Marianna took a sip of her chamomile tea–a slight tinge of anger purposefully posed to hide her inner pain–she stopped typing, clearing her throat, “Hmm . . . but I want a strong female protagonist–not just wise from epiphany, but one who changes because of years of realization, overcoming her hatred of men. I freaking hate epiphany in a story . . . it’s such a cliché. And like Mrs. Talbot said in class, if you want to transcend common plot themes, formulaic structure and all the other common vehicles in all of fiction, the cure is to have characters you care about–characters who change.” She took another sip of tea and started biting her middle finger nail, “Give me another line.”

I plopped a thick chunk of iridescent cocaine onto the marble counter top, stretched a five dollar bill across it cupping the edges with my fingers and smashed the coke with a Bic lighter. I started chopping it into smaller pieces with Marianna’s eyes fixated, mesmerized in anticipation. I said, “Deconstruction.”

“Deconstruction?”

“Yes, I am deconstructing this chunk of Bolivian flake. It’s so funny–you do realize that everything, every theory, every literary concept including deconstruction is a cliché–life itself is a fucking cliché. Cliché and bubbles.”

She rolled up the five dollar bill to form a makeshift straw as I prepared her a fat line, “You said cliché and bubbles?”–leaning in, snorting her line, “Cliché and bubbles . . . explain what the hell that’s supposed to mean.”

I snorted an equally thick line, leaning my head back and plugging my left nostril with my pinky while tears trickled from my left eye. I took a sip of tea, “This happens every time I snort a line. I used to only use my right nostril until it started hurting every time I did, so I finally switched to my left–just like a protagonist who gets tired of boring sex with his wife and has to switch to a secret mistress every time he switches snorting cocaine to his left nostril. See, that could be a story right there but I digress.”

She giggled, “You’re married and snorting through your left nostril–and I suppose I could be thought of as your whore . . . hmm.”

“Don’t change the subject or I will psychologically destroy you and write a New York Times best seller about your demise. Cliché and bubbles. Think about it, all the frivolous bullshit Mrs. Talbot says is all cliché. Even her own book, The Inner Lotus, is so ridiculously contrived, I almost committed suicide after reading it. Another boring love story where the characters change–all the action and story is revealed through conversation and several lives are intertwined against the backdrop of world war two. It’s much like your story, where you try to employ these same devices. After reading your entire manuscript, your attempt in revealing the character’s traits through pure conversation with hardly any description is quite pathetic.”

“What? Pathetic? I’m looking for positive criticism,” she says becoming noticeably agitated, her eyes looking glazed over from fifty hours of no sleep, “I’ve worked so hard on this . . . my first book . . . my dream.”

“Calm down girl, I’m not done. Bubbles. Think about how everything in life is a bubble–a bubble which eventually pops, after which both destruction and despair ensue–often followed by rejuvenation and fresh conditions of growth and change. Like the American economy . . . a credit bubble. Politicians, banks and corporate greed are working hard to patch that bubble so it can re-inflate only to burst again–maybe for the last time, allowing a new society to emerge from the ashes. Life is a bubble, we keep our friends in one, we live and move through many bubbles . . . pop!” I violently clapped my hands together–Marianna’s heart almost exploded, the sound of beating muscle muffled within her frail chest.

“You scared the shit out of me Bobby . . . you jerk off. My heart is beating like a jackhammer, but I’m not tired at all–even after being awake almost a week. So how does all this help my story?”

“Marianna . . . why does your main character hate men? I’ve noticed all your main characters in every story you write hate men. You’re not married, you don’t have or want a real boyfriend–as you always say . . . hmm. Something is going on with this entire motivic movement throughout all your stories. I’m your classmate, study partner and boy toy…your male whore. You will never love me, and it’s simply because I’m a man. I think you really do hate men in real life. Women who were molested as children by their fathers are often promiscuous and have sex only relationships–much like the relationship we have now. Who knows, maybe you hate me, maybe you’re plotting to murder me.”

She’s too high to understand, but I’ve stirred up something disturbing in her psyche, some deeply buried pain in her past–I can almost hear the gears of repressed memories churning in her subconscious. She carefully plans her words in a feeble attempt to mask her inner turmoil, “My protagonist, Danielle, well . . . her father didn’t love her. He didn’t love her mother. I cover it somewhat, but wanted to leave the dark moments to the imagination of my readers. I think it best to not reveal everything.”

