Short Story / fuck love and fuck you
Last Flight To Brooklyn
Mary always had trouble getting started. To say what she wanted to in a letter was tacky—she knew that there was an alternative way to end things—but goddamn it, she told herself, this is the only way that it’ll work. Any other way left too many possibilities, too many questions that could arise after fourteen years of being together. She didn’t want to see that inevitable look in his eyes, that blank stupid look of his. Fuck him, she thought. This is what he deserves. So this was what he was going to get. She leaned over and began:
Michael,
Fuck you, I can’t do this anymore. I have been mad as hell for years and I am tired of your bullshit. I’m going back to New York, and by the way you dumb asshole, I am William J. Croup.
She tore up the paper and threw it to the ground. He would never believe it; that dumb son of bitch would just call his mother and cry. Men, she realized, had the memory of fleas. He still thought that a hug and a fuck could close the wounds that he left when he came home reeking of the cheap perfume that one of his graduate students charged to her parents’ visa.
When Florala University asked him to come and lecture for a year on his new book, it seemed like the only reasonable option. Neither of them had published in a few months, and money was scarce. They never wanted to live in a rural college town where their social life was reduced to faculty gatherings and openings at folk art museums where the only dress code was that one actually appeared wearing clothing. Looking at the brochure, they had a riotous laugh about how the biggest program at the university was the Agricultural Outreach Center.
He was a writer. A dirty, drunken, chain smoking cynic, who couldn’t go two days without visiting at least half a dozen bars, bookstores and coffee shops. He was not the kind of human being who moved to a town with a population, including the students, of just below 2,000. Even while they were packing, Mary kept telling herself that it wouldn’t last a semester. By the spring they would be back in New York, where they could cash in their treasury bonds and move to Milan, stay with her cousin and get citizenship, spend the next three decades in and around Rome, maybe get a little summer house on the coast.
His first semester, still riding the luck of his second novel, he published several papers in a few small academic journals, and though his grammar was atrocious, the graduate students who did most of the editing didn’t notice. The university was thrilled at his publishing a handful of mediocre papers and asked him if he would take an assistant professorship. After he accepted, he began playing with the idea of hosting a literary conference. Though his spotlight had begun to dim a little, it was still bright enough to attract the sycophantic literary moths dying to pay 500 dollars a ticket for a three-day affair. Not being in New York, he had lost most of his connections. It was difficult for him to find speakers; no one wanted to come to the rural south for any reason, especially when the university didn’t have enough money to pay for their plane fares. But with a little help from some of his more gifted grad students, he was able to come up with a meager grant and with it managed to wrangle a few run of the mill academics from the Midwest. The program for the conference was a bit of a joke. Only seven speakers agreed to attend and to give a maximum of three lectures over the entire weekend. With help from the southern law department, who functioned in the rhetorical language of English Commonwealth law, he managed to slip into their contracts a clause which stated:
“ Let it be known that the signer of this contract must eat nor more than he speaks, for even if he eat twice, he must speak at least as much as the man who consumes the proper amount of vittles thrice from dawn till dusk.”
In short, this forced them to lecture three times a day, while he would lecture only once a day, as the lunch speaker. The speakers were furious, but the administration was thrilled that he had managed to put together such a large event. And though in the eyes of the greater academic world the conference had all the literary merit of a Penthouse Letter, it was the biggest turnout at the university since their animal husbandry department accidentally cross-bred a dairy cow with a buffalo, creating Coffallo, a semi-retarded, two-headed, long-haired hermaphroditic cow which became the school mascot. Though Coffallo brought great notoriety to the university, it was the kind of attention that left an unpleasant taste in one’s mouth, as did the “Nuts and Udders” t-shirts that the university printed by the thousands. Fortunately for all, the attention only lasted for one season, as Coffallo had a very short and dissatisfied life that ended when he/she vomited and shat him/herself to death in the final two minutes of the homecoming basketball game against Kudzu City College.
