I Say “No” So You Don’t Have To
Believe it or not, not every word I write is literary gold. Shocking, I know! Sometimes I start a story and it goes nowhere. Sometimes the story needs to cut some dead weight before it can move ahead. Sometimes it is obvious—painfully obvious—why I rejected these passages. Other times the lines seem to have some potential and, in fact, may one day become stories—but today is not that day.
Taking a slightly different approach to my chosen topic, I thought I would share some of these rejected fragments. Take a look and judge them for yourself. See any potential or are they better left for dead?
1. Jimmy and me lived in a one bedroom walk-up on the questionable side of town. Except for the bugs, the heat, the smell, the thin walls, and the over-abundant sexual acrobatics of our next door neighbor, it was a real nice place to live. And at least Darlene, the neighbor, had the good manners to act embarrassed when she’d see us in the hallway and sometimes she even baked cookies. I didn’t mind the sexcapades, really. It gave me and Jimmy something to aspire to. And, besides, whenever the trains rolled by I couldn’t barely hear her.
2. The yellow dog comes at me and carries in its mouth what appears to be a human hand. I stand very still and hope the dog will pass me by, but it stops and stares at me. I decide that this is a male dog because of his unapologetic manner, though I’m not sure why I care. He drops the object at my feet and I am relieved to see that it is, in fact, a suntanned human hand. Relieved not because it is human, but because everyone I know is pale. I step over the hand and leave it and the dog sitting on the sidewalk. I am fifteen minutes late for work. At work, I remember that Cathleen had been to the beach lately but find her at the copier, both hands in tact. I am glad that she is not handless as I would be expected to pick up any of her copying or phoning duties that her handlessness might prevent. It was silly of me to worry about the hand, I decide. It is just a random hand—someone else’s problem. The hand is still lying on the sidewalk when I leave for home. I watch crowds of people step over it without noticing. One man kicks the hand and it skitters across the ground like a spider. The man doesn’t look back. I walk to where the hand lies curled among the city trash and wait. I turn my shoulders to the passing crowd and point my foot toward the hand. Does anyone see it, I wonder. Surely, someone will see it and pick it up. It is, after all, a human hand. When I glance down, the thumb seems to be pointing up and I take that as a sign to stop worrying and go home.
3. Henry had been taking the I-25 to work for nearly six years, ever since the slithering beast had first been set loose on the country side. The highway snaked through the county, swallowing entire neighborhoods, parks and most of the native swampland, promising the fastest east-west route since people first got the notion to head in those directions. The day it opened, local residents sailed across town praising the gods of civil engineering as a half-hour trip took fifteen minutes, an hour trip took forty-five. That day, the I-25 was the best thing to happen to anyone, anywhere, ever. And that was the very last day anyone, anywhere felt that way, ever.
4. Cosmo was a boxer. People called him a boxer because there isn’t a word for someone who stands in a boxing ring and wears gloves but drops so quick it looks like a conditioned response to the bell. He was more like one of those fainting goats that go stiff and fall over at the fist sign of danger. There isn’t a word for a person like that either, so everyone just went with boxer because at least he wore the right kind of shorts.
5. Walter, the world’s fattest man, went on a diet. He lost fifty pounds in the first week, three hundred in the first month. His friends asked him how he did it. “I finally learned to let go,” he said. When Walter was at last just an ordinary man, he tried to give away his clothes but no one fit them. All the charities turned him away. So did consignment stores. No one wanted his clothes. “Not even the fat farm,” he told Ida, his wife. “They said taking them would send the wrong message.” “Shame,” she said. “Guess we’ll have to keep them.” “No. I’ll just throw them away.”