The house was red, blood red. Crimson oozed from the brick, the shutters, the door. Because it was permanently late autumn, even the very trees were very red, the leaves dripping with the blood of their own death.
"This first paragraph is horrible. It is not only preposterous, but unimaginable, leaving the reader lost. The metaphor of the leaves is nonsensical. What is the meaning of 'it was permanently late autumn?' Permanently summer or permanently winter would have meaning, but not 'permanently autumn.' Most of all, what is the point of this first paragraph? I really should not even bother to continue reading."
Bart walked along the deserted gravel road. He was a short person, and scrawny, too. He had deep set eyes with a narrow focus, topped by bushy eyebrows that developed eyebrow dandruff when the weather turned from autumn to winter. His dream was to be a famous writer. By coincidence, Bart looked remarkably like the author of this story who was also searching for the Red House.
"As impossible as it seems, the second paragraph is worse than the first. The description is of junior high school quality, lacking in emotional depth. The biggest question among the hundreds is, 'Why do we learn the main character looks like Mr. Johnson?' This seems to be a self-conscious story, and the only type of fiction worse than self-conscious fiction is poorly written self-conscious fiction. At this point, there seems to be no hope for this story."
Bart wasn't sure if he was capable of facing the Fat Man. He had tried before and failed. The Fat Man forced him to swear never to write again. What would he do if he failed this time? He could go back to South America. He knew he could not handle that again.
He had spent three years of his life in a South American prison. His father had worked for the CIA in Chile, helping to bring Pinochet to power. The new government had rewarded them, executing a family just so Bart's family could have a mansion, complete with a red and a black Ferrari for his father, servants to do his mother's bidding, and a specially constructed go-cart track for him. Less than three months later, the new government broke relations with Washington and threw the Americans in jail as capitalist traitors.
That was the first time he had been separated from his parents. It was the last time he saw them. His father was executed as a spy. His mother was never seen again.
Two guards took pity on him and watched over him. They gave him bits of their own meager rations and occasionally smuggled in bits of chocolate for him. They brought him books in many languages and dictionaries so he could learn to read the books. On his eleventh birthday, they presented him with a silver pen and stationary. He began writing to remain sane, and now it was the only thing he wanted to do.
No, that wasn't true. None of it. He grew up in Indiana, the most boring of all states. His parents were still very much alive. His father was an English teacher and his mother a typist. He had been in jail only once, caught shoplifting a Motor Trend magazine from a K-Mart. He knew he probably could have gotten off with just a lecture if he had been willing to make nicey-nice to the guard. But he didn't. He had something to prove, though he didn't know what. He wanted to go to jail; it was something out of the ordinary in Banana, Indiana. Something he could brag about to his friends.
His other convictions he didn't understand as well. He wanted to be a writer, but he didn't know why. The sentences on paper were never the beautiful phrases that floated through his mind. His characters were always alone and possessed, searching for something, internal peace or the Fat Man, but finding only acceptance of the discord within themselves. There was never any laughter in his stories, at least, never the hearty laugh of men enjoying themselves over a bottle of wine or the innocent giggle of school girls, only the derisive taunting of the Fat Man, his cynicism interjecting itself into the stories.
Somehow, one of Bart's stories had been published in the type of little literary magazine that no one has ever heard of and paid only in contributors copies. Bart had been sure that the first publication would at last quiet the Fat Man, prove to him that Bart could survive as a writer, but Bart had been wrong. The Fat Man's taunting grew stronger, became the story itself. It was time to confront the Fat Man.
Bart looked up and saw the Red House. It must have been in front of him all along. There was no welcome mat upon the doorstep, for no one was welcome here. No one had ever entered. There was no lock on the door and it was left ajar, a further taunt to those who considered entering. Bart imagined the laughter inside, laughing at his scrawniness, laughing at his childish goals, laughing at this bad story, the laughter's volume a sonic boom that rattled the windows and his mind.
He wanted to run away and hide, cry like a child in a private corner, but Bart remembered that the Fat Man ruled over all the crying posts in the world.
With a deep breath, Bart pushed open the door and walked inside.
There was only one room in the house, a study lined with all the books Bart ever read, photo albums and video tapes of his childhood, and ledgers filled with every mistake he made, every wrong he ever committed. In the middle was a large desk where the Fat Man sat reading the story. He wasn't fat. He was just an averaged sized, late-middle aged man who looked exactly like Bart's father.
The Fat Man read this sentence, and when he reached the period at the end, he looked up at Bart. "You must give up this obsession about being a writer. This story is awful."
"So I heard."
"The whole style of this story is just a trick to avoid being hurt. It is impossible to critique a story that criticizes itself. You even created me, a miserly, disparaging father unlike your real father so your writer's workshop would take pity on you."
Bart sat down on the chair that suddenly appeared when he decided to sit down. The Fat Man was harsh. Unfortunately, he was right. The story admitted its own defects in order that Bart wouldn't be hurt when the few friends and editors that read it failed to say it was great.
He was afraid of people and didn't feel comfortable communicating except through fiction, and even there he hid. He hid in the layers of pseudonyms and in the half-truths. He didn't even have the distinction of growing up in any kind of "est" state, only in middle class Maryland, and had never once been in jail, had never even stolen a magazine. And, worst of all, had never been published, not even in one of the thousands of anonymous literary magazines.
The Fat Man continued reading, and a broad grin grew across his coarse face. The Fat Man had won. He handed the manuscript to Bart with a lighter, eager to watch not the pages as they were transformed into cinder, but Bart's face illuminated by the flames.
Bart took the pages, held them to the lighter and was about to set it ablaze when the words on the page caught his eye. He began re-reading the story from the beginning, and as he did, the grin on the Fat Man's face slid into his wrinkles.
When Bart finished, he began laughing, a hearty laugh of happiness, slammed the papers onto the desk and looked into the Fat Man's eyes. "You're wrong. This story is not perfect, but I like it." He grabbed the red pen, the same pen that had forever oozed it's blood red ink across the pages of his stories, bloodying the descriptions of the houses and the budding green leaves in spring. Bart turned back to the first page, crossed off his pseudonym and wrote his real name below. Then he walked out of the house.
He felt young again, like the college student he was. Metaphorically, the air was springtime fresh with hints of the warmth to follow, and the leaves on the oak trees had only just opened their red buds to become flowering leaves.
"You'll listen to me yet," the Fat Man cried from the house. Bart was listening, but laughing, too.
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