A Very Short Story and a Very Hungry Caterpillar

I knew this would happen.

Once I started publishing my film criticism at In Review Online, this space slowly shriveled. It's not dead yet, but I haven't posted anything since October 20th of last year, and while those of you who wanted to follow me over to InRO likely did, I pay $11 a month to keep this site up and feel the compulsion to contribute meaningfully to it.

So I'm retitling it Caterpillar Trashbag (not a rebrand, never a rebrand) and setting an intention to post here more often. That may involve fiction, it may involve essays--I'm not sure yet. Film criticism will likely remain at InRO and on Letterboxd unless there's something I really badly want to write about and feel like this is the best home for it, but expect to hear from me in some capacity at least monthly.

The retitle comes from something I overheard on a film set back in college (a story that will likely find its way into a piece of fiction, just you wait), and I've adapted it to mean something more personal: a small organic creature enveloped in synthetic material. In a media environment saturated with the distorted and the insincere, I write from a place that seeks the real. What shape that writing takes (and what real I'm seeking) certainly changes from day to day, and today it was a short story prompted by Appendix C in George Saunders's A Swim in the Pond in the Rain.

For those who don't know Saunders, he's a short story writer and occasional novelist who wrote a book analyzing the structure of a handful of Russian short stories. It's a great book, and certainly of value to anyone interested in how stories work. I finished it about a year ago, yet I never did the exercises at the end and decided to take a crack at a couple of them today. The prompt in Appendix C is paraphrased as follows:

Set a timer for 45 minutes. Write a 200-word story, but you only get to use 50 words to do it.

In other words, you get 50 free words to tell a story and then those 50 words need to be reused until you make it to the end. I liked the exercise a lot, and will likely try it again: it got my storyteller brain working in a different register than I'm used to, and it's a terrific antidote for writer's block ("a failure of the ego," Mailer once wrote). Below, you'll find the story I wrote for the exercise with some slight revisions for coherence. I took liberties with the functions of words, gerund-ing and participle-ing them as needed, but other than that I stayed true to the premise.

All said, it's strange posting this right as the United States and Israel yet again violently smash the big stick of imperialism over Iran in an attack that's only the latest in a long (long!!) string of brutal war crimes, and I just want to acknowledge that. I'll save further reflections for another time aside from one: when you search the term "war crimes" in Brave (the browser I use) search, none other than Bibi Netanyahu shows his face. Nevertheless, I hope the story adds something to your day.

THE SPIT MAN

The trumpet player blared his horn directly in my face. I spat back at him with relish; I had been waiting for the opportunity. The lights went up in the club; he stopped the show. "What the fuck, man?" he asked. "You've been blowing that horn the wrong way ever since you started playing here," I retorted. The trumpet player spat back at my face. I started spitting, he started spitting. "Fuck!" Spitting. "Fuck!" Spitting. The club relished the wrongdoings, blowing spit themselves. Spitting here, spitting there. Spitting this way and that. The show became the spitting.

"Stop!" The Trumpet player blared. The opportunity for spitting stopped. "You're spitting the wrong way." The light went up in my face. "The spitting club!" I retorted. "Fuck, man," the club started. The club spat directly at him. The club spat directly at me. The trumpet player played his horn; the club spit. The opportunity to spit lighted the club. I, the Spit Man, stopped spitting. I had been waiting for the club to spit. "I spit the wrong way!" I retorted. The trumpet player stopped. "You spit the wrong way?" he asked. "Fuck," I retorted. I started spitting.