Mean Green Fiction Machine
written by: Bruce Snyder
“Faye, I need a word! Goddamit Faye, where the hell are you when I need you?! Dammit!”
Simeon is hollering again. I’m used to him coming unglued, but this morning he sounded worse than usual, so I came up from the laundry to see what was going on. He’s sitting at his computer, banging his fist on the desk, throwing books and papers all over the place. I grabbed the thesaurus from under the sofa and yelled at him,
“Simeon, calm down – what do you want?” Loose pages fluttered to the floor.
“Gnash, gnash…as in gnash your teeth and don’t tell me grit or clench, get me a word with some guts! Jesus, I’m so close!” I worry when he gets so upset.
“Okay, here are some, under anger, like mad, rage, hate …” Simeon glares at me, grabs the thesaurus, and tosses it at the China cabinet. “…rant, bluster…, ” I recited from memory.
He turned back to the computer and hit himself in the head so hard his glasses flew off. “Brux’d! The narrator is a dentist, bruxism, that’s it – finished!” He jabbed the ‘save’ key and hit ‘print’ on the pull-down menu. He’s going to break the keys on that thing.
“My third cycle of short stories using the metaphor of chewing and ingesting to represent the acid-charged cauldron of our consumerist culture and excretion as the obvious concomitant. And by the way, my dear closet inebriate, avoid open flames, with that breath you’ll incinerate yourself.”
“Go ahead, Simeon, keep provoking me, and you can do your own laundry. Why do you have to get so meshugah with all this?”
He muttered and cursed but went back to his desk. I was prepared for the worst, it was Friday night, and his writing group meets here, so I had to pick up some deli and cheap beer, they’ll drink anything. Rudy, who runs the meetings, showed up last month with a quart of EverClear. I made him keep it outside. I don’t need a house fire.
***
Simeon’s writing career is driving me nuts. He took early retirement three years ago from the post office in Worcester, made me quit my job at Bank of Boston, and bought a condo in Ft. Lauderdale. At least we both have family down here. Then, of course, he had nothing to do until he got this idea that he’s a writer. I mean, he’s written stuff for years, but now it’s an obsession. Fifteen hundred for a computer, I told him he was crazy, but the man never listens. Play golf like your brother Herman, I told him. But no – forget about it, he’s an artist, Herman is common. I sipped a Screwdriver to steady my nerves and was putting together a shopping list when I heard another scream.
“Damn, damn, damn, Christ, burn in Hell! E-mails contrived of poison, those venomous bastards!” Simeon slammed down the laptop cover and hopped around the living room like a leprechaun with a hotfoot. “Those swine, those dickless, gutless, misbegotten, leprous cretins! A pox on them, on all their children and to three generations, those syphilitic …” He was going to throw a paperweight at the TV, so I took it away from him. “Rejections, rejected, done, finished, not even a fucking personal note. And that agent, rats should bore through her ears and chew on her reptile brain!” I ran to the cabinet, poured a tumbler of gin, and shoved it at him after having a nip myself. Simeon grabbed it and downed it in a swallow, which left him coughing and sputtering and a bit quieter.
“Anna Taylor didn’t like what you sent her?” She’s the agent he’s been emailing at least twice a day.
He sank into a chair. “My stories, no one wants them, no one will read them. They’re worthless. I’m inconsequential, a joke.” He sat huddled in his chair, gold chain crumpled on his skinny chest, dry, wiry hair sticking up at five angles, a little mustache that really just draws attention to his nose, which looks like a chunky strawberry. I put the gin bottle down in front of him and went for some ice.
“Simeon, I’ve got to get the groceries.” He chewed his lip and didn’t say a thing. “Simeon, are you going to be all right? I think you should start taking your medicine again.”
“Oh, of course, my dearest darling, I’m marvelous, things couldn’t be better, magnificent in fact, and I’m not actively suicidal, not an imminent danger to myself or others, so I resent your innuendos, your conniving intimations that I should submit to that pompous psychiatric quack and the brain-deadening poison he peddles!” By this time, he was standing up, waving his arms.
