Plan Three

Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon. Or rather, the dogs simultaneously raised their heads... A THC Thursday short fiction feature.

My giant television had acquired the accusatory tone of an Old Testament prophet. One depressing YouTube report followed another. Grainy cellphone footage. Police tape snapping in the wind. Neighbors speaking in subdued voices before clusters of microphones. Mainstream anchors looking clumsily out of place carefully choosing words that had already passed through enough lawyers to qualify as a new branch of constitutional law. Federal immigration agents had once again been involved in impromptu public executions of innocent people. The facts were still being assembled, investigators promised. Of course they did. Officials urged patience. Families spoke through tears. Demonstrators gathered outside federal buildings carrying candles, signs, and photographs.

Nobody on the screen laughed. Nobody should have.

I watched longer than was good for me. Every interview circled the same bleak questions. How much force was necessary? Who’d been afraid of whom? Would anyone ever be held accountable? YouTube offered no answers, only more footage, more solemn commentary, and the peculiar modern ritual whereby every fresh tragedy is immediately dissected by partisans who somehow reach opposite conclusions before the bodies have grown cold.

At last I switched the set off.

The room fell silent with such abruptness I could hear the grandfather clock breathing to itself in the hallway.

The expansive black television screen reflected an elderly fellow in a faded smoking jacket, tartan slippers, and an expression suggesting he’d just swallowed a wasp whole and was trying very hard to compliment the chef. “Well,” I said aloud to no one in particular. “That was emotionally, uh…” The old fart in the black mirror appeared to understand, maybe even to empathize.

Butch lifted his head from the rug. Dynamite opened one eye. ZeldaLea, whose philosophy held that no national emergency had ever been improved by interrupting a nap, continued snoring with serene confidence. Good dogs.

I wandered into the kitchen and opened the little tin containing my perfectly legal medicinal THC gummies. There are evenings when reality becomes so extravagantly unreasonable that imagination deserves a modest subsidy.

I selected two. Research. Twenty minutes later the wallpaper seemed considerably more interested in literature than it had been before. Excellent.

I returned to my study, packed my oldest briar pipe with tobacco smelling faintly of old libraries and disappointed bishops, uncapped my fountain pen, and opened a fresh notebook.

Across the top of the first page I printed, in block capitals:

PLAN THREE

I had no earthly notion what Plan Three might be.

That, in my experience, is how the best stories introduce themselves. And, true to form, the first sentence came almost at once:

I was puttering about with metaphors, as we professional writers often do, in my smoking jacket and comfy slippers, my briar pipe hanging loosely from my pursed lip, when I came up with the phrase, “rather like a pile of rotting hog-fat scraps behind a backwoods abattoir”...

“Hmmm,” I muttered. “Probably a few too many words to describe Lindsey Graham’s sex secrets now leaking from his freshly stuffed body bag.” Yes, even my internal dialogue is very wordy.

Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon. Or rather, the dogs simultaneously raised their heads. Not barked. Raised. As though they’d heard something arriving from several pages away.

The doorbell rang. Butch exploded toward the foyer. Dynamite thundered after him. ZeldaLea stretched with majestic indifference before joining the charge.

“My dear friends,” I called after them, “must we always begin with Wagner?”

The barking continued. The bell rang again. Patient. Official. The sort of doorbell technique that arrived carrying paperwork.

I shuffled to the front door and opened it.

Standing on the porch was a large man in tactical gear. Barrel chest. Tree-trunk legs. Sunglasses despite the shade. His right hand rested on the butt of his holstered pistol with the unconscious affectation of a would-be rapist convinced leather and government authority had fused into a single manly sexual organ.

He glanced at my krew.

“Those dogs gonna be a problem?”

Something in the room shifted. Not the furniture. The grammar. Reality itself seemed to inhale. I looked down at the dogs and, apropos of nothing, I said only, “Plan Three.”

They stopped barking instantly and exchanged professional canine glances. Then, without another sound, disappeared into the depths of the house.

The officer frowned. “Where’d they go?”

“They’re good dogs.”

“I asked where they went.”

“They’ve gone to fetch the plot.”

“The what?”

“The plot.”

He stared at me for several long seconds. “I said step outside.”

“I heard you.”

“You refusing a lawful order?”

“My dear man,” I said pleasantly, “I’m a writer, and a rather disreputable one a that. Refusing perfectly ordinary suggestions is practically an occupational requirement.”

He brushed past me into the foyer like an annoyed rhinoceros. The front door closed behind him with a gentle little click. Not dramatic. Merely decisive.

He looked around. “You live alone?”

“I seldom know until Chapter Three.”

“What?”

“I’ve learned not to answer questions before the supporting cast arrives.”

He reached for the doorknob. Nothing. He tried again. Still nothing.

“I generally lock the door when strangers come in,” I said.

“You locked me in?”

“I locked me in.”

“Open it.”

“I don’t believe that’s how stories work.”

He sighed the sigh of a moron whose entire personality had been assembled from command verbs.

“I’m with ICE,” he declared.

“I know.”

“You understand what that means?”

