Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Dave Edgers / The End Is Night

Short short stories

The End Is Night

by Dave Edgers
Saturday 4 June 2005

There once was a man who thought, one day, on a lark, while looking at a lark - he was looking out of the window and there it was, a well-built lark with a dirty mind and a filthy mouth - that maybe he should write some very short stories and publish them in a land very far from his own land, which was California, which has a ludicrous man as its governor. The man, then, began writing these short stories, one a week, and they were published in this far-off land, which is sometimes called London, and sometimes England, and also the UK and Britain and sometimes Europe or Over There. The man wrote these short stories each week, and sometimes, when he had finished writing one, he thought that he liked it. Other times, he read over what he'd written and didn't like it quite so much, but often it was too late, and these short stories went out to the people of the land described before, and, presumably, ruined their days. But, overall, the practice of writing these tales, which often involved bears and sometimes squid and once in a while people, was a pleasurable one. Yes, it was, until one day, when the writer suffered a bout of some kind of disease. It was not a normal disease, in that it had never struck anyone before, at least no one outside of Canada, where the diseases are all very deadly, thank God.

The disease in question had as its main deleterious effect the fact that it renders its victims perfectly unable to write anything but 500-page books about the civil war in Sudan. It is a very strange and rare thing, this malady, but there you have it. Actually, you don't have it. The author who usually writes short stories in this space has it, and he is stuck with it. The only cure for said affliction, alas, is the completion of a novel about Sudan, which his publisher is waiting for, and which the author has been working on for upwards of three years (and for which he believes he is on the home stretch). Until he finishes it, he cannot write more short stories; he cannot, come to think of it, stand up or walk or talk to friends and prostitutes. So this is what the writer will be doing for the next many months, while your mornings are brightened by crossword puzzles or advice columns for badger-stuffers or whatever eventually comes to fill this space. As long as there is nothing by or about Canadians, the writer will be happy. And he will be happy to write one last story, which will appear next week and will feature many giant squids, in a great but ultimately indecisive battle with the bears of Yosemite. These are the bears you heard about before, who don't like EM Forster. It should not be missed.

THE GUARDIAN