Beneath the leaves of a golden tree, Willington wrote, admiring the ash collecting light at the edge of the cemetery gates.  Oddly, these vaguely poetic words, clearly plagiarized, were the most efficacious of any he’d written since undergoing chemo.  They would elegantly communicate where the great man of letters was to be buried after the final chapter of the earthly tome had been written and consigned to the bargain books section of the local Barnes & Noble.  As a man The New Yorker once touted as The great guru of the I-generation, America’s last lion of literature, Arthur James Willington III found he knew very little of life, much less of the business of living.   It was like one of the lines his characters would say, preferably in French, to sound more sophisticated (so the critics would leave it alone), a line like Last wishes are easy; it’s living that’s hard.  Only now, at the wrong end of a remission from lymphoma, did the great Willington have writer’s block.  Only now would the voice that The New York Times called One of the most singular in modern fiction be silenced.  What irony Willington had come to personify, even outside of the page! 

As he sat, unable to simply be at one with life, in these, his last days, Willington thought of how much his life looked like an unending dependent clause in some unwelcome sequel to Humboldt’s Gift.  Even his thoughts, like his last composed sentence, seemed to skip over the essential detail—life—in favor of the more erudite life of the mind  Some allusion to Apollo (though certainly not to Bacchus) would do well here, Willington knew, if he only had the strength of thought.  But he found that obscure allusions of the variety that would please his imaginary ideal audience were lacking in gravitas this day.  I’m dying, Willington found himself whispering aloud, if to no one in particular.  The phrase had such simplicity, such finality, such a call to action; it was precisely the type of sentence he kept out of his postmodernist tomes that neither he nor his critics understood, but praised anyway.  

Putting down his pen—he never assimilated to the laptop, thought it too cold for human fingers to mete out the poetry of life—Willington immersed himself in the vapidity of the scene in front of him.  It was like a short exercise he pushed on his grad students in the workshops at Temple East (where he oversaw the creative writing program, as Richard R. Hayes Professor of Writing, Emeritus): Man Against Time.   

Sure, Willington dutifully informed the writers of tomorrow,  it’s not up there with man versus nature or man versus self, but isn’t that what all conflict boils down to?  Picture your character with the fleeting of time and think, what is his true conflict, his true drive?  Put that on paper.  Know it cold.  Now, take the paper and tear it up.  Go ahead!  Tear it to pieces!  You’re not allowed to write it in any way, shape, or form in your stories.  Instead, keep it like you would a gem buried just beneath the surface of the line.  

It was one of many Hemmingwayesque exercises the great prophet of the age blessed his student luminaries with, that forced them to be aware of the subtleties of character motivation.  But was it not true beyond the fictional realm?  Were not all these statues of fallen soldiers, these great skyscrapers of a distant New York City, all unspoken testaments to man’s struggle against time?  

How gaudy it all was, this quest for immortality, Willington found himself 

(rather hypocritically) thinking.  He scratched his chin in a scholarly gesture of absolute concentration, something worthy of Rodin.  And yet, for all his censure, that was the very quest this knight of American letters devoted himself to: to be remembered, to be sung in all ages like an American Chaucer.   Like the Popes, Shakespeares, an Addisons before him.  No hack was he, churning out—dare he think it—genre fiction (forgive the literary fart!) of the variety he’d banish from his workshops.  No, he was a conquistador of sorts, questing for the fountain of eternal youth revisited on the plane of the written word.  The great Willington.  Master of postmodern wordplay and irony.  When all others were forgotten, he would be remembered.  Yes, they’d quote him and say: As—who was it?—ah, yes, as Nabokov wrote…

Still, Willington was determined. I’ve almost found the fountain too, the artist would say after every book, such as his De Apropos, considered by Kirkus Reviews to be the masterpiece of his later blue period (yes, he was important enough to be split into different colors, as his generation’s most exquisite painter of words).  Each new tome, no longer rigorously edited due to the girth of his reputation, would contribute in his rivalry with Wallace’s Infinite Jest as the most important, yet least read, work of a generation.  No matter how unruly the writing grew, how pompous the diction or verbose the dialog, no matter how many sentences showed a phobia for the period, Willington would see himself praised.  He won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in the same year, twice!  his editors and critics must’ve said by way of excuse.  He must know what he’s writing, even if we don’t.  

