Spectral Evidence

(get to it, get to it, get to it)

“…you seem really pissed off, actually. Is something wrong? Are you…not gonna take me there, tonight, or something?”

Yeah: ‘Cause that’s the deal-breaker, right there. Isn’t it?

“Of course I’ll still take you,” Nim snarls, eventually. “Jesus fucking Christ! Couldn’t get there on your own, that’s for sure. Besides which, I already goddamn said I would, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did.” A beat, then: “Why?”

(Why indeed?)

“Because I didn’t know you, back then,” Nim says. And gets up to pay their tab, back stiff, turned flat one-eighty to Veruca. Like she’s shutting a door in her face.

—

From Scarwid and Ffolkes’ Overview of Millennial Fantasists (Cold-water Flat Press, 2000)—

FFOLKES: I’ll begin with a few of your late uncle’s more noteworthy reviews, if I may…

TOM DARBERSMERE: Oh yes, please.

FFOLKES: “The bloody meat of Tim Darbersmere’s stories is always the exact opposite of the soothing, reasonable tone in which he communicates it.” “Never has such beautiful and clever prose been suborned to the service o

f such decadent and puerile ideas.” “Solipsistic to the point of sociopathy. Darbersmere is the sole protagonist of every story he’s ever written…the hero, the villain, and (most certainly) the love interest.” As you begin your own writing career, does the potential after-effect of these remarks disturb you?

DARBERSMERE: Not at all. I aspire, one day, to a similar critical impact.

FFOLKES: And “Ellis Iseland,” what about her? Why has she become central to your fiction, too—carried over from your late uncle’s work, for continuity’s sake? or does she represent some more personal archetype, perhaps?

DARBERSMERE: Ellis who? oh, you mean the chainsmoking war profiteer femme fatale from that last story Uncle Tim’s supposed to have written, the one no one’s ever reliably found a copy of?

FFOLKES: “The Emperor’s old Bones,” yes.

DARBERSMERE: Wherein we find out the secret key to eternal life and renewed youth is making a meal of filleted ghetto child? Well, that’s a bit like quizzing me on a viral Internet meme, one of those things that seep into the creative community’s groundwater without anyone noticing how, and wondering why you don’t get more of a distinct response.

FFOLKES: But she turns up here too, doesn’t she, in Tim’s own “Echidna Comes Rising”—he calls her Lisha Illen, granted, but each version is described using much the same language. or here, from your novella “Copshawholme Fair”: Elfis Isham. Essa HigHman in A Dull Wind Blows from the North, Ester Smallwaterhame in Safe in Their Alabaster Hives…

DARBERSMERE: Does she? I suppose she must. How extraordinary! You know, I never read my own stuff once I’m finished with it, no more than I re-read his. I really must start.

FFOLKES: Everyone’s got a type, I suppose.

DARBERSMERE: Oh, certainly. Every woman I write is my wife, to one degree or another.

—

The package is waiting for them when they get back to Nim’s. As Veruca trudges past, still sunk in the same kicked-puppy misery haze that made their silent walk back so excruciating, Nim unlocks her mailbox and frowns at the result: a flat rectangle wrapped in subtly-striped brown paper with a registered-mail barcode in one corner, poking up out of the rest of Friday’s bills. The return is a name she doesn’t recognize, in Australia; scrawled across the front in letters two inches tall, meanwhile, is—

ATTN VERUCA LUZ C/O NIMUE EWALT

“Veruca!” Nim’s a little startled by, but not really sorry for, her own shout’s volume; Veruca skitters back down, eyes wide, as she holds up the parcel. “What the hell? You gave my mailing address out to some guy, without even asking me? You—”

But Veruca throws herself headlong to rip it from Nim’s hand, tearing at the paper, all the while emitting such a fast high-pitched squeak it takes Nim a second to decipher it: “Ooh, owemjee owemjee owemjee owemjee owem jeeee!”

Owemjee, equalling OMG as in Oh My God, in ‘Net-compacted typespeak for terminally lazy hunt-and-peckers. As in—

Let’s get this straight…you can’t be bothered to fill in four extra letters, like you were actually saying something out loud? Like a genuine fucking adult?

“What is it?” Nim makes herself ask, at last. And Veruca turns it towards her with a The Prestige-y flick of the wrist, showman-like, conspiratorial: Ricepaper cardstock cover, deep Chinese red, embossed carp design. Pretty classy, actually, for some cheap little one-story printing…