Glancing up from a small slip of paper, the head librarian introduced Dr. Kathleen Shaughnessy as “Witherspoon Academy’s own answer to Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty, and Joyce Carol Oates,” then led the audience in brief applause and seated himself to the right of her lectern. Kate thanked him and took a small sip of water.
“Tonight, people, I have half a dozen stories to read,” she said, “but with this first one I’m going to depart from my usual format of explaining my A-to-Z goal, because this little story partly attempts to include all of you within its world—and me as well—and I want to see how it hits you. Just give me a few seconds, please, to fill in some blanks so I can ‘customize’ the story to this group.”
Peering over her reading glasses and pointing her index finger above each person’s head, Kate rapidly counted the people before her and then jotted short phrases on the first page of her typescript.
“Ready to roll, my friends. Just so you can keep track of progress, this one, which I call ‘Repossessed,’ is about fifteen hundred words and has three very short chapters which I’ve numbered in reverse order as a kind of countdown.”
Taking another sip of water, she picked up her story and read it aloud:
3
“Yet once more,” says Kathleen Shaughnessy, “I see there are no representatives of Witherspoon’s administration among us. At least no acknowledged ones. Perhaps one of you—perhaps two—perhaps all of you are in some sense their unacknowledged—umm—representatives—and so perhaps I should watch my mouth—as my mother would have advised, way way back in her better days—not that I often heeded her.”
Kathleen Shaughnessy smiles at the twelve students, two librarians, and one lone faculty member who have come to the Witherspoon Academy library to hear her read some of her recent short stories.
“Anyway, thank you all for coming out on this dark and rainy night. Yet once more, courtesy of our fine library staff, we have coffee and assorted flavors of donut holes waiting for us when we get done here. Normally I would start with a short overview of the six or seven stories I plan to read tonight, but this time I’ll just jump in with what editors might call an ‘experimental’ story. This one might be termed a ‘metafiction,’ and, as Will Rogers once said, ‘I never metafiction I didn’t like.’”
The two librarians and the lone faculty member smile politely. Nine of the students stare blankly at Dr. Shaughnessy, but three of them wince.
“I’ve had,” she says, “great trouble naming this story. Normally I don’t have such problems, but after trying out five other titles, I’m reluctantly calling this one ‘Repossessed.’ It has only two very short chapters, which I’ve put in reverse order as a kind of countdown.”
She pauses and swallows three sips of water from her large paper cup, clears her throat, and begins reading:
Repossessed
by Kathleen Shaughnessy
2
Fran Dixon looks up as Pat enters their living room.
“How’s your latest story going?” asks Fran.
“I’ve set it aside and have begun a different one,” replies Pat.
“I suppose that’s okay. I guess that’s a pretty normal thing to do.”
“Of course it is. All sorts of authors have done the same. Just yesterday I happened to read online that Anthony Trollope—your favorite author—did that with some of his novels when he went on long sea voyages to arrange postal treaties or whatever. And Trollope was as normal and sane as writers come.”
“Hmm. And he . . . ? Well, yes, I suppose that he would.”
“And so will I—eventually.”
“So, then—what’s the new story about, hon?”
“It’s sort of an experimental thing. I happened to think of it while I was over at the gym having my workout this morning. Annie, my trainer, says to me, ‘Written any new stories?’ And I reply, ‘Nothing really new. I’m working on one I thought up nearly five years ago—about people being punished for violating traffic laws. You know what a nut case I am about that sort of person. Two of these selfish snots, both talking on their cell phones, nearly ran me down just a few minutes ago while I was walking over here. My story’s titled “Embarrassment,” and it’s about a live TV program of the same name where people who have been caught on film or videotape running stop signs or traffic lights—or speeding—or doing illegal U-turns—or—whatever—they all get bare-ass spankings in front of, say, millions of TV viewers—and not by anyone who’d turn them on. They’re being paddled by little old ladies or big fat clowns or half-toothless biker dudes—or whatever. And the title and the name of the show, of course, is a pun on the authorities making somebody’s ass bare. Embarrassment. Get it?’”
“I remember you telling me about that one,” says Fran Dixon. “I gather you’ve gotten stuck on just how to put your points across to readers?”
“Correct. I was going to lay it aside and try to work some more on my other old crazy driver story—where the scientist guy is testing out his new telepathy machine that lets him read the minds and feelings of other drivers—supposedly invented to help make the roads much safer.”
“I don’t remember that one.”