It’s art, Willington would argue, by way of explication, in all his interviews.  I can’t change a sentence.  The writing’s perfect just the way it is.  

And so that’s how Willington was received—as America’s greatest patriarchal hope for a Nobel in Literature since, well, the last one kicked off.  As the Howells Medal recipient for Incipient Days: America’s Quest For World Dominance In The Twenty-First Century.  As the MacArthur recipient.  As the artiste, on a level most refined. 

I’m immortal now, Willington seemed to be screaming out with each new unwanted novel.  See!  I have words between two pieces of cardboard!  Decorated with award seals and everything!

Yet, the father and daughter playing Frisbee on the outskirts of the cemetery fence took no notice of the sage.  Nor the mother with stroller to their right.  Nor the boy with dog to their left.  There was no plaque, no bust, no tomb big enough to distract them from the business of their lives.

Didn’t they realize who they were idling near?  Willington had a mind to call out.  The greatest literary light of his generation!  The next Pynchon—in his dying days!  In a moment of rare pathos any literary biographer would love to capture!   And yet these Philistines were more concerned that furry little Fido got his piss in—which he did, in abundance. 

Such is the life of the artist, Willington found himself saying.  Indeed, all art is suffering.

Willington found himself looking around, wondering if anyone had heard.  But there were no students near to quote his words, no critics ready to review the greatest act he’d ever write: a death, a total extinction of the light, of word and flesh, plain and simple, no wordplay.  Yes, that’s what Willington was: the artist lost to time.

             With Apologies To Tolstoy: The Mandatory Flashback To The Life Of The      

                                          Inconsequential Man In The Casket

Before you see the corpse (Willington does die, after all, if this is to be a Willingtonesque story, let him assure you), picture a boy of twelve. That’s all the great artist Arthur Willington ever was, really.  Somewhat of a poser, the great Willington had seen Ray Bradbury (he was a serious enough writer, right?) on his Ray Bradbury Theatre typing away in some artificial scene purely meant for cameras.  How much the young boy loved The Martian Chronicles and, well, everything Bradbury wrote!  How much more he envied the attention he saw lavished upon this rare creature, this mythical being in league with the unicorn or satyr, this writer, and how much he wanted to become one!  They never have to go to the office, he thought.  Anonymity in a quiet marriage with fame and fortune.  Sign me up!  the twelve-year-old genius must’ve said. 

In future interviews, Willington would revise the story any number of ways, substituting Bradbury and television for more acceptable moments of plagiaristic literary awakening—say, perusing a copy of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or of Kafka’s The Hunger Artist.   Yes, that was how the young genius got his start!  With the classics, of course!  Not as a wannabe bum, as a lazy piece of refuse in the spirit of the beatniks or Whitman, but as a serious reader, the kind accepted in academic circles reading tomes Harold Bloom would certainly approve of by one of the four or five major writers of their respective movements.

Eventually, I moved on to Foucault and Derrida, Willington would say to Harper’s, and language immediately opened up to me. 

Of course it was a lie.  Who’s really read all of Foucault and Derrida and lived to tell the tale?  But Willington was a writer of fiction and memoir.  What was he to do: tell the truth?

In actuality, Willington sucked at writing for the first ten years of his literary life (and arguably for the entirety of his esteemed career).  He took workshops at prestigious writing programs and was never the star pupil.  No mentor sought to guide him; no agent ran from the woodwork, contract in hand.  And so he started writing the academic nonsense required of him: first, pure mimesis.  Real, if plagiarized, fiction of the kind in workshops across the country that threatened numerous Raymond Carver copyrights.  Dirty realism, it was called by some ass looking to make a name for himself.  Writing for the common man, for the working and middle classes (since the great Willington couldn’t escape them, after all).  That was Willington, all right, until the next equally pompous professor favored Barth.  And so Willington studied and copied shamelessly until he’d rendered his writing hopelessly obscure, pretentious footnotes and all.  He pictured even T.S. Eliot himself grasping his manuscript and saying What the bloody hell?!, at which point Willington knew he was ready to seek publication.