As it turned out, small southern universities loved any publicity, even if it is ill-gotten. Though the conference he assembled solidified his reputation as a parody of an artist on both coasts, that fall, judging his efforts a complete success, the university offered him full tenure. A few months into his third year he started to phase out his old black Levis and black button-down collarless shirts, preferring now a gently washed flannel, a rustic tweed sports coat and a pair of light brown woolen trousers. He threw out his black leather shoes for a pair of Rockports and switched from Camel straights to a pipe. He was even trying to grow a beard, which really disgusted her. She knew he was changing, but she let it go. He was the shallow one; if she’d been the one to take up a pair of coveralls and trade her typewriter for a grad student stenographer, he would have walked out the door without another thought. She had to hang on. Someone had to remain sane; someone had to hold on to reality and when the university finally broke him. She was going to be there to say “Honey, lets get the fuck back to New York!”
So while he was off flailing in two-headed cow shit with hippies and rednecks, she continued to work. Just because he had become an artless academic hack didn’t mean that she was going to let her literary career go. The dream her husband was buying was something neither of them had ever wanted. She had taken to writing novellas, novels, and short stories for magazines; she even tried her hand at plays. Everything she wrote was golden, and not a single word of it was written under her name. Wanting to hide her identity until she could really lord her success over her impotent husband, she adopted a series of pen names. Only her agent knew the truth. After a few months she decided never to tell anyone, and after four years, three of her ten personalities were considered the top three American writers. One of her characters instantly became one of the greatest writers of the French Cannon. Zoe R., a thirty-something French masochist, wrote, in the simple French she had learned while attending graduate school at Oxford, the most profoundly disturbing sexual morality tales that ever haunted Europe. After Oui Magazine published her first story, “Cocks in the Bell Tower,” about the degeneration of a group of monks living alone in a bell tower in a plague-ravaged city, Zoe R. was declared a heretic by Pope Claudius III. After her first book, she became the most scandalous novelist to ever write in the French language. The novel, Lift Up Your Pen, was about a cruel English professor by the name of Micelle, who would introduce his young virginal graduate students to the dark ways of academic sadism. Under his instruction, they learned to relish in failing and abusing underclassmen while rewarding them sexually by pleasuring them with a variety of writing devices.
The novel was so foul that the Dutch would not even translate it. This assured its place at the top of the banned books list, though the novel was so vivid and frightening that internationally known pornographers and white slavers in both the EU and America were calling for an international decree to ban the book and burn any copies that might have survived.
She was proud of Zoe R., but her favorite persona, as well as the one she felt closest to, was William J. Croup, a dashing young New York hipster who never went to college and who spent his spare time at the antique store, where he rebuilt old typewriters and wrote mockingly kitschy murder mysteries in the style of Mickey Spillane, with breaks in the storyline for Carver-esque retrospection. His first novella, Murder in SOHO, was published in seven installments in Playboy. It was about a mysterious chain of murders at the top three trunk shows during fashion week. At first, few critics paid attention, and those that did wrote Croup off as a passing fad. But by the end of the Playboy run, their readership was up forty-five percent, and Croup was a literary firestorm that couldn’t be put out. That year Croup won the American Literary Association award for Best New Writer of Genre Fiction, but due to illness, he was not able to receive the award in person. The next year he followed up with A Moveable Beast, a Hemmingway knockoff about a statue of a Husky in Central Park that would appear every night in the East Village to terrorize the patrons of Griff Dogs, a trendy little hotdog joint on St. Marks and Ave A.
The next few came easy; there was I Kill You Scum, a psychological realist novella about the hard life of a Ukrainian maid working for snobbish pricks on the Upper West Side, which she followed with Hotel Roma, a story about a hotel in Rome, Georgia, that was being haunted by the Ghost of Seneca, who apparently took a wrong turn out of hell, but once settled there decided to stay.
By the time Hotel Roma hit the best-seller list, William J. Croup was getting too big to conceal, so she did what she thought best and wrote him out. She sent the following letter to the New Yorker:
To Whom it May Concern,
I, William J. Croup, being of sound mind and body, do hereby declare that my life has reached its peak. Not wanting to hang on to some dying dream as my skills and wit decline, not wanting to become some lifeless relic reduced to teaching at a community college, I feel it is my duty to myself and to my fans to end now, while the ship is quite in tact. I have written one final story that will be released five years from now by my agent. I will not tell you the name, for it is such a wonderful title that if I give it to you without its story, I fear you will desecrate my watery grave and flog me for being such a bad sport. I love you all, and knowing that I am loved by most of the intelligent people in this country makes my choice a hard one. As for the stupid people, well, it’s your fault I am ending my life; if all of you were intelligent then this place wouldn’t be so bad. Regardless of your intelligence, I wish you all well. Even those of you who hate me had to read me first before you could do so, and for that, I thank you.
