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By Root 495 0

had walked into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. There were six men and five women, most of them in their late teens or early twenties, though there was one man who was in his forties, all of them holding notebooks, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. “So, students, this is Buster Fang,” Lucas began. “He’s the author of A House of Swans, which was universally praised by the critics and won the coveted Golden Quill award. His second novel, The Underground, was, befitting a second novel, a more complex and divisive book. He’s here to talk to us about the creative process, so I hope you’ll give him your full attention.” Lucas then turned to Buster and smiled. Buster had not prepared. He had assumed that Lucas and the students would ask questions and he would patiently try to answer them. He had no speech worthy of anyone’s full attention.

“Well, okay, thank you. It’s nice to be here. I thought, well, rather than bore you to death with my talking, you might like to ask questions and I would be happy to answer them as best I could.” He waited for questions and then, with a sickening realization, understood that there would be none. Lucas said, “Perhaps you might begin your presentation and that will generate questions?” Buster nodded. Then he nodded again. Then, to negate that extra nod, he shook his head. The students stared at their shoes with even more interest. “We are fugitives,” Buster thought. “We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” He resisted the urge to say this out loud.

“I like,” Buster began, unsure of what would follow, “well, I like to write on a computer.” One of the students wrote this statement down in his notebook and then, looking at what he had just written, frowned. “They used to make this gum,” Buster continued, “it had a kind of minty gel inside of it.” He looked at the students for recognition of this gum but found no sign of it on their faces. “Anyways, I liked to chew that while I wrote. It’s hard to find now, though.” He closed his eyes for a second and concentrated. “God, I can’t remember the name of that gum to save my life.”

Lucas Kizza finally interjected. “Um, Buster, perhaps you might want to speak in more general terms about your process. For instance, because these students are only beginning to find their own voice, perhaps you can talk about what drives you to put pen to paper?”

“Well, I write on a computer, like I said,” Buster replied.

Lucas Kizza’s patient smile, for the first time, began to disappear from his face. Buster felt his only ally, the one person who seemed to think that he wasn’t a total fuckup, pulling away from him. Buster dug deep. He touched the spot where his eye patch had once been and waited for the ESP to work its magic.

“Okay, I can do that,” Buster said. He looked at the students, who were almost willfully ignoring him now, and tried to say something that would bring them into his arms.

“Do you ever have a moment when you have this horrible thought and you can’t get rid of it, even though you want to?” he said. A few of the students looked up.

“Like, when you were a kid, did you have this idea pop into your head where you wondered what would happen if your parents suddenly died?”

Every student in the group was now listening to Buster. A few of them nodded and leaned forward. Lucas Kizza looked worried, but Buster felt something click into place.

“You don’t even want to be thinking about it, but you can’t stop. You think, well, I’ll inherit whatever money they have, but I probably won’t be able to access it until I’m eighteen. And I’ll probably have to live with my aunt and uncle who never were able to have kids and seem to hate me just because I exist. And then you realize that they live on the other side of the country so you’ll have to go to a new school. And if you’d managed to make any friends where you live now, you’re going to have to leave them behind and start all over again. And your new room is like the size of a closet and your aunt and uncle don’t eat meat and one time they find you eating a hamburger and scream at