Jun 5, 2025
In an early draft the story became a Scooby-Doo fan fiction. This was never intended or by design, but rather a convenience of the familiar: the story needed several characters at once and the setting, a gothic castle almost dangling off the edge a narrow cliff, seemed to require a counterpoint of innocence, five young friends (one so near-mythically child-like any competent reader would understand the symbol he was) against the endless night, colorful clothing as though to pollute the corridors and halls, which to this point had only been blue and gold, in each color’s darkest variation, and silent save for arbitrary whispering or creaks. Why were the children there? Did it even matter? They had captured their prey as they always did, their target, clad in the rusted shell of a now-black armor, fallen over down onto the ground. The children surrounded the knight as though to prevent its escape, though it had given up the ghost. Perhaps for the first time ever, their target had died. Purple smoke seeped out of perforations in its helmet, around where the body beneath might have had its eyes, and it pooled or perhaps clouded above the children, blinking now and then as it started to swirl, as though to imitate a hurricane. —Ru-roh, said the most innocent child.
I was living that year in Miami, which I’m assured was nice. It would be a lie to say I stayed indoor most of the time, afraid of heat and interstates and people, but lies are sometimes better than the truth, the way a photograph is better than your vision, as it lasts beyond the moment, and details can be zoomed it. I read the draft on a visit to a friend.
—It’s like a dream, he said, in that there seems to be no ending. No beginning either, I guess, it’s just you’re there forever experiencing, the gang around the knight as he bleeds out.
—When you were writing it? I asked.
—No, he said.
—To read it?
He thought a moment, or stalled, either which manifested as staring at his coffee, unpeeling layers from its paper sleeve the way that I, in nervous moments, unpeel the skin around my thumb.
—The entirety of the image, he said, pressing his most recent peel back. Everything, I think, exists already, so I was just marking it down.
In the story next the cloud was forming words. It was unclear (from clumsy detail work) if it spoke or transmitted thoughts, but the words were at least described as being purple, the way a day might be called warm or cold. It was praying to the children, describing death in abstract detail. It begged forgiveness for the way it manuevered life.
—No, Fred said at once. We cannot offer absolution.
—Yeah man, Shaggy said. Like, we’re no different from you.
—I can only assume you’re attempting to use us, Velma said.
—Look to yourself, Daphne advised.
—What are you even trying to say with this? I asked my friend.
—Some things are images, he said.
It made no sense. I couldn’t see his story as anything more than a joke, at best, a failure or embarrassment at worst. Nothing occurred. Events just happened. It was one more moment among many, none the same.