The Author

  ~

  People who I pass look at me as though I am insane. I lurch to the left and right. I am having trouble breathing and walking straight. I open my eyes to new surroundings but I keep the body going in the same direction. We are heading towards something. It smells like birth. Or death. I can’t shake it but I know that is all that awaits me at my destination. Is it mine?

  I so am eager to get there. I want to stop. Please don’t make me go. I cannot wait. Let us begin to run. What am I running from? It’s all in my head. Oh, God. We’re here.

  Things begin to get muddled and my vision goes in and out but when I finally open my eyes and see clearly I am in my dream. But it is not my dream. It is a cheapened version of my dream. I walk into the room to find that it is just a stage. Is that what I am? Cruelty for entertainment? She gave me so much hurt for what? A class assignment? She had the opportunity to give life and she gave me a cruel one. I wanted nothing more than to make her pay.

  But I played out the dream as I had before. Only this time, a skinny little blonde teenybopper had replaced Darla; some juvenile placeholder in a dress was trying to look all grown up. So, I killed her anyway. She was a sacrifice. I had no quarrel with her. Mine went higher. To the creator. Our mother. The mother of all of us.

  Then I glanced at her off stage in the dark. Also young and afraid, there she stood. I knew that she was the sniveling little whelp that had put me to paper. So I grabbed her by the shirt and kissed her, for what I really wanted to do was rape her in the hopes that she would have some sense of what she‘d done.

  “Thank you, MOM,“ I said bitterly. I was about to crush her head against the wall like my dear bloody grapes when I suddenly realized that she was not it and dropped her. I’d realized it only then when I had seen the terror in her eyes. She may have written the play but the fault goes deeper. She too was just a hapless victim of casual creation. There was still one more layer. But I didn’t know how to peel that.

  So I let them take me, because in the end our mother still held the control. But I got close. She was nervous for at least a moment that she had lost control of the voice. I almost beat you, old gal. Look at the board and you’ll see that I have you right where I want you. It could have gone either way. What do you say to that?

  Checkmate.

  Libby

  After Eugene’s story, everyone just assumed that Libby’s story would come right away. But Libby’s story never really began because her narrator didn’t show up, or at least, that was the best excuse she could come up with. She was just standing around waiting for her story to start, when it didn’t. As you can imagine, she suffered a large amount of ribbing. (She swore only yesterday that if one more person made an “unreliable narrator” crack, she would pummel them.) No one really knew anything about who the narrator was supposed to have been. Someone thought he was supposed to have been one of the boys on Leslie’s hall or maybe Professor Constantine, but Julianne told Libby that, if it was anyone, it was most likely Chuck, an attorney from Wisconsin. Rumor had it that he was a rather dry, omniscient, third person sort of fellow with no real style to speak of and that Libby’s story was truly better off without him.

  Julianne probably could have told it, even though she told the first one, but after the initial embarrassment caused by beginning without a narrator, she refused to associate herself with the whole silly affair. She was getting a rather big head since her roommate had told her that her story was “a brilliant study examining the many levels of storytelling in a complex narrative within a narrative structure.” She was really somewhat annoyed that this whole mess had destroyed the whole “disturbing-intellectual-tragedy” mood she had going on. It’s just as well because she was really starting to get on everybody’s nerves. (She kept using “the stain of experience weighs heavy on my pen” in nearly every sentence of her everyday conversation as if to prove to everyone that it really was consistent with her voice.) Either way, we should count her out as a narrator.

  So Libby found herself in a bit of a pickle. If it was up to her, she would much prefer to just sort of go about her thing and not really worry about her story, which is why she couldn’t help but feel that Chuck would have been just fine as a narrator. To be quite truthful, she hadn’t really been paying attention in the last two stories and her role in this one was really a mystery to her. She’d tried to read the first one at least, but she wasn’t in the first few pages and that bored her, so she never finished it. On top of that, she really didn’t see how this narrator thing was her problem anyway. She felt a little like Alice when she first gets into Wonderland and everyone has all these expectations of her. This rather lofty problem seemed over her head as a bit player. I mean, for heaven’s sake, they’ve already heard the story twice, does it really need to be told again?

