GABRIEL BLACKWELL / CRUEL, AND UNUSUAL
This piece and more work by Gabriel Blackwell appears in Always Crashing Issue Five, now available to order via Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and local bookstores everywhere (we particularly like Pilsen Community Books in Chicago and White Whale Books in Pittsburgh).
Because this man is a writer, he can imagine many different kinds of cruelty, is able to imagine many cruelties, but this man also knows he believes he only really has the stomach, in the end, to realize one of these many imagined kinds of cruelty, that of writing (while of course recognizing that this one kind of cruelty may yet produce many further cruelties; a realist, in other words). It might be reasonable to assume this cruelty would take the form of writing about others in a critical or insulting way, but this man, because he has been a writer for some time and has been a reader even longer, this man understands that really the cruelty comes from writing about others in any way at all. What is it that might make this man, this writer, want to be cruel? Well, because this man is a writer, we know that it could be virtually anything at all, which is to say it could also be nothing at all. So, something. The man doesn't know what it is and so we won't know what it is. It's a difficult thing, the man thinks, to be a writer, when every act of writing is a cruelty. And because what this man began to write was fiction, and because his fiction was most often left unread by others, he understood before he'd even begun that what he was going to write would be a cruelty perpetrated against himself. And so he had a thought; he ought to leave this fiction he'd written in a place where the man he lived with would see it, because he thought the man he lived with would be curious about this thing he, the man this writer lived with, had found, and would then feel himself bound to read it. It may go without saying that this man, this writer, believed that the man he lived with would read the thing he'd found because this is what the writer would do under the circumstances. The world, though, is not arranged that way, and the man the writer lived with saw the writing the writer had done, and, thinking it was probably something the writer hadn't meant to leave out, something, in other words, that wasn't meant to be read by others, not even the man this writer lived with, he simply left it there, where he'd found it, without so much as picking it up—without, in other words, reading it. The writer waited weeks for the man he lived with to bring up what he, the writer, had written, but the man the writer lived with never did, in all that time. And so the writer had the idea to repeat the experiment, but this time, he would make the first word of his story the name of the man he lived with. In fact, he decided, he would name the main character of the story he was writing after the man he lived with. Even if the man this writer lived with thought he wasn't supposed to read this thing that he'd found lying on the table in the living room, if he saw that the main character had the same name as him, how could he not then read it?, the writer thought. The writer first thought he ought to write a story in which this character was a hero, if only so that he could get his way without also creating strain at home, and so the story started that way, but, after he'd written a sentence or two, it all felt so false to the writer that, in his next few sentences, he so debased, degraded, and embarrassed his character that really this writer felt he'd lost his way, in the story he was writing and in life, and so he stopped. Over dinner, the writer asked the man he lived with for his opinion: Should the main character in his latest story be a hero, or should the main character in his latest story suffer some horrible fate? The man the writer lived with, not being himself a writer, said, Why can't it be both?
Gabriel Blackwell is the author of seven books, the most recent of which are Doom Town (Zerogram Press, 2022) and CORRECTION (Rescue Press, 2021). He lives in Spokane, WA.