Somewhere Over the Sun

If someone has ever told you to fear the blank white page, they are wrong. The blank white page is actually one of the best things that can happen to a writer. Nothing has gone wrong yet, nothing that doesn’t work, a world of opportunities ahead. It’d be like someone telling you to fear a fuel gauge pointing to the letter F. All you have to do is accelerate. 

By all means, be afraid that you will not get there safely. That you shall be mangled by the journey. That you will lose more than you gain along the way. Fear the things that will come at you, the people that might try to destroy you. Fear how well you are built to resist collisions, whether you can keep momentum when you have slowed down to a near halt far away from your destination. Fear that you will battle through the journey and no one will have cared, or noticed. Or that, no matter how much you have already battled, people insist that you are not there yet.

And once you have moved past the fear of the blank white page, understand that all these other, bigger, realer fears, have the exact same solution. Every problem or fear or obstacle a writer faces can be dealt with simply: by writing. 

Entirely, not fully. That was the word he had been searching for, and finally it had come during a middle-of-the-night piss. He flushed and went back to his room, turning on the computer that he kept by his bed. Entirely, not fully, he kept saying, lest the midnight weariness erase the perfect word choice. He hoped the glow of the screen would not keep him from falling back asleep, but there were more important matters at hand.

This was it: the greatest moment of their lives. Adi and Shay, ages 11 and 13, respectively, had procured a BB gun.

Shay had a friend who had a friend whose parents were okay with toy guns, and by keeping themselves away from candy for a couple of weeks, they had saved enough lunch money and now here it was, black and silver plastic and a thermos full of bright yellow ammunition. They had no hiding place for it yet, but that could wait until tonight, until after it had been properly used.

They both thought about it at the same exact moment, but Shay said it first, and so he would get the credit, once the blame had subsided, “The roof!”

The roof was glorious. Large and flat, open space with a great view of the city, plenty of surfaces to place toy figurines on, other buildings reasonably close by. Guns, even harmless ones, were strictly forbidden at the Alsaid household. Mom had been in the Israeli army, and so all violence was banned from the beginning, even harmless representations of it.

Shay and Adi were fantastic marksmen. Fantastic. The Mossad agents were probably on their way to recruit them. Adi shot a tic-tac from twenty feet away, true story. The BB and the tic-tac both disappeared. That’s Mossad shit right there.

Target practice lasted about 15 minutes before it was no longer exciting. There was no pain inflicted (tiny, non-harming amounts of pain, Ima). So they looked to the building across the street. A beautiful balcony, four stories below them. Tile floors, an enclosed garden, wooden deck chairs that might have been hand-crafted. But no one in them. No fun shooting at leaves, especially with no snails on them. Targets.

They took a lap around the roof, which, by itself was taboo enough to make the afternoon exciting, but they had a BB gun, so exciting enough wasn’t enough.

Ah, the adjacent building.  A story taller, and lots of open windows. Someone’s mother doing dishes on the sixth floor: too risky. A half-full glass resting on a ledge on 7: behind a protective window , barely cracked open. A challenged. Physics would never allow the shot to be successfully pulled off, but neither of them had yet taken a physics cours, so it wasn’t going to keep them from trying. A limited amount of BB’s made them look for something else.

Oh my god, what was this? Right across, on 9, a perfect shot, a kid maybe Adi’s age trying to sneak some freshly baked cookies that were cooling on the counter, tin foil shining bright beneath them. “He’s gonna get hurt anyway,” Shay said, putting the Replica Berretta X-4 Series (no orange tip!) in his younger brother’s hands. He crouched behind the waist-high wall meant to keep people from falling to their deaths and to hide boys from being spotted by enemies.

Adi crouched too, but he placed the gun in both hands on the concrete and steadied his arms, making himself only slightly more visible (in their minds, all that could be seen by the enemy were two sets of eyes and a gun, maybe a finger or two, nothing at all). The cookies looked chocolate chip, melty, and was it really necessary to say delicious?

What else was there to do with a trigger but squeeze it?

Adi wanted to look just long enough to see the reaction. He wasn’t expecting an award for marksmanship from the Mossad, necessarily, just a chance to see the fruits of his labor.

“They might have seen me.”

“They?”

“There may have been a parent in the vicinity.”

Solution: leave the roof, pretend violence had never happened. But they matched a description. Adi may have pulled the trigger, but they had both fired the bullet, and both were severely punished, although years later they wouldn’t be able to recall what the punishment had been. Regardless of Shay’s vehement claims of being an innocent bystander, he got punished too. It was unfair. What else were they supposed to do with a BB gun?

I need an opinion, dear readers. In my upcoming short story collection, The Calvin Sky, I want to include an Author’s Note. I’ve written the following draft and just wanted to get some input. 

 I used to specialize in short stories without endings. All throughout high school and college, I’d get dozens of ideas, tiny morsels of inspiration, usually just a sentence or two long, which I’d pursue only as long as the initial bout of inspiration lasted. Sometimes, I’d manage to get ten or twenty pages of a story that never really went anywhere before I abandoned it, and sometimes I’d get a single sentence that could have led to something of value but was likewise forsaken. I used to toy with the idea of someday releasing these short stories and abandoned pieces of fiction in a collection called Never-Ending Stories.

This is not that collection.

The stories that follow— some might be called short stories, others flash fiction—are products of the same impulse to write down an idea without knowing where it’s going to go. The difference is that, thankfully, I’ve gotten past that inconclusive specialization and I now have the ability (I think) to plan out a story or at least see it through until the end. It’s infinitely less frustrating for me, and, I’m sure, infinitely less frustrating to my would-be readers to have a complete story.

Some of these stories might someday be expanded into longer stories or even novels (as might be the case with The Mood Garden and The Ministry of Lost Hours), one is an excerpt from a novel (Bright and Blue- Chapter 1) and some, as short and silly as they may be, feel satisfyingly finished (Return to Sender). But for now, what I want them to be is an introduction to my work, a peek at my writing voice and the kind of stories that I write.

Enjoy.

So, thoughts? Is it lacking something, is it totally unnecessary? Would you like to hear me talk more about the stories, or just let them speak for themselves?