By the time you receive this I will have already thrown myself into the East River. There is to be no funeral, as I have no family and you, dear readers, are my only true friends.
Thanks again for the support,
William J. Croup
P.S. If you could stop voting republican I would appreciate it, and if you do I promise to tell god that you are, at least for now, trying to be good people.
Two weeks after the letter was published, the mayor of New York announced that the city would be holding a funeral on the banks of the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A day before the funeral, the American Literary Association ran an insert in the Times of a full color origami paper boat that looked when folded as if there were a little Alaskan Husky howling at the moon from the center. Griff Dogs, whose business soared after A Moveable Beast went to number one on the Times best seller list, also ran an insert that said they would be selling small hot dog bouquets, in honor of Croup, to be sailed alongside the boats. The next day, over 500,000 people showed up. This number included the entire membership of the international literary organization “Le Bonanza des Femmes,” which specialized in the metaphysical interpretation of letters between Zoe R. and William J. Croup. By the time the ceremony ended, there were so many boats and bouquets in the water that they were piling up across the river on the shore of Manhattan.
When she saw the picture of the funeral ceremony on the cover of the Sunday Times, she almost cried. When she saw in the New Yorker a four-panel, pullout, black and white spread of the East River so crowded with hot dogs and paper boats that one could not see any visible water from one shore to the other, she cried for a month. Michael didn’t notice for at least a week, and when he finally asked her what was wrong, she told him that she had gotten pregnant. It had settled in her fallopian tube, and since the embryo couldn’t grow there, she had no choice but to terminate the pregnancy. To her this was the truth; she only failed to mention that the embryo was William J. Croup, currently the most famous writer of American letters.
His response was to say to her, “Well, you never wanted kids anyway, right?”
She thought of these things as she continued to stare at the blank page, pen tight in her hand.
Michael,
I don’t know how to say so this so I will just SAY THIS. I don’t love you anymore. You have changed. I have changed. These things just happen. I am going back to New York to stay with Sandra until my next book comes out. My publisher said they were at pre-pre press so I guess once they finish the final design they will give me the date. Marc said-
She yanked the paper off of the desk crumpled in into a ball, shoved it inhermouth and screamed.
“FFFUUUUUUCCCKKKKKKKK!!”
She leaned over and spit the giant slick ball towards the trashcan at her feet. This wasn’t going to work. She would have to wait for him to come home. She looked up at the clock above her desk and realized that it was only one o’clock in the afternoon; he wouldn’t be home for at least another nine hours.
It was time for a drink. She stood up and walked over to the kitchen. Reaching under the cabinet for the Stoli, she realized she was still clutching the pen. Instead of letting it go, she reached out with her opposite hand, picked up the bottle and walked back over to her desk. She sat back down and looked at the pen in her hand and the paper in front of her. She leaned over; gripping her teeth tightly on the cap, she twisted it off and spit it into the trashcan and took a giant shot. Slamming the bottle down she leaned over and wrote:
Michael,
I can’t stay here anymore. This place is boring me to tears, and it is turning you into an incontinent academic. Do you realize that you have become what you hated? You refuse to participate in reality anymore; instead, you spend all of your time catering to sub-human trash that thinks that because they have a lone thought about a quirky situation that they have just received an invitation into the literary world. You used to tell me how disgusted you were by your students, how none of them had the soul of the artist. At best they were rigid grammarians. What the hell do you think you are doing to us, to me? I can’t take this. I need the city. I need museums and theatre, and good food. And no, fried tomatoes and catfish IS NOT GOOD FOOD. You are getting fat too, didn’t you notice? The reason you don’t wear your old clothes is because they show you how FAT YOU ARE. FATTY, you’re a big fat fatty with a big fat head and I AM TIRED OF IT! You wear BROWN SHOES and TWEED. You look like a sock puppet parody of a college professor. A big fat, overstuffed sock puppet!