“Simeon Green, you are entirely too excited, and if you don’t take your pills right now, I won’t be back.” I threw them at him. He snarled at me but drank some down with the gin. “That’s better, now you should take them every day and try not to get so excited.” He kept grumbling, but I had to go shopping.
***
The writing group began trailing in around seven. Simeon always wants me to sit in – he says he feels more secure if I’m there, so ok. By now, I know them all. Louis, diabetic and depressed looking, took his usual chair. He has his own sugar-free snacks. The rest of them scrummed up to the appetizers like piglets to teats. Simeon had on his black t-shirt and the baggy shorts he got at Albertson’s. That and a three-day stubble are his creative look.
Everybody was gabbing, but finally they settled down to take turns reading their poems and whatnot and talking about it. I was checking my messages and emails until Simeon started reading his story. It’s called Fantasies of Retention about a traveling salesman’s panic-fueled nightmares of unrelenting constipation. When Simeon finished, Lillian said, as she always does, that she really liked it and thought it was very good. But she likes everything, so it doesn’t matter. Rudy weighed in, “This is hasenpfeffer, sly and devious! Hateful frill and sham, dreams in stories, feh! An easy out.” Then, trying to be conciliatory, he added that the character’s manual dislodgement of the coprolith was engaging.
LeeAnn crooned understandingly that dreams, even if well-conceived, shouldn’t try to do the work of the story, and believe me, that story is a piece of work. It made me gag when Simeon first read it to me, and he reads me his stuff every time he changes a sentence, calls it a new draft, and I have to hear the damn thing again from start to finish.
Simeon tried explaining that the dreams allowed him more metaphorical license, and besides, Sam Shepard did it in one of his plays, and Cliff chortled that Simeon was no Sam Shepard, at which Felicia quietly suggested that Simeon might do better with poetry as his vehicle if he desired the ultimate in metaphoric freedom. Simeon’s voice clotted and curdled. Then Nathan said Simeon’s story showed real promise, and he’d like to hear it again after extensive revision. Simeon leaped out of his chair and threw himself at Nathan’s throat with a howl, but Alex tripped him and held him down until he was quiet. This happens every time they critique one of his stories, so no one was surprised, and they finished everyone’s reading and polished off the rest of the cold cuts before leaving.
I had a Tom Collins and fell asleep on the couch watching Kimmel.
***
Simeon was quiet the next few days, then Wednesday night, his friend Kepler came over to mooch beer and cigarettes. Kepler, at seventy-two, is a greeter at Sam’s Club, but you’d think he was the mayor or something. Tell him your kid got a good job, his is now a vice-president. Your dog is trained; he bred his for show. And he’s always coming on to me like he’d really know what to do with it if he got some. But Simeon likes him, and they sat on the balcony drinking and smoking. Simeon complained about being ignored by the literary world. Kepler, of course, said he had an offer from PBS for a photo guide on home brewing. None of Kepler’s big deals ever come through, but Simeon always falls for it. Kepler says, “You gotta write what the public wants. My nephew Bruce got a six-figure advance from Random House. Wrote a sizzler about a satanic sex maniac who murders pit bulls and their owners. And get this, the killer is tracked down because he drank dog blood and got Distemper. Everybody wants it.”
I listened for a while as I did the dishes, then I went into the bedroom with a nightcap and watched Fallon.
***
Seven, the next morning, the clatter of the exercycle and Simeon’s ragged panting woke me up, so I made his yogurt and carrot juice shake with a banana and soy protein all blended together, very nutritious, and brought it out to him.
He jumped off the bike and began his stretching routine, talking to me in between gasps while pulling viciously on his foot. He had this big smile and kept saying, “I got it, I figured it out, I know where they live, Faye.” All around the porch, there were stacks of magazines and boxes of books.
“Simeon, please, I have to do the kitchen.”
“The hell with the kitchen, you obsessive kraut, don’t you realize what I’ve discovered?”
