He hated writing stories about writers. But they were what came naturally to him,

and naturally he had gotten one published. It was the first in his career and the lead editor of the small but reputable journal had called it very good. This very good put him on a certain path. He took a job teaching English at a high school, got married and settled into life, and in his free time he wrote stories about writers. Three years’ worth. He thought none of them very good, but there were a handful he liked and he sent these out to small but reputable journals, and mid-sized ones too, and when he got back letters of rejection he would tweak the stories and send them on to other places. Some he knew and respected and some he did not. Toward the end of those three years he didn’t care who picked them up. But no one did pick them up and that was how he came to hate writing stories about writers. 

He loved writing, or thought he did, and he knew enough to know the score when

it came to publishing. He took a break, went to Mammoth to try out skiing and sprained his wrist. But it was not long until he came back to it, and when he did he began to write about unsavory characters, as his wife called them. 

His wife knew he was a model husband. He had proven that. She wasn’t anywhere

near ready for kids and he said that was just fine. He hardly drank. They could talk to each other about almost anything in the world. She felt she very nearly completely understood her husband. Very nearly completely. 

He had always trusted her enough to read her his stories, and even to accept or at

least consider the few small suggestions she sometimes made. He read her his new stories too, the unsavory ones, and they were hard on her. She didn’t so much mind the bad men, but did they always have to play the leading roles?

“I’m experimenting,” he would tell her, thumping his stack of papers. “I’ve got a

good feeling.” She didn’t share that feeling, but she smiled anyway. Really she loved her husband very much.

One of these stories followed a man, Dean, who had determined for himself that

Wendy, his wife of nearly ten years, could not be trusted. His reasons were arcane, subterranean. He went through her things, listened in on her phone calls, took careful notice of the state of her hair, clothing, and makeup whenever she got back from being out. But Dean worked long hours and there was time he could not account for. He hired a private investigator who promised results, only the results were not what he or his client had expected.

Dean was summoned to the investigator’s office, where a stack of photos and a one-

page written report were waiting for him. 

“Consider yourself lucky,” the PI said, but Dean didn’t hear him. He was studying

the photos. Every one of them showed Wendy sitting on a bench somewhere, writing something down in a notebook. The benches changed but the notebook didn’t. Dean had never seen it before in his life.

“I can’t say for certain, but I think she was sketching,” the PI said. “You maybe can’t

tell from the photos, but that’s what it looked like to me.” Dean shook his head. He was trying to account for the notebook. He’d searched her car, her bags, everything. “You got yourself a good one,” the PI smiled, “usually my pictures ain’t so innocent.” Dean put the photos into his coat pocket, cut a check, and left. 

He didn’t know what the cards were, but that wouldn’t stop him from playing

them. Almost as soon as he was home he had the pictures spread out on the kitchen island in front of his wife, who, looking down at them, could hardly grasp their meaning. To her they might have been ingenious fakes, artifacts with no origin. As far as she knew, Dean had been skipping work, had taken them himself. The thought that her husband would pay a stranger to follow and photograph her never entered her mind. Mostly she was busy coming to terms with the fact that she’d married and given ten years of her life to a time bomb, and was already thinking about the kids and how to get them to her sister’s house without setting off the fireworks. Dean, for his part, did not even realize the marriage was over. That would take a lawyer. In jerky half-sentences, he tried to make Wendy understand that a husband and wife should have no secrets between them. The notebook, he stressed, was a secret. He was not mad at her, he only wanted to see the notebook. Finally, though, the PI business did come out, and there were fireworks, and that was that.

This story was selected for publication in an Oregon-based quarterly called

Leitmotif. Its leading editor proposed several small changes in diction but was otherwise very pleased. He used words like taut and thorny in his acceptance letter. 

With publication came a one-time payment of $50. The husband had never been

paid for a story before. Pretty soon he had three other manuscripts prepped and it was his wife’s insight that they each followed the same basic pattern as the Dean and Wendy number. Man and wife at the center. Man begins to indulge himself. Marriage goes to pieces. Kids appear only to be scared out of the room when it all blows up. Slow tracking shot of the ruins. The end.

She told him this one evening. They were eating fast food in the car with the

windows down to let the scent out, and she told him about the pattern. He listened, chewing, swallowing, taking a drink. “I see what you mean,” he said. “But they don’t all have kids.”

The next morning he scrapped and rewrote the endings to two stories. In one he

introduced a moment of abrupt and gratuitous violence and in the other, a reconciliation. The third story he scrapped entirely. He made copies of the two revised manuscripts and mailed them out to a number of magazines that same day. He did not show either to his wife.

In every case but one he was met with rejection or silence. One was enough. He

brought the letter into the kitchen and looked it over while his wife stood by. Then he turned to her and held up the paper. “Two hundred and fifty dollars,” he said. “Two hundred and fifty!” He pulled her into his arms, still holding the letter. She brought his head down. “You did it baby,” she said, and kissed him. The envelope lay behind her husband on the counter, stuffed full of papers. After she had hung the letter on the fridge, he took out the papers and started flipping through them. She asked him what they were. “My manuscript,” he said. “The editor left me some notes.” He put the bundle back into the envelope. Then they went to the bedroom. 

Later, she lay in bed while her husband showered. He was humming faintly—she

couldn’t say what tune—and she raised herself up on her elbows and looked out through the open bedroom door. In the kitchen, the envelope lay on the counter, lit by a floor lamp. She thought she had better go and turn the lamp off, but she didn’t. A moment later she had the manuscript in her hands. She held it to the light and skimmed the first few lines. Yes, she remembered this story, her husband reading it to her, hunched over the page like the words were too small to make out or like he was translating as he went. That was just how he read. Their house wasn’t much of a house, and his voice had seemed to her to fill every inch of it that night. She would have rather heard it recorded and played back on the radio. Then she could turn the dial down until it was audible but only just. No, she had not liked this story. She wondered would she like it more now that someone else did. 

Comments were scrawled in the margins in dark blue ink. She focused on these as

she went, though really they said very little, and listened for a change from the bathroom. Soon she flipped to the last sheet. Here, in the white space below the final paragraph, one word had been penned in thick capital letters: WOW. She started over from the top of the page, reading slowly now, recognizing the words until she didn’t. She stopped, went back a line, continued, stopped, went back a line. An enormous pressure began to settle on her head. She put a hand on the counter. It was cold to the touch and she was cold, standing there reading and rereading what her husband could not have written. But then of course he had. She felt herself becoming light, or heavy, she couldn’t say which. Her stomach seemed to be coiling inward.

When she was done, she folded the manuscript, tucked it into the envelope and

turned off the lamp. Wow, she thought. Wow, wow, wow. She didn’t sit down or go back to the bedroom. She just stood there, holding herself upright, waiting to be discovered in the dark, and when he appeared in the doorway and called out to her she told him she was just turning out the light. 

“Wait a minute,” he said. He walked past her and switched the lamp back on. Then

he picked up the envelope. “I know it’s late, but I want to read it to you. I changed the ending.” She said okay. This man, after all, was her husband, and stories are just stories.

Dylan Reber is a writer and editor. His work has appeared in The Columbia Review, Hobart, Four Palaces, The Rumen, and elsewhere. He currently lives in California.