Nonetheless, it was a long, bloody road to New York.  The editors of literary journals, far too pompous to admit they had no idea what the hell Willington was stating, began with polite passes (while citing the obvious allusions to Grendel so as not to look stupid).  This continued until one editor was so insulted by the unintelligibility of Willington’s prose that he offered him a contract for what became Schopenhauer on Saturdays.   Suddenly, Willington, the literary pretender, was a literary star, though a far cry from The New York Times Best seller List.  And so, like any writer, Willington took up anything but what he knew—teaching a craft he’d never come anywhere close to mastering.  Not a damn student ever understood a word he said, but he had publication credits and The New Yorker was calling the agent he finally landed—so he was made assistant, then full, professor of writing and rhetoric at myriad state colleges.

Was there a wife?  Was there a family?  Was there a nice flat next to campus on the outskirts of the city?  

No, but there was the O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart, and then a National Endowments from the Arts grant.  

And—don’t forget—along came The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Best American Short Stories.

And so Willington, the usurper of voices long dead, became important, a supposedly brave new voice in the world of ideas. 

      #

    Yet More Pomposity, With Willington’s Apologies To Pulitzer Winners Everywhere

The Pulitzer-prize-winning Willington felt tempted to make a nod to Edgar Lee Masters when casting his eyes on the graves of what would so soon be his home.  Would they speak to him today in perfect dramatic monologues?  Would he find inspiration to write this one last tale?   (Remember that it is, of course, really Willington writing, just preserving the critically mandated distance between author and narrator—it’s metafictional, as Willington would say, as if he coined or even understood the term).  

No, it seems today the great master had lost his form.  He had half a mind to grab a skull, hold it up, and say I knew him well, Horatio…or some other plagiarized line Shakespeare never wrote.  But he’d have to save that for the next academic journal, so that somebody would be around to appreciate the thought.  

Instead, what happened next was the worst thing that could happen to any literary story: a small girl, of the cute, cherubic kind.  If she had golden reams of hair like a Lewis Carroll heroine or if she flew through the air like one of the lost boys in a J.M. Barrie play, would it matter?  No, Willington would not condescend to indulge the audience with a character description.  Suffice it to say she was a girl and that she was small.

(Need you be reminded that Willington is the master here, and he’ll tell the story the was the master tells it!)

Why are you here every day?  the girl asked.

The great artist analyzed the upturned, luminous eyes, unsure of what to make upon this interruption of his literary epitaph that would mean so much to Western civilization.

The same reason you build castles in the sand, guarding to make sure the water doesn’t wash them away, the great man of letters said.

Huh?  the girl asked.

Let me put it another way.  There’s a story, a very old one, of an ash tree.  Whoever drinks of one the springs beneath finds eternal life.  There was a book based on the myth…Tuck Everlasting.  You ever read it?

I don’t read.

That in itself is the saddest story I’ve heard in quite some time.

What happened?

To what?

To the tree?

Look to the edge of the cemetery and there it is.  Ironic, isn’t it?

What?

An immortal tree…in a cemetery.  I’ve come to look upon it, you know.   

I had no idea that tree was so special.

It has a sugary sap…in mythology they said it led to the mead of inspiration.  It was a tree of the gods and of the poets.

You’re a poet?

Well, I’m sure not a god.

So you’re looking for a story? For your poem?

Willington’s even eyes met the inquisitive gaze of the cherubim beneath him.

I’m looking to end a story, actually—that story being my own.

Maybe it would help if you told me the beginning.

Willington smiled, albeit slightly, wondering if he still knew the beginning himself anymore.  When did letters become vibrant enough to take on a soul?  When did the magical cadence of language first seduce him from the sundry affairs of life?  When was it that he heard a story, a first story, powerful enough to turn him from the world of sports, of camaraderie, of romance, to a love affair with the fictional form?   When did he not plagiarize form and style, and call it allusion and craft?  When did he first encounter his own voice?  Was it reading Bradbury?  Was it earlier?  Not even the great master knew for sure.  But how he longed to recapture that first spark, that first moment when anything in an entire language felt possible.