“Simeon…”
“For one minute, will you open up that rum-soaked dustbin you call a mind and pay attention to me? I have discovered a conspiracy.”
“Simeon Green, I will not stand here and be insulted. If you can’t be civil…”
He interrupted me, “Please, I apologize. I meant no disrespect for the Saxons, Magyars, and Slavs in your polyglot ancestry.”
He’s got a great vocabulary from doing the Times crosswords every night for forty years. I begged him to at least let me do the dishes while he talked to me. He didn’t pause. He grabbed my hand and insisted I sit down and listen.
“Faye, consider the dozens of short stories I’ve created, the writing courses I’ve taken; the high praise I’ve gotten from everyone who’s seen my writing, and the startling fact that none of my work, not a paragraph, not a sentence, not a semicolon, has appeared in print. I have been rejected dozens of times by anencephalic ciphers who send me form letters with checklists cataloging my failures. Worse yet are the teasers telling me they found my work interesting and try again, and I have, but I won’t take it anymore! I’ve analyzed the entire English language fiction output for the past five years. That’s nearly 300,000 short stories and over 30,000,000 novels. The stories are all the same Faye: love, sex, premature death, belated realizations, agonizing regret, murder, theft and extortion, wounds and trauma, stillbirths, blackmail, wizards and goblins, time travel, coming of age, pregnancies out of wedlock, inspiration, heroism, cowardice, and so on, over and over again. I am convinced that all of it is the product of a single mind or group of minds, preselected by a publishing cabal, no outsiders need apply.” Simeon paced around the porch, waving books in my face and then tossing them down.
“You are getting too upset, Simeon; you’re going to have a stroke. I think you should call Dr. Pond or let me call him.”
“Oh, Judas! Why do I tolerate this disloyalty!?!”
He went on like this, getting very worked up, so I put my foot down, “Simeon, stop this right now, or I’m leaving, and you can do your own cooking.” I told him he was sounding crazy, talking about some conspiracy to not publish what he was writing. “Besides,” I said, “you worry too much about this whole thing. We’re secure, we have our health, we’re living in Florida. Your writing, well, it should be like a hobby.”
He gave me this look. “Oh, fine, a hobby. Just a hobby. Of course, how silly, how ridiculous of me. Dear God, sweet Jesus woman, do you really think I slave over this craft, pruning backstory, trolling for point of entry, clinging to the focal character, immolating point of view violations, entombing clichés, compacting the prose, launching safaris after the ultimate enigma of the human condition just for a hobby? Fifty rewrites of an opening sentence, do you think that’s my entertainment? Let me tell you something, you mollusk, there is in Ireland a bench by the Grand Canal of Dublin, and on that bench is the cast bronze statue of a dead poet, lingering by the current, his name preserved for generations. That is what I want, to be remembered, to be missed!”
“Okay, look, if you want my opinion,” he turned toward the window, pouting, “what was that poet’s name? C’mon, answer me. You won’t because you can’t, you forgot, and big deal nobody else ever heard of the guy and he’s dead, so he don’t know, and if you ask me they should’ve built a statue of his wife. He must have been a bitch to live with!”
He turned around, looking discouraged. “Faye, listen to me, this is vital, it goes far beyond my own petty concerns. I believe that a conspiracy has taken control of fiction writing and that means that the real talent, our storytellers and mythmakers, are being silenced and we need those stories because every people, every tribe and clan, every shtetl and village and pueblo needs to have their stories told or they die!! I am going to save our culture and discover this conspiracy. I will bring the light of truth to the dank chambers of deceit and remove the gag from our mouths!”
I told him to put a sock in it. That night I tried Colbert.
***
Simeon insisted that he could uncover this fictional conspiracy by penetrating the websites of certain publishing giants. I told him he’d wind up going to jail, but the man would not let it rest, so finally I called my grand-nephew, Jerome — he’s Wanda’s youngest –who knows computers. He went to court for hacking and electronic trespass when he was fifteen. I asked him to help his crazy uncle Simeon a little bit. I thought that if we could just get through this and show Simeon that it was all his imagination, then he would agree to go see Dr. Pond. Jerome said fine and to meet him at the library.