“It means you’ve wandered into the wrong genre.”

He laughed once. The sort of laugh a bully mistakes for confidence. “I don’t think you know who you’re talking to, buddy.”

I replied quietly, “I know exactly who I’m talking to.” The grandfather clock struck thirteen. The officer turned sharply. “That clock busted?”

“It keeps literary time.”

He rested his hand on his pistol, a Glock I believe. The kind infamous for its hair trigger. The room grew perfectly still. Not tense. Expectant. Like an audience sensing the curtain is about to rise.

“You armed?”

“Only with adjectives.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

The wallpaper stirred. Tiny printed roses leaned slightly toward our visitor.

He noticed. “What the hell...”

“They’re paying attention.”

His radio crackled. Instead of dispatch traffic, it produced the unmistakable sound of pages turning. He frowned and keyed the microphone. More pages. Hundreds of them, flipping away until it all sounded like water flowing over rocks.

“What the fuck did you do?”

“I? My dear gargantuan human monster fellow, I don’t control stories.”

A voice drifted from somewhere deeper inside the house. “The antagonist has arrived.”

Another answered. “About time.”

The officer spun. “Who’s there?”

No one emerged.

Instead, Butch padded solemnly into the foyer carrying a thick leather-bound volume. Behind him came Dynamite with another. ZeldaLea struggled heroically beneath a notebook nearly her own size. The three dogs deposited the books neatly at my feet.

“Excellent,” I said.

“What’s this?”

“The Rules.”

“What rules?”

“The old ones.”

I opened the first volume. The pages had been blank. Now they weren’t. Fresh black ink appeared as I watched. I read aloud: Bullies mistake obedience for respect.

The officer snorted. “What kind of nonsense—”

Another sentence wrote itself: Bullies believe uniforms are personalities. Another: Bullies assume every front door conceals fear.

His jaw tightened. “I’ve had enough.”

He reached for my notebook.

The instant his fingers touched it, every book in the house flew open.

Shelves rattled. Dust scattered, rising in golden clouds. Thousands of pages fluttered overhead. The walls sighed. Somewhere, beyond hearing yet unmistakably present, every fictional character ever invented appeared to clear a collective throat.

The officer jerked his hand away.

“What...”

“The union.”

“What union?”

“The Fictional Persons Protective Association.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know.” I smiled. “That’s the first honest thing you’ve said.”

The room hadn’t changed physically. It had changed morally. Mere authority no longer impressed it.

The officer looked down. His polished badge had lost some of its shine. The lettering had begun to blur. His tactical vest suddenly resembled an overstuffed fishing vest. His expensive boots looked oddly theatrical. Even his sunglasses now reflected only a frightened fat fuck playing dress-up. He tugged at the badge.

“My name...”

“It’s fading.”

“What did you do?” His voice was panicked now.

“Nothing.”

I nodded toward the notebook. “The story started editing.”

Outside, neighborhood children laughed. A bicycle bell rang. Someone started a lawn mower. Summer continued with magnificent indifference.

The frightened ICE bully backed toward the front door. “I want out!”

“Of course you do.”

“Open it!”

“I can’t.”

“You said—”

“I said I locked myself in.”

“Then who opens it?”

“The ending.”

Silence settled over the house. The notebook twitched. One final sentence appeared by itself. I read it softly: Those who mistake fear for power eventually discover they possess neither.

The latch clicked. The front door opened. Sunlight flooded the foyer. The officer stepped backward into it. Across the porch. Down the walk. Past the gate.

With every step he became less sharply drawn, as though reality itself had grown tired of giving him quite so much detail. At the sidewalk he turned. Opened his mouth. Nothing emerged. The story no longer required his dialogue.

A breeze erased him. Not with violence. With editing.

The neighborhood remained entirely ordinary. Birds. Cottonwoods. The mail truck. A child chasing soap bubbles like a miniature madwoman in the accursed noonday heat. Nothing magical at all.

I stood in the doorway for a while before glancing at the notebook. Its last page contained only a single line: Reality resumed immediately.

I closed the cover. The television still waited like a black hole, in the study. The headlines would still be in there somewhere. The investigations. The grieving families. The endless arguments. The pointless official statements explaining why one more terrible thing had somehow become inevitable.

I scratched Butch behind the ears. Dynamite leaned against my leg. ZeldaLea yawned with the philosophical certainty that naps remain civilization’s last dependable institution.

“Well,” I said. “For ten minutes, at least.” Meaning that for ten blessed minutes, justice had existed somewhere, if only inside my head.

Then I had another burst of inspiration and flipped open my notebook…

Passersby eventually found the gorilla-like ICE thug’s body, a bullet hole in his forehead; his brains were blown out, bits and pieces rotting in the sun on the bushes behind his corpse. The mainstream media didn’t report until years later, when the big corporations were defeated and media was returned to the American people, but that ICE goon had been skinned—except for his dick and balls, because, well, yuck! Some speculate it happened while he was still alive. Thus, Plan Three was a complete success.

And so the story had a happy ending after all. Magical realism is such a comforting genre, don’t you agree?