes to the graveyard, hoping to meet this guy she once saw there. Of course he doesn’t come back, but you were doing this incredible inventory of her clothing and you started to explain what the guy meant to her, the ideas he gave her, and then you just … stopped.” She tilted her head and sighed. “Brett, I’ve been on the edge of my seat for over two years. Are you ever going to pick that up again?”
He laughed, and he monitored what this laugh felt like. It wasn’t nervous, though it should have been, finally being confronted by a stalker. But she didn’t feel like a stalker at all. She felt like … a fan, but that was stupid. That was stupid! Okay, so she found his rinky-dink little blog and followed it, that didn’t mean anything. “Yeah, I keep thinking I should go back to that, but you know. I’ve had other ideas, and work’s coming up on the holiday season so it keeps me busy …”
The woman sat up straighter, and now her brow did furrow and her fist did pound the table (respectfully quiet, for the other patrons, and nowhere near his coffee). “Come on, Brett! You were having fun writing those stories! They didn’t mean anything in the critical marketplace, but they meant a lot to me and my sister.”
“Why do you and your sister know my blog? Why would anyone? I don’t post it anywhere.”
“It was recommended to me, the platform recommends other accounts. You came up once, and I read your story about the backpackers driving the stolen van through Bangladesh, and I had to read it to my sister.” Her face lit up as she recounted the moment. “We were cracking up! I don’t want to do anything as boring as asking you where you get your ideas from, but you’re amazing! You were amazing, when you wrote.”
He shrugged. “I’d like to know where my ideas came from, too, because I don’t have any anymore.”
“That’s not true, I saw you typing.”
“And did you see anything on the screen? It was just bullshit, anyway.”
“It wasn’t bullshit!” The woman’s cheeks reddened slightly, as though he’d questioned her sexual choices. “You have real talent! You’re probably comparing yourself to Kerouac or Hemingway, but you shouldn’t do that. You were great all by yourself. I’m sorry I never commented on your posts, I didn’t want to intrude.”
“Intrude? It’s a public blog.”
“I just thought it would be weird if one person shows up and never says anything, just keeps liking your posts. It’s your private place, you’re just talking to yourself, but I guess I should have let you know you have fans.”
Brett froze in his seat. “You’re not going to tell me that you posted my shit on social media, are you?”
“Maybe a few times. I love everything you’ve written, but once in a while you’d write something, like the woman who beats herself up to break out of caring about what men think about her, and I had to share that. Other people had to know about it.”
That explained why his stats suddenly spiked at times. He wasn’t sure if it was a keyword search or some errant bot that found him. “Well, I guess I’m glad you liked my work.”
“Not just me, Brett. Lots of us. I’m not going to say we have a fan club, but I know a dozen of us who love your work. If you ever published something, we’d all buy two copies.”
Brett stared at the strange, intense Latina sitting across from him. Something at the top of his throat tightened up, something stung in his sinuses. “That’s really sweet, but that’s never going to happen. I … okay, look, you started this conversation, so I’ll meet you halfway. I don’t have any ideas. I don’t have anything at all. Okay? I used to, I loved writing that shit out, just random shit that no one would ever care about.”
Her hand slipped around the corner of his laptop, reaching for his own, then retracted. “So what changed?”
He stared at where her hand lay. She was actually going to touch him, she was going to reach into his personal sphere and touch his hand, a stranger would do this. “I don’t know. I just kept submitting my work, and people were very polite about it, sometimes they’d offer me advice, but nobody would accept me anymore. I figured I had a brief flare-up of talent and burned out quickly. Nobody was mean about it, it’s not like that, but … I got tired of fighting.” He breathed deeply at these words, surprised they came out. He supposed his coffee was getting cold so he collected his thoughts as he sipped at it.
“It really felt like a fight, too, toward the end. That one with the girl in the graveyard, that was inspired … fuck, stolen from a Shirley Jackson short story. They’re not the same story, but I read about her and I wanted to write about a person like that too. Obviously it was junk, because I just gave up when I saw it wasn’t going anywhere.” The corners of his lips stuck when he breathed. “None of it was going anywhere. I’m not a writer, I’m not even a hack. I’m just some monkey that hits keys in sequence on a keyboard. You ever see that video of the orangutan in Borneo? It watched the humans doing chores, and now it does those chores: washes laundry without soap, hammers at a board, paddles a little boat.”