***
“My God, look at him, look at those clothes. Why doesn’t he just moon everybody?”
“Simeon, that’s the way the kids dress these days, for heaven’s sake, be nice.”
“I don’t see why we have to meet here; this library looks like a Greyhound station.”
I waved at Jerome, and he slowly got up, he’s a big boy, all the chairs are too small for him, and I gave him a hug. It’s like putting your arms around a huge oak barrel. He towered over Simeon, who was muttering about how we should have met at the house and used his computer and so forth. Jerome sighed, “Uncle Simeon, if you hack in from home, they’ll nail your IP address and have your butt before you log off. I’m hungry.”
He led us over to a nearby White Castle and got a half dozen sliders. We sat down, and Simeon started telling Jerome that he was trying to use the internet to find an old friend. Jerome gave him a look and said almost sadly, “Uncle Simeon, tell me the truth because a screwup will be juvie probation for me, but you’ll do geezer time, two to five swabbing toilets or raking roadkill off A1A.” Wanda’s boy and does he have a mouth.
Simeon rubbed his head and began whispering urgently about getting proof of a conspiracy and how he had to get into the archives of Random House. Jerome finished his snack, told me he was sorry, but his mother had said Uncle Simeon was really nuts, and she was right, and he didn’t want to get involved because they’d both get busted. Then he left.
Well, that was that, or so I thought. We went home, and Simeon was very mopey. That night I nodded off with Seth Meyers and a little brandy, but at three in the morning the lights went on, and there’s Simeon, naked except for his socks, babbling nonstop, sweat pouring down his face, a letter-opener in his hand.
“I broke in Faye, I saw it! I got up to their offices, and that bitch of an agent tried to stop me! I stabbed her, but nothing happened, I mean, it was like nothing, she just kept saying ‘thank you for your interest in Harper Collins’ over and over. I shoved her, or it, and she fell over backwards in her chair, but she didn’t bleed. Faye, she lay there waving her arms and legs like sort of a crab on its back, oh, I was so scared! I stepped around the desk, and there was a door. I went in.”
“Simeon, put that down, you frighten me.” He paced back and forth, shaking, staring, trembling.
“In this little room, I saw a big green control panel all lit up with labels like plot, characters, chapters, audience, romance, adventure, and on and on. There was a man there, Faye, who had a list, and he kept punching in numbers and pulling this huge black lever, and each time he pulled it, a new book slid down a chute and dumped out on the floor. I picked them up, Faye, one of them had a banner that said New York Times Best Seller. Another said Edgar Award for 2027! I asked the man what he was doing, and he turned around and laughed at me. I think he was James Patterson, Faye!! A machine, a fiction machine! I asked him how they could get away with it; he said all the stories were pretty much the same, nobody would notice. I ran for the door, but I couldn’t get out. The guy laughed louder and louder until I fainted, and I came to here.”
“Simeon, you had a bad dream, stop it, wake up.” I got up and reached for my phone, but he grabbed my arm.
“A dream?”
He looked really confused, and I was a little scared, but then it was like he saw me, his eyes began to focus, he dropped the letter-opener, and sat down on the floor. I put my arm around him and told him he’s been taking this too seriously. “I’m worried about you,” I said. He let me call Dr. Pond, finally.
***
That was a few weeks ago, Simeon’s taking his pills now, and he looks much better. Dr. Pond only lets him watch PBS. He hasn’t written a thing, and on Wednesdays, he’s out with Herman trying some golf. I got him a camera kit, maybe that would be a good hobby for him. I told him I was very proud of his writing, and I’d send some of it to the family with our holiday letter. God, I hope that keeps him satisfied, I need a little peace and quiet around here.
The End
- Mean Green Fiction Machine - February 22, 2026
- Grandma Fisher - October 16, 2024
- Spotlight On Writers – Bruce Snyder - February 17, 2024