I wickedly smirk, “You need to delve into this darkness. It is the missing ingredient.”

She seems transfixed on my words, “Really? You really think so?”

“Yes indeed. Add some twisted concepts of transgressional fiction in the story. How about this: Danielle is seeing a hypnotherapist, who has her in seriously deep regressive therapy, unlocking horrifying events in her past. She remembers her mother being raped by her father while she was a little girl. Her father locks her head in a vice so she is forced to watch–her eyes taped open–hour after hour of sickening rape and terror. Later on in the story, amidst marrying her dream man and supposedly cured from her torment, she has repeated dreams that when she was born, her mother was at home and had no medical help–the nearest hospital too far away for her to ever reach. Her mother needs a cesarean section, but cannot get one. The baby Danielle, who as an adult known for her strong will–the strong will you wanted her to have as a character trait–is actually born with adult teeth, a rare trait only one in two-thousand babies are born with–eats her way out of her mother’s womb with her freakish adult teeth, devouring her uterus and organs. The doctor finds baby Danielle cradled in her mother’s blood sodden, hollowed out cavity–pop goes the bubble. She wakes up–a repeating dream from which she cannot escape, but tells no one. The repetitive nightmare is a reflection of her own will to fight . . . to live and escape from her pain–to escape from her bubble . . . her prison of misery.”

Marianna is in tears, unable to speak, her hands trembling while she takes a sip of chamomile tea to calm her nerves. Seemingly almost in shock, she says, “Bobby . . . my real mother died when I was born, from a c-section. She bled to death on the operating table.” More tears gush forth.

“I’m not done Marianna. Draw some parallels, powerful parallels between her own desire to not hate men and deconstructing her own past, discovering why she’s so fucked up. The whole story can end with a reverse deconstruction, that ties the entire plot together–she puts the pieces together, constructing her life in an amalgamation of psychotic insanity and quest for hope and love. Her final dream of eating her way out, like a lizard from an egg shell–a second birth if you will, a birth to escape from her torture–is the most intense episode ever. She remembers how her mother’s flesh and blood tasted. She is unsure what is real: did she actually kill her own mother to save herself–a testament to her own will–did her father really rape her mother? Did your father rape you Marianna? Back to your story–maybe Danielle is so confused, her father actually raped her, not her mother–and the psychological scars are so deep, reality is a grisly pipe dream. They find her in the end after cannibalizing her husband the first night of her honeymoon, screaming I’m sorry mother over and over. She finally constructs her past and loses her sanity. Write a final paragraph about how she is shrouded in a straitjacket in an insane asylum. Weave all this transgressive violence into the framework of a standard, formulaic love story plot. That would be fucking awesome.”

Marianna suddenly stands up, tears streaming down her face, ridden with tortuous anguish, “Leave Bobby . . . leave and never come back . . . get the fuck out!” She throws her tea cup at me and collapses on the floor . . . sobbing. Jeez, I guess I stirred up some old feelings–well cry me a freaking river.

The following week in Mrs. Talbot’s creative writing class, Marianna wasn’t there. She announced that Marianna had committed suicide–she slit her own belly open with a straight razor while in the bathtub. The coroner said it was the most gruesome suicide he’s ever seen in his entire life. She had so much cocaine in her system, she almost gave herself a complete hysterectomy before she died. Since cocaine thickens blood, her rate of blood loss was slowed, allowing her to almost complete her self-operation. Marianna was such a cool chick – maybe I’ll write a story about her one day.

*This story is purely fictional. I wanted a short story based on transgressional fiction and conversation about people talking about writing a story based on conversation and transgressional fiction–my favorite type of fiction. I do realize it is not truly transgressional because the escape from societal norms is not complete, but does contain many elements of that peculiar genre. In a story this short, there’s not much room for character development – but it’s the best I could do with this situation. Because there is something wrong with me, I wrote myself into the story like I usually do in my blog fiction. In many ways, my character is a murderer, though easily gets away with it. Through psychological awareness, I keenly unlock Marianna’s pain, and she commits suicide–taking advantage of a mentally damaged woman while in a cocaine stupor – sickening indeed. If a real person did that for real, they would deserve to die. May your day be filled with joyful happiness!

Tags: horror, psychological disorders, psychoses, transgressional fiction