  So, there she was, stuck in literary limbo. But the readers were waiting on her. As each pair of eyes scanned across the page on each copy of her story she felt more and more pressured to give them SOMETHING. She didn’t even really know much about herself because there had been no narrator to describe her short blonde hair, pointy (but cute) nose, slender figure, and warm, friendly blue eyes. So Libby, bravely clad in a pink tank top and this “to-die-for” light blue flowered skirt, decided to take her story into her own hands, courageously, though begrudgingly.

  nar-ra-tor, nar-rat-er n. a person who narrates; esp. someone providing connecting explanations or descriptive passages in a theatrical performance

  Libby was a little wary of introducing any new characters since she wasn’t actually sure if she was allowed to. But since she at least knew that interaction with other characters often bred plot, she decided to seek out an existing character in the hopes that, through dialogue, her story would start to come about. So, she walked across the campus towards Professor Constantine’s office, with her eyes down, desperately trying not to meet anyone new until she was quite sure of the rules. This tactic was working splendidly until a frantic wide-eyed boy with just as frantic red hair, wearing blue and purple striped cow-printed pajamas grabbed her shoulder. Libby had never seen him before in her life, but I happen to know that his name is Bill and that he belongs in different story entirely.

  “Resist the narrative!” whispered the penned renegade in a harsh and panicked tone. No sooner did these words leave his mouth then he was promptly written out and replaced with a lovely free-standing information board littered with posters for Playwriting class and a seminar on William Ball. Slightly shaken, but deciding that anything THAT confusing couldn’t have actually happened, Libby continued to Constantine’s office.

  Professor Constantine had really let himself go that day, figuring that since he’d made it through two stories without being described yet, he would without a doubt be safe in this one. Unfortunately for him, he wore an oversized gray sweat suit that looked remarkably silly on his thin artist’s frame and even sillier in the context of his very official looking office. His normally neat Shakespeare-esque goatee was untrimmed. He had his feet up on his desk and he wore sneakers that seemed to have previously been used to stomp huge mounds of manure into small crevices. Yet he smiled and welcomed Libby into the room.

  “Hello, love,” he began as she sat down. “So sorry to hear about your narrator. Though if it makes you fell any better, I’m not supposed to get a story at all! Just my luck, eh? Here I am, saying more words in one long line of dialogue then I’ve done in the last two stories put together and doesn’t it figure that it’s for the one with no narrator.” Libby was not at all sure of how to respond to this and so she began to twiddle her thumbs in the hopes that this was all there really was to her story and that it would be done soon.

  Suddenly all business, Constantine went on to congratulate her on taking Playwriting class and for being a theatre major and all this random academic stuff that made her mind sort of glaze over until the very end when he stood, shook her hand, and patted her on the back, waking her from her blank stare.

 
“Well, good luck to you,” he said, looking a little sad and letting go of her hand slowly. “It’s too bad. You seem like a nice personality. Lead material. No placeholder, I’ll tell you that much. Ah, well. Still, love, it’s a shame.”

  Libby was rather easily confused to begin with. A bit of a ditz with dreams of stardom as deep as she was lousy at acting, she just assumed that her good looks would get anything all that important repeated for her. She seldom paid attention to what was going on around her and took the unordinary a little too in stride. Perhaps if she were a sharper tack, she would have been wary from the beginning that all was not as it should have been.

  Even so, one imagines the run in with Bill would have at least set her off balance. One can imagine all that one wants, but this is Libby we are dealing with. So she took only a moment to pause and wonder at what the professor had meant and then, dismissing it with a toss of her blonde hair, she did a giddy skip out of the building. Whatever she was supposed to be finding had not been there and so, putting on a brave smile, she began to walk back across campus to Leslie’s room. Before she got there, however, she was accosted yet again, this time by