written via zoom, revised during crescent city retreat, november 2021

The writer of fictions pulled off the street in front of Coast Central Credit in Arcata, California, and slid her Prius along the curb. In front of her car, a vintage Volvo with faded bumper stickers:  a rainbow Kamala in all block letters, “Read a Fucking Book,” and “I brake for shadows and hallucinations.” Giselda thanked her fortuitous glowing orbs she was parked on the street behind the car. You didn’t want to be following a car like that in traffic, what with the driver stopping for any insubstantial dark shapes.

Giselda read the slogans and noted scuffed paint and deep gouges on a rear hubcab. Grey grime coated the car. The Volvo’s rear windshield wiper had swished a half moon from the back window. She imagined the kind of dusty roads on which the Volvo had been driven. A dusty beach parking lot, loaded with potholes. Lighthouse Road in Petrolia, the gateway to the Lost Coast. Or Burning Man, all that playa dust.  Those were places where cars could get that dirty.

She snapped a quick photo of Volvo through her front window. For near future reference.

She popped gum in her mouth and felt cool mentholated explosions zinging.

Giselda, the writer and hero of my tale, was struggling to get her powers of observation back. She inhaled sensory details like a diver sucking oxygen from an refilled tank. Sights and sounds were the progenitors of idea. Ideas fueled stories. Giselda hadn’t been able to write, not for days or weeks or months or, in fact, practically since the start of the covid.

Giselda been one of the first of her friends to get the coronavirus. Back in March, when folks were still taking the lockdown and stay-at-home orders seriously, when streets were empty and coyotes were howling on the Golden Gate Bridge. It started with the relentless cough, the fever. Then burning eyes and nausea. A long wait in a crowded emergency room one night. A couple weeks disappearing into the memory abyss. You know how the virus works, though. We all do.

Finally, pain transformed to discomfort, a little covid hangover. You’ve heard of brain fog, right? A little bit of that long covid. That’s probably why Giselda could not focus on the novel she was revising, couldn’t track her invented characters, their nuanced relationships and pesky pre-pandemicky problems. In the next few months, nothing much improved. She exercised and cleaned the house. She cleaned her closet and dug out the huge brass obelisk she’d won as a prize for literary fiction designed to be read on devices – the Mobile Raven Writing Award. The award’s nicknamed the Mo’ Poe, but you know that. Giselda had reveled in the award, the proof that literary agents who’d accused her of vicious verbosity were woefully wonderfully wrong. She ignored calls from friends who wanted to visit. She turned to streaming media for narrative but her eyes drooped at insipid sitcoms and even the prequel movie for a ground-breaking HBO drama seemed pointless, boring, incapable of harnessing her attention.

She couldn’t write because she couldn’t think. The cloud was thick and viscous from when she rolled out of bed to when she climbed back in at night. “Your head will collapse,” the Pixies warn lyrically, “If there’s nothing in it.” Every morning, she sat in front of her computer with her manuscript on the screen. By noon, she’d conceded to cranial disintegration.

Months sunk away.

One blissful day, she filled her mug with coffee and, damn, it was dark, earthy and fucking delicious. She added cream and savored the return of flavor.

It was time to start again. She needed to feast on experience, see and feel some facts. Assemble specifics. She stepped out her door into the glorious hues of her world. California poppies, brilliant orange, growing between cracks in the sidewalk. The smell of lupine blooming near her garage, golden and purple and white and all the hybrid shades in between.

She climbed into her Prius and began an observational odyssey.

Exiting the freeway, a man with a torn cardboard sign that said, simply, “I’m having a hard time.” He lifted it toward her as she pulled up to the stop sign at the end of the offramp. She tipped her head to him. He was wearing a t-shirt with the Nirvana logo. The shirt didn’t quite reach his waistband.

“Cool band,” she said. She smiled and realized he couldn’t see her smile through her mask.

“I’m smiling at you,” she said. She inhaled a hint of his odor, redwoods, dirt, hand-rolled cigarettes.

“Can you help me out with any spare change?”

She shook her head. “I’m cashless.”

But that was her bank just ahead. The front doors were propped open. She could see the lobby, almost empty but for one person talking to a masked teller behind a thick plexiglass partition. She couldn’t remember. Were there always plastic partitions in banks and grocery stores? It seemed normal now but maybe there was more plexiglass now that in the before time. Note: research needed on plexiglass proliferation.