She leaned back and looked at the page briefly before she crumpled it into a ball and threw it onto the floor with the others. She looked at another blank page in front of her and took another shot. She realized, although she’d quit smoking months ago, that it was time to start again. She rose from the desk still clutching both the pen and the bottle of Stoli. She walked over to the freezer and with the neck of the bottle opened the freezer door. Looking for the pack of smokes she had stashed inside an old half gallon of vanilla ice cream, she raised the pen as if it were an ice pick and began digging into the freezer, knocking to the floor pounds of meat, frozen pizzas, and countless clear plastic containers of undated leftovers from nights he never made it home. Thinking of all those frozen vegetable memories of her unhappiness, her pace quickened. She relentlessly mined the freezer till the only thing left whole was the bucket of ice cream. She reached in and gripped it with both of her hands and walked it over to her desk. Sitting down in her chair, she took a shot of vodka and wedged the small bucket between her knees, using the pen as one uses a paint key to pop off a tight lid.
There they were, an unopened pack of American Spirits wrapped in old brown bread paper with the little note to herself written in black marker that read:
ONLY IF YOU ARE REALLY GOING TO LEAVE HIM.
She took another shot as she began to realize how frightening it was to really know oneself. How long had she been planning this, and why hadn’t she done it before? She told herself she wrote it as a joke, as a deterrent for something she would never actually do. But she knew that she had meant what she wrote. It was an honest thing to admit. To ease the awareness she took another shot, tore into the pack, lit a smoke and began yet another draft.
Michael,
What the fuck is wrong with you, you dress like an asshole and your pipe smells like a set of dirty balls that belong to an aging drunk who just can’t manage the washcloth anymore. A fact which I find funny because for the past three years you have been acting like an old drunk’s musty leather nut-sack. You think you are worth a damn but you are actually mentally shriveled, cold, useless and hopelessly miserable. You don’t even remember what it’s like to feel anything anymore. I want out, I want to go away from you and your rusty old balls.
She read over the letter and laughed. She put out her cigarette. That was it. It might not be the most subtle, or even remotely appropriate; hell, it didn’t even bother to offer a rational explanation, but it seemed to fit just right. And right now, that was all she needed. Her happiness didn’t last long. As she was reading the letter for the third time, someone began anxiously and repeatedly ringing the doorbell. Mary looked up at the clock; it was only 1:45.
She stood up and took a step towards the door, slipping on her spitball of a first draft. She spun around and fell on her back and began to laugh hysterically. After a few moments, she stopped laughing and realized two things. The first was that she was so drunk that she didn’t even remember falling down; the second, that she had no idea how long she had been on the floor, but whoever was outside ringing the doorbell was still there.
She rolled over on her stomach, careful not to spill the bottle of vodka, now half-gone. She crawled slowly over to her chair. Using its sturdiness for support, she was able to stand on her own in a little under three minutes.
Once upright, she stumbled over to the door and reached out to open it, realizing only then that she couldn’t open the door holding a pen and a bottle. She turned to the foyer table, placed the pen on top of yesterday’s mail, took a shot, and opened the door.
Standing in the sunlight, still ringing the bell when the door was opened, was Tammy, one of Michael’s undergraduate helpers. She stood there sweating, gripping tightly with little anorexic fingers a dozen or so research papers, her heavily sprayed bangs limping into her eyes.
“Um. Like, Mr. Michael told me, to uh…have these copied and brought to his office, but he’s like not there…and uh…he’s like not in class, so like I don’t know what I’m uh, supposed to do?”
She looked at this skinny little girl caked with makeup and hairspray and felt nauseous; she wanted her to leave. She leaned over to take the papers from her when she recognized the perfume as something cheap Michael came home reeking of a few days before.
“You worked late with Michael Wednesday, didn’t you?”
Being somewhat inbred and not having the natural survival skills of most semi-sentient creatures, Tammy blurted out, “I work late with Michael every night, and we’s work really, reeeaaally har-.”
Before poor Tammy could finish what would be her last sentence with a straight nose and her front four teeth, the papers she had guarded so carefully were ripped from her hands, and she was sent forward as the heavy oak door slammed directly into her trajectory.
Sadly, it wasn’t Tammy who had slept with Mary’s husband; she was just being a rude little bitch. The villain was actually Tammy’s sister Carol Anne, who had borrowed Tammy’s perfume on the night in question.
Laughing at Tammy’s muffled screams, Mary picked up the pen and walked back over to her desk. She sat down and looked at the papers. Ahhh… his graduate students’ midterms. This was too good; not only had the fates brought to her his little college fuck-toy, but they had also handed her the keys to his career. Now it was payback time.
