FII – Will VanDenBerg

FII – Our Great City In Wartime

Failure Is Instructive is an occasional series where I take unpublished/unpublishable stories and reexamine them. They are often very old and not representative of my current work. Notes on the story are in bold italics.

This one goes way back. I wrote it for a fiction workshop during my sophomore year of undergrad, so about six years ago. I got some good feedback but never developed the piece after the semester ended. I’m hesitant to go back and read it, because now a 21-year-old writing a quasi-surreal 5,000 word story about war sounds insufferable, but hey, it could be fun?

Our Great City in Wartime

Two months ago I woke hooked to a rattling machine. I woke with an inch wide plastic tube stuffed down my esophagus; (Pretty sure I didn’t know how to use a semicolon then. Hooray for public school.) the end of which scratched the top of my trachea. There were smaller tubes, a quarter inch wide, poking at my eardrums. Through them I received sharp sounds like bullets flying past and low rumbles in the distance. Two tubes were shoved up my nose several inches, and the smell of dust and gasoline trickled through. My head was full with intrusions. (This would work better in the present tense. The “Two months ago” frame just distracts from what’s going on.)

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FII – Trajectory

Trajectory came from the same period as Underground Lights, the previous entry in the series. It was never submitted. I couldn’t ever get it too a point where I felt comfortable with it as a finished product. It also never felt essential — this kind of narrative has been executed better.

Here it goes.

Trajectory

Addams, Jennifer – Interview

“Jacob and I were in fifth grade together, but we weren’t friends or anything. And so much time has passed that I don’t feel like I got an accurate picture of him. I guess what I’m saying is, don’t treat my memories like gospel.

He was solitary. Not unpopular, he’d just go off by himself to practice different little things, like balancing on a thin ledge or hanging upside down on the monkey bars. He seemed to enjoy gathering a crowd of witnesses, but only after he perfected something.

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FII – Underground Lights

Underground Lights came about during an idea session four or five years ago. I had a week off work and mapped out several stories on whiteboards and easel pads. Other story ideas during that time: a middle aged woman in an empty house with the ghost of an old professor, a child who dies trying to scale a batting cage, a sci-fi story about masked aliens.

I sent it out to a few places, although it had been completed for almost a year. Rejections all around, but it wasn’t submitted widely. I then lost any ambition for it, having turned my attention to more promising work.

Underground Lights

Underground 1

The inhabitants of the area underground don’t expect to see the sun. They exist without expectations, without contentment or desire. They live most of their lives like moths drawn to a flame, chasing their little lights around. (It starts off kind of pretentious. The moth to the flame image, the repetition of the words underground and without. It’s too self-consciously arty. Also, the first sentence is unjustifiably stilted — it chucks the reader into the world.)

Occasionally, one will receive the notion that something is missing (The word “one” shouldn’t be used as the subject of a sentence except in case of emergency. It’s particularly confusing in this case. Who is the one? Are they an inhabitant of the area? If you can be more specific you should.) . He will look around the darkness, possessed by a memory, not of light, but of an absence of darkness. The walker will then shake the idea from his skull and walk away.

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