She pulled off the street in front of the bank and parked her car behind a bumper stickered Volvo. Kamala in rainbow colors, “Read a Fucking Book,” and “shadows and hallucinations.”

She looked up and down the street to see if someone like this car’s owner was in sight. A teenager in a black beanie crossed the street swinging his left arm. His right hand was tucked in the front of his jeans. A human with nuance, thoughts, desires. A human with 20 stories or 50. All humans have 20 stories, at least. But this human was not the driver of the Volvo, the car with so many inspiring slogans.

Giselda slid her driver’s seat back, tucked her legs up against the steering wheel and began to invent.

The car in front of her belonged to Missy Hawthornenstien, an aging hippie cannabis farmer –  — farmer or college professor, 1970s Northern California back-to-lander. This character named Missy assumes she defies California stereotypes while inhabiting them all. Hemp pants and a windbreaker, definitely that’s what Missy Hawthornenstien wore. She had just broke up with her longtime partner. They’d fought about getting vaccinated. Missy wanted to be the first to the bank to clean out their joint account. But the damn tellers wouldn’t close her account without her husband there to show his ID and sign the paperwork.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, grumbled Missy, coming out of the open bank doors of Giselda’s fertile mind.

Missy lit a cigarette. Wait, should Missy smoke? Yes, maybe, if she’s a farmer. Probably not, maybe not if she’s a college professor.

She did say “Fuck fuck fuck” and stuck her debit card in the ATM. Missy withdrew $300, the max. The machine spit out a wad of $20s and Missy counted it, her eyes darting up and down the street. She tucked the wad in her matching hemp sack and poked at the machine till it spit out another wad of $20s and then another. But that was the machine’s limit. She had $900 in $20s but couldn’t get at the rest of the dough.

Not bad. Giselda had a character and a conflict. She would have to check on what the limits were, really, for ATM withdrawals. The writer had a where and when, basically here and now. Giselda had a story. What would happen next to Missy Rainsongshine? Shit, she’d have to change that awful name. Sunny Baldwin? Pomona Hart? She kind of liked Pomona Hart, Pomona with a cultural legacy that helped her fit in anywhere. Pomona who’d moved here in the 1980s and spent her trust fund on some acres west of McKinleyville.

Now Giselda zipped over the the ATM herself and took out $20. She noted the worn buttons on the machine and an Airhead candy wrapper left on a scuffed metal shelf. This was where Pomona had obtained enough cash to get out of town but not enough to retain a lawyer. Was Pomona the kind of person who would pick up litter at the ATM and toss it in the trash? What would Pomona do, now that she’d left her partner? Giselda would think of something exciting. Pomona could become a detective or an epidemiologist. She could be recruited as a spy or abducted by extraterrestrials. Giselda had never made a foray into speculative fiction. Maybe it was time to rethink genre. Fantastic shadows and illusory hallucinations seemed right for these pandemicky times.

Back in the car, she u-turned and slowed in front of the Hard Time Guy in the Nirvana shirt. Here’s some dough, she said and handed him the bill. Then it was back to the onramp and home to her garage, inhaling lupine, bouncing into her office because now, now she felt like she might just be able to write. She sat down at her desk and opened her computer.

And then the walls of her home started shaking. Was this an earthquake? She should get under her desk, she thought, but it was too late. The rattling Mo’Poe fell off the shelf above her desk and, bam, hit Giselda’s skull, scrambling her brain in ways that could not be fixed by the EMTs or emergency room doctors.

Giselda would never write again.

What, you don’t like that ending? What a picky reader you are. I am the writer. I could throw the earthquake at you and you’d just have to accept it, at this point, having read the previous 1,200 words or so.

But sure. I can take a hint. No earthquake. Or maybe stick with a little pointless rumbler that breaks nothing at all, all metaphor, no fatalities.

The rumbling. The adrenaline surge that comes with surviving something Real fuels the story Giselda starts that night. Pomona Hart’s abduction by the extraterrestrials that unleashed covid on the unsuspecting masses becomes a bestselling pandemic novel. Giselda exists blithely ever after or at least for another couple decades.

Happy?