No Reply
My first short story is live
Last August, I published my first short story in KGB Literary Magazine, a mag based out of KGB Bar in the East Village. The occasion was accompanied by a reading, which a number of trusty TRIAGE subscribers were kind enough to attend. We had a great time!
I’ve been to a lot of readings in the last few months, and (beware) a frustrated diatribe may be incoming; these events really aren’t the best way to interact with writing and reading themselves, which are, above all, highly solitary acts. But I can’t lie: getting up there and publicly getting into the weeds with this story, which I’d toiled on and wrestled with internally for the better part of a year, felt pretty damn good. I’m still pretty new on the scene, so I haven’t become old and jaded yet; I really appreciate everyone who came out, and everyone who’s given me really genuine (I think) feedback from reading the story in print.
And there’s exciting news! “No Reply” is now available to read online via the KGB website. It’s around 8,000 words long, so you’ll want to set aside between twenty and thirty minutes to read it, depending on how fast you go. And I really think you should; seven months later, I still feel really good about the piece, and think it’ll challenge and surprise you in ways you don’t anticipate. At its heart, it’s a mystery, and I suspect once you get into it you’ll find it hard to put down. I set out to write something unlike anything I was reading elsewhere that simultaneously wouldn’t be too esoteric to digest. And, well:
Seriously, if you like what I’ve been doing here, you should read (and share!) this story; I love the flexibility I have to do nonfiction stuff, but ultimately fiction is the direction I want to go in, which is a tougher slog industry-wise. You never know whose hands a story will fall into if you share it a few times.
Finally, I want to thank the team at KGB, and in particular its editor Carrigan Miller, who was the first person outside my immediate family to embrace this story so vociferously (subscribe to Carrigan’s Substack, both because he’s brilliant and it’s quite good and because it will force him to write for it more).
Stay tuned to this space, where I’ll have another exciting announcement for New Yorkers in the next week or two. I’ve been a little quiet here over the last month as I work on balancing out my fiction-nonfiction output and integrate some fancy-schmancy professional stuff into my life, but I’ll be back more consistently soon. In the meantime, here’s a preview of “No Reply” (click here to jump straight to the full version):
Nathan Cole <nathanco97@gmail.com> Fri, Oct 13 at 10:23 PM
To: Svetlana <svetllama214@yahoo.com>
Dear Svetlana,
I’ve tried everything. Figured this’d be worth a shot. Don’t ask me how I found it.
After a week of unanswered messages, I figured I wouldn’t see you again. This, on its face, I could understand. I do understand. It’s a premature ending, but as you and I discussed, this had to end sometime. Now or later, it’s not so different in the long run, the sort of long run we knew. Somewhere inside I know I will, someday, accept it, that you and it will fade, become one great learning lesson, everything dissolving into the great puddle of shit I’ll force a smile and call a learning lesson for the rest of my life.
But there’s acceptance and there’s that other thing, the doubt, blasting me over and over, replaying our last conversation dozens, hundreds of times in my head. I’ve thought of every alternative, every path I could have wound our last conversation down by replacing a noun here, a word there, adjusting my tone at a critical moment, switching to the passive tense at a crucial juncture.
That the outcome holds in each imagined scenario hasn’t stopped my ongoing search for a different destination. I hold onto the hope I’ll get there. I imagine the most crushing blow will come only later, when the fact of my finally having discovered the right formula will run into the truth that I found it too late, and, worse, that it was only in my own head, not out there where it counts. Where you’d have any chance of realizing I’d even tried to get it all back.
It must have been that talk. Right?
You make a decision and you take whatever you want with you when you walk away. I haven’t spoken with many people about you, but the few I have talk about debt. She owes you an explanation. She doesn’t owe you anything. Owing, not owing. Would our debt have ever been settled? Was our language insufficient? Did we not transcend?
Nate
Svetlana <svetllama214@yahoo.com> Sun, Oct 15 at 8:21 PM
To: Nathan Cole <nathanco97@gmail.com>
Dear Nate,
Last night, a mountain lion chased me through the streets of the city. I never actually saw it until the very end, but I knew it was there, and I knew I had to get away. I sensed it, in the beginning, near the train station. I don’t remember how. I only began to run.
I sprinted in every which direction, surprising myself with the turns I took, the routes I followed. I tried outwitting the mountain lion, and I felt the best way to do it was to outsmart myself. Complicating the whole effort was that while I sprinted for basically as long as I wanted (I impressed myself with my stamina) my feet never quite made as much traction with the ground as I would have liked. I would say it was like trying to run on ice, but that wasn’t quite it. It was as if every street, park, and lot I ran through was covered in loose, invisible gravel. Of course, there was no gravel anywhere. Each surface was perfectly normal, but my soles kept slipping, surprised air kicking up behind me with each dubious tread. Anyways, even if I’d had a good grip, I knew, the whole time, that no matter what I did the mountain lion would find me. I continued to run.
S…
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Was there - was brilliant - I love this story