What’s your favorite story?

Harry Potter.

Under normal circumstances, the literary aesthete in Willington couldn’t fathom a popular novel actually being good.  Yet, the boy in him still wondered, still inquired—the burden of being an author, Willington supposed.

Why Harry Potter, of all the books ever written, of all the stories ever told?

Because he’s good.

There it was again—the limit of language.  What do you mean by good?

Good.  He just is.  He’s exciting and he has great adventures and he’s a good person.  I love him.

I used to feel that way about stories, about characters.

What happened?

I wrote too many of them.  

Were they good?

Willington smirked.  I don’t know.  Other people said they were, I suppose.  

Are they famous?

Not so famous as your Harry Potter.

Could you tell me one?

Willington looked helplessly upon the hapless child.  How could he condense an entire career, a pursuit of excellence in wordplay, of felicity between each element of craft, a delicate balance between word and idea—how could all that turn into a story a child could love?  Willington smirked a confession.  No, he couldn’t tell a story.  For all his literary finesse, he realized that while he could use the words of the giants to talk to the ages, he could not talk to a single little girl.  What, then, was the purpose of art?   

Words are my fingers, Willington remembered himself telling a reporter for some snotty journal, with them I touch the world.   

How pompous.  How ironic, the master of rhetoric was.  Yet, critics lavished him with praise; his ideas and language so lofty they’d take a generation or two to fully analyze, and yet this writer of genre fiction, this J.K. Rowling, had connected with this little girl, had moved her, educated her, encouraged her, more than the loftiest of his words ever would.  Who was he, this great pretender, to look down upon such talent?  Upon any commercially successful writer just because they were not as erudite, as polished as he thought himself to be in the subtleties of canonical literature?  And yet he knew that at conventions where he’d received his second National Book Award he did just that, touting Tolkien, demeaning the popular writers of the world.  The thought shamed him, all the more because he knew he’d do it in the presence of his snottiest critics yet again.  And why?  For what noble purpose, what holy war?  What had such arrogance over the arts accomplished?  What pantheon were the Rowlings, the Meyers, the Kings holding siege to?  What if they were allowed entry by Academia’s invisible guards?  Would the world of letters crumble?  Would high culture fall to the ocean?  And what of art?  Would it cease to exist?  When did art become removed from the people, and why does that help make it art?

She’ll never read me, Willington thought to himself.  And millions like her.  My words became an institution, and that institution of thought became condescending, detached, obsolete.  I’m a text message away from oblivion.

I’m waiting, the girl said after what had seemed like an eternal moment.

So am I, Willington said.  So am I.

He wanted to reference Beckett in a moment such as this, thieve a line from Waiting for Godot, but what did the girl know of Beckett?  What did she care?

Shouldn’t you know your own stories? she asked him.

I haven’t memorized one of them.

Why not?

Because nobody praises me if I do, Willington answered honestly.  Only if I write them so complexly no one can ever memorize them.  Somehow that makes them greater.  Somehow that makes them art.

Just then, the little girl’s mother called, no doubt concerned that she was talking to some strange man, no doubt sorry about her negligence in not noticing it earlier.  Willington winced.  Yes, this plot turn was awful, hackneyed, clichéd.  It made for a terrible line in a terrible story Willington would never put his revered name to.  The kind that killed careers—that robbed writers of Pulitzers and MacArthur grants.  The kind of stories that were downright embarrassing.  But it was reality, of the kind all serious writers are supposed to interpret, chronicle, magnify.  And so Willington noted it, however begrudgingly.

We come here this time every week, the girl said.  Bring me a story next week.  Tell it to me then.

Only if you tell me your name. You’re the first friend I’ve had in ages.

You’re strange.  I’m not telling my name to strange men.  Just bring the story.  If it’s good, I’ll tell you my name then.