He scrunched up his face at his company. “But it has no fucking idea why it’s doing any of that. Maybe it thinks that’s what primates do. Maybe it thinks that if it repeats these rituals, something amazing will happen to it. But it has no idea what any of those actions mean, and it repeats them without any understanding. It probably will until it dies.” He leaned back in his seat. “I won’t. I can identify these meaningless actions, and I can find something better to do with my time.”
She smiled warmly at him. “You’re so full of shit. You brought your laptop to your usual cafe because you were going to try writing again. You can’t give it up, and you don’t want to. And you shouldn’t. If there was any way I could make you want to write again, just that stupid thoughtless shit you did in the beginning, all those brilliant and lovely stories you blow off now, if there was any way I could make you do that again, I would.”
It took a great act of will for Brett to prohibit his eyes from drifting down to where her huge, Dairy Queen cherry-dipped red breasts were resting on the cafe table. Even if she was offering herself to him, that would be completely inappropriate. “I appreciate your … fan-ishness. I’m glad you liked my stories, and I’m sorry to learn I’ve let you down. I’ll try to keep that in mind, but I’m just not feeling it anymore. I don’t know why I came down here, it’s just a bad habit. I knew I wasn’t going to do anything useful.”
Now she frowned, but it wasn’t a stormy or fiery frown like before. It looked like she was going to cry. “I’m really sorry to hear that, Brett. I guess there’s no reason you should care about me, I just …” She looked around the cafe, laughing against the oncoming tears. “I guess I made an ass of myself, just walking up to you with a list of demands. If you don’t have anything, that’s how it is. Why should you care about a dozen readers who never said anything? I’ll tell everyone to go back and comment on your stories, though, because you should know how much we appreciate you.” She swallowed hard, looking down. “They probably won’t.”
The mood had shifted and Brett was on his back heel. “I’m sorry … what’s your name? You know I’m Brett.”
“Roza,” she said. Well, that fit.
“I’m sorry, Roza. You seem really upset, and I should be creeped out by all this, but I don’t want to upset you.” Glancing at the spot beside him, he winced and looked down at his shoes. “Fuck me. All right, Roza, if you don’t mind, do you wanna sit over here for a minute?”
Her huge, dark eyes blink-blinked behind her lenses, but after a moment she slid out of the chair across from him and swiveled to perch on the chair beside him. She could see his screen now, and her breast rested against his drinking arm, but he went on anyway. “Look, you give me a topic, and I’ll write you a nice little story, right now.”
She laughed and leaned back. “No, you don’t have to do that for me. I’m sorry, I’m being weird. I’ll go back to my chair, I’m just watching music videos. I looked up and thought I recognized you from your blog profile.” She started to rise.
Surprising them both, his drinking-hand slammed down on her thigh. Her plump skin burned hotly beneath her black denim jeans. “No … just give me a chance, okay? I want to do this. You’re probably my biggest fan”—he couldn’t help stealing a glance at her impressive chest—“and I’d like to do this for you. Okay? Any topic you like. You can watch the magic as it happens.”
Roza side-eyed him for a while, unable to keep the blush from rising in her cheeks. “Okay. Go back to that girl in the graveyard—”
“I’m sorry, I can’t pick up an old story.” He could see his face in her glasses, the profile of sunlight backlit against his head, forming a curvy line in one huge lens. “A brand-new one, just for you.”
Her eyes went huge and her thick hand flew to cover her mouth.
“You just had an idea, didn’t you?” His smile stretched and grew positively lupine as he leaned into her. “Tell me. Now you have to tell me, you have no choice. I’ll call the cops if you try to leave.”
“On what grounds?”
“Intellectual robbery. Conceptual larceny. I’ll make it sound good.”
Her sigh was broken up into silent laughter, and her breast shuddered against his forearm. He couldn’t believe she wasn’t aware of this. “All right, this is the first thing that came to my mind. You can’t laugh, because …” She gestured at the several other patrons draped over chairs or hunched over coffee tables in intense palaver.
Brett nodded and pulled up a timer app, setting 20 minutes, then opened Calmly. “Okay, it’s serious now. You have to tell me.”
Even sitting down, he was nearly a head taller than her, but when she leaned in to whisper, her eyes huge and her glossy lips parting, he felt …
“Write about a beautiful, fat woman who finds a tiny man living in her home.”
Something inside his brain flared into life, like a gas burner that hisses and leaks and suddenly catches. “Where did that—”
“And it has to be from her perspective.”
Her thigh burned hotly against his as his fingers slowly hammered at the keys, starting anywhere and gaining momentum.