The first paper on the stack was a rough draft of a thesis entitled “Themes of Torture in Modern Agricultural Literature.” It belonged to the mayor’s son, Billy Hobgood. She had met Billy a few months back; they were at a faculty/student bonfire when he came up to her drunk on moonshine and began, in an attempt to seduce her, reciting poorly formed heroic couplets on the nature of her pumpkin-like beauty. He wasn’t a bad guy, just a typical country boy who actually wanted, at least for now, to do something decent with his time in the world. She didn’t want to insult him, but she knew that if anybody would snap to defend his southern pride it was Hobgood; his family was the oldest of the founding families in Florala. She opened the drawer and grabbed a red Sharpie and began hacking away, crossing out whole paragraphs and writing the word “Horseshit” (a rather insulting term in context; as everyone in Florala raised cows. The usage of the term implied that one was not a local, and as such, had no good reason to be talking at all). After crossing out at least two-thirds of his paper, she wrote, in a perfect imitation of Michael’s handwriting:
Billy,
You are a goddamn ass! What the hell are you talking about? You should drop out of college and marry your cousin Tammy, who I am sure has the intellectual capacity to take in all of the horseshit that flies out of your ignorant country mouth. Better yet, do humanity and yourself a favor and end that inbred genetic line of yours by cutting off your balls, or just use the cow bands to wrap around your whole package. Of course you will have to wrap it around several times, as the genitals in your family are known by all to be the smallest of all the Texan immigrants who by their very presence have desecrated this sacred land.
She smiled, drew a tiny little set of balls on the cover page, straightened the paper and placed in on the bottom of the stack. After such a great setup she felt a little drained, so she just crossed out most of the next few papers, scribbling purposefully illegible notes all over the margins, managing to fill up almost all the blank space. The forth paper she found, which didn’t even have a cover page, renewed her rage.
To whomever the fuck you think are,
What is wrong with your family, why did they not throw you in the river like the Lord commanded be done of all unholy things! You know it’s actually in the town record that your mother was raped by bandit demons in the old east side cemetery. She thought she was just going to a nice old 1980’s coked-up gangbang, but oh no! She was fucked real good by some dead degenerate Texans. I will not grade this paper because you, you poor bastard, should not even be alive.
This was pleasing her immeasurably. It was better than what she remembered to be sex; of course it was sex with Michael, so it wasn’t special anyway. She had discovered her theme.
Texans, she said to herself. I’m going to make these bastards form a hanging squad.
She quickly read through all the title pages. The whole town was in there. What followed was the culmination of all her literary talents. All of the voices from her past, even the late William J. Croup and Zoe R., came to her aid. By the time she finished, she had managed to insult at least one member of every family in town. The papers were destroyed. She was about to place them in an envelope, but she could feel that Croup had something else in mind, so she wrote a letter to the President of the University of Florala, who was also a Hobgood:
President Oscar “the Mexican from Texican” J. Hobgood,
You sir, have created an Alexandria in the wild. This place has about as much knowledge as you can fit in a ten-foot teepee made from horseshit. This entire town is full of degenerate Texas whores. The grandmothers in this town look like Mexican-Indian turnovers from the 1800’s. When I agreed to teach here I was under the assumption that this town had a legitimate southern heritage, but I find here only cultureless heathen slag, crossbred with catholic whores. There is something terribly wrong when an entire population has inbred so much that over 40% of its population shares not only a name, but the genetic trait of ridiculously rodeo-clown like genitals. I fear that staying here longer might lead to the shrinking of my family line, as I would not dare raise a child alongside Texan immigrants, who are as likely to take up the practice of sodomy as they are Little League. No, I cannot dare continue to teach in such a place. I am writing to the Montgomery legislature in the hope that the governor of Alabama will nullify the laws that prevent normal people from hunting the genetic cesspool that breeds in this town, as the only natural purpose your freakishly small genitals serve is best found in having them stuffed and mounted on a very small plaque. May you all burn in the hell of your sins.
P.S. We all know it was Hobgood sperm that created Cofallo. Where else but from a Texan would the seed for a Buffalo come? Besides, it is obvious he is of your ilk, as he had the same tiny genitalia that are associated with your family line.
Sincerely,
William J. Coupe
“Fuck!” She screamed as she frantically scratched out the name which she had carelessly let slip. She managed to turn the blocked out letters into a small penis with the word “Texan” written above it.