          #

The Master At Work, or Why In The Hell Did Willington Win The National Book Award?

Apparently, the eminent writer’s skills were greatly diminishing with Death 

interrupting his usual non-sequitur of semantic psychobabble.  Disarmed from his art, Willington decided in a moment of unabashed authenticity to write the way he did when he was a child: free of the consciousness of style, of form, of allusion, plagiarism, and wordplay.  He would write—literally—with a pink crayon.  While Willington could picture his critics appalled at so blatant an abandonment of high art, a feeling, a sensation overtook the elder statesman of American letters that hadn’t since he first broke into Harper’s.  Writing was—dare he say it—fun.  Not that nihilistic themes, ultra-obscure allusions, and Nabakovian wordplay weren’t engaging to his manic mind.  Just that, crayon in one hand, impending death in the other, Willington felt free to create the masterpiece that had always eluded him—not the frightening tomes designed to give bookstore clerks broken vertebrae, but a story, in its purest, most archetypal form, that a clearly defined audience might actually enjoy.  

Enjoy!  Willington thought, savoring the word.  Not lie about, fail to finish, and pretend to understand.  Not pay their critical respects to the way one might at a funeral.  

Willington smirked as he thought of one particular Kirkus review that gave his latest work the mandatory star while outlining his poignancy and grace of style using the past tense, the way some critic might when he finally dropped dead.  It was true, Willington mused: they didn’t write reviews; they offered up obsequies.  They’ve been waiting for me to die for years now so they can pigeonhole me, stuff me away with an endnote on my career.

Well, to hell with them, with all of them, with all the phony garbage of being that most dignified of plagiarists, the professional artist.

So what am I to be, then, Willington thought, the aesthete, the literary purist, the slave to Art?  Willington laughed along with the words he composed.  Art, as he understood it, had always been such a b*#*%.  She only favored stories—artfully told—with thoughtless mimesis that mirrored the joy one might find in a Sophoclean tragedy.  Why must the artist always lament life?  Why does literary writing have to be such a downer all the time?  Willington knew this was the literary equivalent of farting quite loudly in church.  He knew critics held up the literary canon as sacred text and treated real writers as if they belonged in some sacristy.  Willington used to be one such writer; while he didn’t write Gospel per se, how would he have liked it if someone farted in response to his work?

At least it would’ve been an honest reaction, Willington thought.  Anyway, back to the story.  Too much figurative language, he decided upon critically reviewing his ongoing dramatic monologue.  Let’s start this story simply.

There once was princess—no scratch that—why does it always have to be a princess?  There was once a slug who was not like other slugs.  He was bigger, lazier, and yet paradoxically—scratch paradoxically— more ambitious than the average slug that thought only of nutrients—scratch that—food—and avoiding salt shakers.  No, this slug was a dreamer, the rare slug who sought to exceed his slimy self.  

The crayon struck stillness.  Willington couldn’t move for a few seconds.  Was it true that when writing long, metafictional masterpieces he truly wanted to write about slugs?  Was this really his own voice?  Where the hell did the idea of a slug come from and how could anyone call a man who wrote about slugs a genius?  Still, Willington had doubted his ability before (well, at  least before the first Pulitzer) and he didn’t stop then.  The slug clearly had no intention of stopping, so why should his creator’s Crayola crayon?  Artiste that he was, Willington soldiered on.

Everyone would’ve been happy had this slug—Slimy—scratch Slimy—Beowulf—

scratch Beowulf—too literary—ah, the artistic agony of naming a slug!  Willington had gone through this before, for books of loftier stature, but there was always some archaic 

literary text to steal names from, to make him look smarter and better read than he actually was.  But in all of his literary travels Willington had never picked up a single volume on slugs and it showed.  So Willington kissed any chance of the Nobel goodbye as he chose the rather erudite name of Stinky, or, more properly, Stinky the Slug.  

The angst that slug must’ve felt, Willington commiserated, to be so named! 

But in angst is art, or so his mentors taught him, so Willington decided to continue, to bring this slug from the pits of Hades to the joys of the Elysian Fields—scratch that—he decided to make a slug destined for happiness.