“Sure you . . . . Well, maybe it’s been too long since I told you about it—or maybe I haven’t told you. The gimmick there—and it’s told from the viewpoint of the scientist, who’s in the hospital, remembering—is that his machine, which is designed to let him know that some other driver is cluelessly speeding to get home and have a B.M. or watch a TV show—or is being aggressive because his wife or his boss gave him a bad time—or whatever—his machine gets jostled by a pothole or something, and, instead of just receiving others’ thoughts and feelings, it starts transmitting his thoughts and feelings out to other drivers—and then fifty other drivers sense him reading their thoughts and emotions and get so blindly pissed off at his snotty old condescending attitude that they all converge—some even backing up—and ram the living crap out of him and his car—and his new machine.”
“Sort of a satire, I take it. Too bad markets like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits have gone off the air.”
“Yeah—sort of a satire. But Annie made me suddenly think I was only trying to do something old, or at least old to me, and I wondered what might be a new thing, and I had no idea—until I was doing some of my ab crunches. That was when a newish idea started to come to me. By the time I’d done four or five more sets on other Nautilus machines, I had a pretty good plan laid out for what I wanted to do with it.”
“Well—good.”
“I happened to be looking in the mirror on the wall in front of me and saw how there was a reflection of me there—and a reflection of the back of me in that ab-crunch machine, coming from the mirror on the wall behind me and Annie. We’ve both seen that kind of thing a hundred times when getting our haircuts, of course—or our hairs cut. Everyone has. You can sort of see five or six semi-clear reflections of your front and back, and you imagine they go on and on for an infinite number of repetitions, but you can’t really see much more—you know?”
“Yeah? And?” says Fran.
“So—and I told this to Annie: ‘I just now had a new idea for a new story—thanks to you poking and prodding me a minute ago. What if a fictional character I’m writing about is a writer who is writing a story about me writing a story about him or her—writing a story about me—writing a story about her or him? I’ve even already got a character named Kate Shaughnessy in four of my other stories, who’s a writer of sorts, and I could reuse her in this one. It can’t be very long, of course, because it would bore the crap out of people if it were stretched too far and got repetitious. Maybe I can combine it with one of my favorite themes—forgetfulness. I’ve written about a dozen stories about people who get ideas late at night or while driving or jogging—and then they forget them. Maybe I’ll have this Kate Shaughnessy character write about me as if I were somebody a bit different—possibly a scientist instead of merely a science teacher—who has an idea for a new way of growing stem cells to cure spinal-cord paralysis—who has this great idea while driving—but I’m in a car wreck.’”
“Science teachers can have ideas, too,” says Fran. “You have them all the time.”
“You’re right—as usual. Anyway, Annie looked very upset when I said that stuff about me being in a car wreck, but I continued. I said, ‘In one version that this writer character considers, I’m ironically killed, but then later, with the character named Pat Dixon writing about her, Kate Shaughnessy thinks up other possibilities: next she decides to write that I’m merely knocked on the head and forget what the new cure was—I just—or the person whom my character Kate Shaughnessy calls Pat Dixon is just, well, vaguely aware that the idea for a cure was there—but has been lost—and then, finally, and here is where the two-hatted character with my name comes in again—as a writer—and has that Kate Shaughnessy writer come up with a third, better idea: the character with my name, who has come up with the new cure, is now paralyzed totally—and yet ironically can still totally remember all the details of the cure—but even more ironically cannot even blink now to try to communicate this cure to anybody.’”
“Hmm. Wouldn’t that sort of muddy the waters of your multiple-reflections story? It sounds to me as if you have, maybe, two stories there.”
“I know—and here’s what I’m going to do: after my character, Kate Shaughnessy, comes up with this ‘better’ idea for the character with my name, I’m going to have her jot it down on a scrap of paper and tuck it away in a box with other story ideas she plans to work on someday—and then forget about it—implying, perhaps, that she never finds it again.”
“That could work—maybe.”
1
Kate Shaughnessy softly says the words “The End” and looks at her fifteen listeners to try to gauge their reactions. Several of them are blandly smiling, as if, perhaps, expecting something further from her odd little story. Others are studying their fingernails—or the ceiling tiles—or the gently blowing burgundy drapes covering the seminar room’s partially open side window. And the rest are slowly shaking their heads and nibbling gently on their upper lips. Kate Shaughnessy considers these reactions very satisfactory. Then she whispers to herself, yet once more, “The End.”
Epilogue
“That could work—maybe,” echoed the head librarian with a broad grin. He began to applaud loudly, and was joined, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by the others.
Smiling, Kate Shaughnessy softly said, “Thank you. You are too kind. I hope that some of these other stories, which are much more traditional types of fiction, will suit some of you better. Different strokes for different blokes, you know.”
And she reached for her water cup with one hand and her second typescript with her other.