Sincerely,
Michael “Fuck You I Quit,” Peterson
She was done. She looked up at the clock. It was just after four. She had just enough time to deliver them. Relaxing a bit, she noticed someone crying in the distance. She walked over to the door and heard Tammy whimpering on the other side. She opened the door in time to see Tammy finish her climb to her feet. It had taken her a while, as the brass knocker on the front door had crashed directly between her nose and her top lip.
“I’m sorry I mouthed off to ya, ma’am, I didn’t ever really do nothing with your husband, you were just all liquored up and I was tryin’ to razzle ya!”
Mary felt terrible. She hadn’t meant to hit this poor, clueless anorexic in the face, but she damn sure laughed like hell when it happened. She brought Tammy inside and let her go rinse up. Initially, the damage wasn’t so bad: the teeth were chipped, and the nose was just a little crooked, a small fracture. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, while giving a blowjob to her Buck, who was sitting on an electric bull that was then turned on by his whiskey-drunk brother, that the extent of the damage would appear. While Tammy was cleaning up, Mary put the papers and the letter to the president of the university in a large manila envelope and wrote Michael’s name on the front. When Tammy came back out, Mary handed her the envelope and told her to deliver it directly to the Chair of the English Department, with a letter to be forwarded to the president.
Once Tammy had left, she cleaned up around the desk, threw away the almost-empty bottle, and began sifting through all her drafts. She took out a pair of scissors and began to arrange the pieces, taping them to the page
Michael,
I am William J. Croup.
I don’t know how to say so this so I will just SAY THIS. I don’t love you anymore. You have changed. I have changed. These things just happen. I am going back to New York to stay with Sandra until my next book comes out. This place is boring me to tears, and it is turning you into an incontinent academic. Do you realize that you have become what you hated? You refuse to participate in reality anymore; instead, you spend all of your time catering to sub-human trash that thinks because they have a lone thought about a quirky situation that they have just received an invitation into the literary world. You used to tell me how disgusted you were by your students, how none of them had the soul of the artist. At best they were rigid grammarians. What the hell do you think you are doing to us, to me? I can’t take this. I need the city. I need museums and theatre, and good food. And no, fried tomatoes and catfish IS NOT GOOD FOOD. You think you are worth a damn but you are actually mentally shriveled, cold, useless and hopelessly miserable. You don’t even remember what its like to feel anything anymore. I want out, I want to go away from you and your rusty old balls.
Your X Wife,
Mary Maudline
She placed the letter on the desk, went to her room, packed a single bag and called the only cab service in town.
Michael came home a little later than usual; the poor bastard actually had one hell of a day. At about five o’clock, the president and the sheriff met him in his office, where the president preceded to abuse him both mentally and physically until he was forced to beg the sheriff for help. Being the president’s brother, the sheriff refused. Michael then ran to the parking lot where he saw Billy Hobgood tearing out the seats of his fully restored 1974 super-beetle. He tried to stop Billy, but before he could say a word, he was struck from behind. As he fell, just before he blacked out, he could swear that he saw the mayor standing over him with a small wooden baseball bat. He awoke, soaked in what appeared to be someone else’s urine, around 10:30 that night, on top of what was left of his car. Billy had ripped off the doors, the soft-top, cut up and ripped out the seats, slashed the tires, smashed the ignition, and apparently relieved himself all over Michael.
By the time he got home, he was too tired to even make it to the bedroom. As he passed out on the couch in the front room she boarded the 11: 45 direct flight from Birmingham to New York. She would land in time to get settled into a hotel and still catch breakfast at Tony’s in the West Village.
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~ Great opening. I’d like to see more punch in the first sentence, but the first ‘graf is great.
~ Coffallo. That’s boss.
~ I’m only on page six, and I can tell you have a gift for relevant non sequiter. Oxymoronic, I know. I don’t know how else to describe the different directions you take. This is definitely an indirect route through curvy mountains.
~ Page 13, where you say who really slept with Mary’s husband: Is this part necessary? You concentrate so wonderfully on Mary through the whole story, that this sudden detachment into another character is jarring. I have the same problem with the part about Tammy’s Buck.
~ Now that I’m finished: Delicious revenge story with a great concept about writer’s block. I don’t know how I feel about the imbalance at the end; I’m not sure Michael’s punishment matches his crime. In fact, I think that last paragraph could be cut completely.
~ Overall, great job. You have a good command of how the side story relates to your main plot.
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