Everyone would’ve been happy had Stinky the Slug decided to stay under his rock somewhere near the finest trash in all of New York, Willington wrote.  But Stinky was a slug with a mission.  He had seen beautiful creatures—creatures called Muses—flitting up among the afghan blue—scratch that—flying overhead.  These Muses, though rumored to be cruel…

Willington paused.  Why would slugs think of Muses, much less gossip about them?  It seemed absurd.  The moment found Willington in an artistic crisis—did the story belong to a realist school that would treat a slug like a slug or was it a magical realist story he was after?   Apparently, the thought occurred to him that perhaps no other literary master had spent so much time contemplating the fate of a slug, so Willington let it go with that and continued writing.

These Muses, though rumored to be cruel—capricious?—no, cruel—were immortal and beautiful, just like Stinky wanted to be.  So Stinky set off to find where the sky ended, to find the Muses he so adored.

Should Stinky be magical?  Willington wondered.  Stinky, the slug wizard?  No, Hogwarts would never suit such a slug, despite the obvious Slytherin pun.

Willington ceased in his activity, astonished.  He, the great Willington, stealing from a popular author?  How his peers (if he truly had any) would denigrate him now!  Still, Stinky was waiting, so Willington put his ego aside for a rare moment in his life and did what was best for Stinky.

He traveled farther than any slug had ever traveled before—unless there was some Disney slug who went to the moon—well, at least as far as any slug ever had before Disney and Pixar took over children’s films.

But what adversaries was the daring slug to face?  Willington paused at the thought.  Surely, anything and everything was adversarial to a slug.  So Willington typed on about Stinky nearly getting eaten by a giant bird, about his facing Polyphemus, until Willington realized that there were only so many Odysseys and One Thousand and One Nights tales he could rip off.  So, in a stroke of anything but genius, Willington typed about Stinky’s pathos-inducing encounter with the Muses.  Apparently, Stinky caught the back of a mythical roc and flew with it up into the heavens, grabbing the tail of a flying Muse.

You’ve caught me, the helpless immortal confessed.  He who catches the Muse 

earns eternal life.

But what of you? Stinky asked.

The life you earn is my own.  That is what we Muses do.  We give of ourselves so that others may live throughout the ages.

Stinky stopped for a moment.  Willington stopped typing.  It was as if protagonist and creator stared at each other for a good amount of time in dire contemplation.  

I can’t do it, Willington told the slug.  I can’t give you immortal life if it means taking a Muse’s.  What kind of happy ending is that?  

Immortality’s not everything, the imaginary slug replied.  Slugs weren’t made to live forever.  Every creature has as much right to life as me.

The modesty of the heroic slug won Willington over.  Was it true that one of his own creations realized what the creator never knew?  Was it true that his story was ending the way only the worst kind did—with directly stated themes that would never earn the reverence of critics?

It’s such a simple lesson, Willington found himself saying.  Take what the Muse has to offer…and then let go.

And so the dreaded moral fell upon the postmodernist, crushing him: True art, true creativity, promised no man to the ages; the Muses gave freely and abundantly and asked for nothing in return.  No promises were made; no repayment was taken.  Only then could true Art be what it was meant to be: the highest form of human expression.

That was one wise slug.  And so Willington ended his story with Stinky flying with the Muses, realizing he was beautiful in his own artistic way all along.  And then he was given a rare gift, the ash tree, where he could snuggle under, telling the tale to his grandchildren slugs and then rest for the ages, at peace.

Oh my, Willington said.  Did I just kill off the slug?

Willington rewrote the denouement a bit, ending with a celebration, with the slug finding his new home.  Still, the core of the slug’s lesson remained with him.

Amazing, the complex author realized.  Even the simplest tales can carry the greatest lessons.  Time is no enemy: it is simply part of the miracle of life.

Willington put the pink crayon down.  As he read over the uplifting tale of Slimy and the Muses, artfully entitled Where The Sky Ends, Willington had to admit, it was awful.  Rubbish.  Yet, it got to the senses, much like a putrefying turd left out on a summer’s day.  

