Tragically Killed Due to Clerical Error hosts writing that doesn’t fit in, that is peevish in social situations, and that has no conception of its proper place in the world. A lot of this stuff was just lying around and didn’t really have a concept of how to get on with things. These pieces were working at the mall, living at their parents’ house, and making expensive long-distance phone calls to people who didn’t deserve it. We hope that by presenting these pieces to you, they will have found something worthwhile to do with themselves, and will no longer be taking up much-needed space in their creator’s hard drives / minds. We hope you enjoy these, the bitter and half-ripe fruits of our sometimes distracted labors.
-The Administrators.
For more information concerning contributors and selections, please drop a line to sallingh@gmail.com. All pieces on this site are the sole property of the contributors, and are not to be reprinted without permission.
Short Biographies of the Contributors
About Sam
Things I would like to learn about: Arson and how to identify it, fishing, carpentry, haberdashery/tailoring, police procedure, the workings of an automobile.
Things I already know a little bit about: European history, acoustic guitar, Japanese pop culture, the rock drumset, blues record, short stories.
Things I don’t want to know about: the price of speedboats, techniques to make oneself attractive to the opposite sex, Star Wars trivia, rhyming poetry, economics.
Places I have lived: Greenwich, NJ; Philadelphia, PA; Oberlin, OH; Kyoto, Japan.
Thank you for reading my fictional works! I hope you enjoy them/tell me how you might enjoy them more/tell me I suck!
About Walker
Words & I go pretty far back. I always kind of liked them, but I was scared to talk to them. I would usually just look down at my feet and kind of fiddle with my shirt collar. One time when we were eleven, words smiled at me, and I almost peed.
I finally officially hooked up with words some time in high school. We seemed to get along okay, and though we had some rough patches – especially when I went away to college – things eventually smoothed over and words and I were a steady item by my last year of school.
Even then, though, we both knew that things were falling apart. There were nights when I’d sit up late, just wanting to spend some time together, but words never showed up. In the morning I’d try not to snipe, but words were already tired and grouchy, and all I could do was leave a banana and a blank note on the table and go out, shutting the door as quietly as I could.
Words finally left two Decembers ago, and – except for a memorable one-night stand last July – I haven’t seen much of them since. I’ve missed words, of course – not as often as you’d think, a fact which makes me a little uneasy whenever I think about it. But it still shook me up quite a bit when, about a week ago, I heard that words might be interested in getting back together. What should I do? I didn’t want too seem too eager. A new start would mean a lot of awkwardness and confusion, I was sure. But wouldn’t it be worth it? We had some good times together, or at least I remember them as good times.
Last Friday night was the first time we’d seen one another in months. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands. The evening was full of moments when our time apart completely slipped both of our minds, or my mind at least. I kept instinctively almost doing things that would have been no big deal once, but that now made both of us a little uncomfortable.
I think it’s a good sign that words and I decided to keep on trying, even after our first somewhat disappointing attempt. We’ve seen each other almost every day since then, and things seem to be improving. I don’t want to jinx anything, but I feel like this time we might be able to build that lasting relationship that I think we’ve both always wanted. We’ll see! My fingers are crossed.
March 9, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I wonder how many people today who cruise blogs know anything about the real little small town places where roads run around marshes. We have a broad fiction to draw on. I love this story. I love the disconnect between the narrator in the present and the narrator in the past, because that’s a real disconnect today that effects our collective hearts and souls.
To me the insertion of the nets is way of making nature very visible, when ordinarily it simply is part of the background, while not romanticizing it by describing it in any great detail. The net is not natural, not a bit natural, in fact it’s soaked in poison. And yet its presence makes the natural visible, especially the cornfield which is pressing up against it at the lovers below make love for the first time.
There’s something special about a rural small town in America that brings this juxtaposition of nature and control into a poetic story, usually centering on a young boy and a young girl. OFten, as in this story, it’s the boy whose destined to move beyond the little town and the girl who stays and dies there. That can be seen as sexist in the writer but in the real world it’s more the truth than anything else. Boys escape more often, it seems, the writers and the soldiers, they find larger pastures and different women.
The pull of nostalgia is not altogether to be abhorred. We find in our childhood things we loved because we simply loved them without anybody telling us we should or directing us in their direction. We loved the fields, we loved the moon, we loved the smell of our pillow, we loved the rituals of the seasons – we were lucky of we had these connections with natural life, and if we’ve had them, we’re not wrong to celebrate them in that sense of nostalgia.
March 10, 2007 at 12:08 am
This is my mom’s response to my story, “Under the Netting”. I didn’t quite know how to repost it under the actual story, but it actually works quite well in this section. Both my ma and I lived in small town NJ for about ten years, and while we have different ideas about the town and what went on in it (I actually intended the story to be kind of a parody of the childhood awakening-trope we see a lot in short fiction) her response actually has more to do with the real town we lived in than the story does. Also, her final lines are really quite nice, better than I could have done.