Willington smiled.  It was the smile of an artist.  He had finally done it; he had  plagiarized no one’s voice, no one’s style.  In the end, he had written a masterpiece not even aspiring to mediocrity.  And he felt proud.  Horrendously proud.  This was it, Willington’s one true artistic fart and how he relished it!

#

          Willington In Rare Form, or The Artist Speaks of Slugs

Assuming his post opposite the big ash tree, Willington reviewed his story feverishly, committing all to memory.  As the minutes trickled by, Willington put the story down.  

I’m missing the point, the old man said softly.  A story exists in its telling.  The words must come alive, not exist only in recitation.

And so Willington, comfortable he had come to know Stinky the Slug well enough to tell his tale, awaited the most important, brutally honest, and intimidating critic he’d ever face—a small child.  Upon her giggles or yawns his whole impression of himself as a writer stood, and Willington could not help but feel—for the first time in years—nervous.  Normally, he grew accustomed the praise the critics lavished upon his 

work.  But here the matter was entirely—and excitingly—uncertain.  

When the girl did appear, not too far off cue—an unrealistic happening that (need it be said?) would never stain the pages of a Willington story—Willington was surprised that the little girl had a story for him.

Sorry I’m late.  My mother almost didn’t come.  She misses my dad too much for her own good.  He was a firefighter, you know.  He lost his life saving someone else.

Willington could feel the flush of inspiration upon him.  Here, he had prepared a tale of a noble slug, yet he knew it was not quite the story he would share.  That story was his, and he grew from the writing of it.  But the story must not be his; it had to belong to the small girl.  It had to address her needs.  And so, waving his arms in a dramatic flourish, Willington broke into his tale of a slug who had to save other slugs from an impending fire, who had to risk his own life so that others might live.  

The girl giggled—a sure sign of either complete failure or overwhelming success.

Willington continued, adding interludes where the slug had a baby slug that he had to show how to act the right way.  He centered the slug’s quest on the little baby slug, on how much this heroic firefighting slug thought of her.  Willington wondered whether or not the girl would feel uncomfortable, whether or not she’d cry, but the tears never came, and so he continued.  Instead of Muses, the slug approached monsters who oversaw the great fire and how the slug had a choice to make—to take a life or give his own.  The slug chose to save others, in his last moments citing how much he loved and cared for his little girl slug, citing how much he hoped that from his death she’d be given life.

The ending was a bit of downer, Willington realized—his literary instincts for a sad ending simply had a way of overtaking him.  But the girl proved tougher, and altogether more savvy, than Willington could’ve imagined.  She saw the tale for what it was and rewarded Willington with a smile.

That was my story, she said.  You came up with that just for me.

I did, Willington affirmed.  Though you were part of the story too.  Whenever you smiled, I found favor and continued.  Whenever you yawned, I took a cue and changed parts of it around.  You see, through the smallest of your gestures, you were writing the story right along with me.

The smile broadened.  

What shall we call the story?

Escaping the Fire, the girl insisted.

Not exactly the most literary title, but I think it’ll do nicely.  So how about it?  Do I get to know your name?

At that moment Willington encountered an ending that he himself could not interpret. 

Willington could’ve sworn she said Calliope, a mythical Muse herself, but he imagined she simply said Callie and that Willington himself provided the classical twist.  It was something he did in quite a few of his stories—add in classical Greek names to make them sound loftier than they were.  Though the magical realist touch—adding a supernatural being into a natural story, for those unable to grasp the full literary scope of Willington’s writing—was not something he really went for, and so he edited that part out of his mind.

I have a gift for you too, the girl said.   I think you’re ready.

Show me.

Willington and the little girl he’d never let into his stories, the one his lofty

command of rhetoric towered above, approached the great ash tree together.  For a 

moment its green leaves sparkled in a light, looked almost golden after all.  Willington smirked.  He knew this scene would never survive the chopping block in his stories either.

Too obvious a symbol, he would’ve said.  Too forced.

Yet he found himself comfortable near the ash and in a display astonishing for the unflappably objectivist Willington, he gave in to sentimentality.  He simply forgot what the critics might say and let flow the sap of his humanity.

You gave me a gift, Willington said to the tree of immortals, a gift for words.  To tell the people of God, of life, of the world.  And I misused it.  I used it for my own glory, so my own name would live forever, not God’s.  

Willington thought of the ancient pharaohs, of their monuments to themselves, of modern skyscrapers, of films and their makers, of cyberspace ever expanding, of the writer and the written word.  How much they were like him, all for the glory of man, all for names long since consigned to the dust.

I never thought once to write a children’s story of an abused boy making it in the world to inspire abused boys, Willington said in a Scrooge-like moment of epiphany that no serious writer would compose.  I never once gave royalties to charities nor have I put my audience above myself.  I never cared about helping people with my words.  I only cared about prizes and glory, about accolades, tenures, and immortality.   And for that I’m sorry.  From the bottom of a writer’s heart—I’m truly sorry.

The girl looked on, certain only of the sympathy she felt for this remarkably odd creature, this writer naked of all his words.  She touched his withering hand.

Let my name and my words die, Willington said.  Let them forget me.  Let critics call me simple and passé and let readers forget my books.  I am at peace.  If there’s one little girl in all the world as wonderful as this, I am at peace.  Even if God was the author and not me.   

It was an awkward moment, the old man slumped over, pouring out his soul.  

How long he must’ve pent those words up inside, how long he must’ve felt the phony, the plagiarist reciting a long tradition of ideas not his own.  Without whimpering, Willington the man turned to the small girl.

I know what they’ll write of me in The Times.  Do me one last favor to humor an old man.  When I die, find the obituary and tear it up.

Tear it up?  But why?

Because that’s who I was, a man against time.  Building castles to be washed with the tides.  This, Willington said, squeezing the girl’s plump little hand tighter, this is who I am, a man as he should be.  Mortal.  Decidedly so.   Let them forget me.  And let them bury me here, beneath the leaves of this golden tree.

How sappy my last words were, Willington thought, and how remarkably human.

Willington would’ve sought solace in the fact that such words would never appear in print, but he drew an odd, childlike comfort from their sheer sentiment of it all.  They were words a man could die with.

An Epilog of Sorts, As Willington Did Rather Favor Them In His Stories

Sure enough, later that month, Willington passed away, which is a cultural euphemism avoiding the truth of it.  Simply put, the man died painfully.  The cause: terminal lymphoma, for those who weren’t paying attention earlier.  The obituary, borrowing its form from so many others that had come before it, read simply (and shortly, as news was hardly scarce that day):

Arthur J. Willington III, Noted Author, Died Today

New York—Literary executor Frederick P. Willoughby, PhD, confirmed that novelist, playwright, poet and essayist Arthur J. Willington III, best known for his opus De Apropos, died today.  He was 87.

Long considered a Nobel front-runner, Arthur Willington led a five-decade career and was, according to New Yorker editor Philip Greeley, “the voice of his generation.”

He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice and the National Book Award twice, making him America’s most decorated man of letters.  He also taught in several Ivy League schools, retiring as writer-in-residence at Temple East.

Willington was a staple of the postmodernist movement.  Yet, when his career began sagging in the late eighties and early nineties, he reinvented himself, as postmodernists have a way of doing.

“While the literary elite shunned the Internet, he embraced the freedom of the form, creating chapters and scenes based on common web exchanges.  He was an artist of extraordinary range, always trying something new,” Willoughby said.  

Raised in Burgundy Hill, Connecticut, Willington’s earliest antecedents remain speculative.  Stories about being a child of the Holocaust have long been disputed after the publication of Willington’s The Blind Cry from Warsaw: A Metafictional Memoir, but it is known that he graduated from Avon High School in Connecticut and briefly served in the U.S. Air Force.  

Willington leaves behind his colleagues at Temple East and a stepbrother in Wisconsin.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

And so there it was: the note of finality.  But, as Willington might’ve noted, had he not been—well, dead—it was just an obituary.  And since when has an obituary been the measure of a man?