Pilkington Raspberries

An unlikely name for an unlikely candidate. He softly rolled the cigarette between his lips, a quiet dance with the tongue acting as the fulcrum. Sharise Stewart Shepard, the first creation to ever come forth from his flowing pen. And now that she had, he felt horribly ashamed: with such a stubborn subconscious desire to be published, he was worried that the masses would read the tales from his youth and laugh at the alliterative titles of his stories. Sure, he had written others, but always stopped when it came time to title his story, and subsequently its protagonist. He refused to believe in the banal idea that fiction should be believable. Nor did he read fantasy, he found it childish and queer. His fiction was one more styled after Gonzo journalism: sure, far-fetched, but ultimately, believable. He heard his mother stalking up the stairs from the basement, her post-operated hip causing one leg to clunk, drag, clunk, drag, allowing him ample time to discard his cigarette into the neighbor's emaciated rose bush and pop a mint into his mouth. "It smells like cigarettes up here," she stated flatly, allowing no room for escape. "Must be this room, ma. Always has reeked. You haven't been at it again, have you?" Immediately defensive, she scoffed and clunk, drag, clunk, drag, walked away.

Humming tunelessly, he turned back to the mostly blank sheet. Feist calmly floated through the old speakers on his shelf, the simple, repetitive beat juxtaposed against simple melodies so pleasing to his untrained ears. He, as a rule, forbade himself any music that had more than 5 instruments playing at once. He also forbade himself electronic music, hip-hop and R&B, chamber music (the thought of Mozart chilled his heart), solo artists (as in those who used to be in a band and then went solo, making the same music and taking all the royalties), bands with a name beginning with a definite article, boy bands, girl bands, bands with biblical references, christian bands, jewish bands, polka bands, and smooth jazz. Bebop, Ethiojazz, and Acid Jazz were all acceptable, provided that they passed the aforementioned requirements. He also liked Joanna Newsom. He didn't read much, save books with tiny print and few pages. He still wrote longhand, even though it gave him terrible hand cramps and caused him suffering throughout the night. The way he saw it, he was atoning for crimes yet to be committed. He wasn't sure why he attempted writing at all. It wasn't for fame or glory--despite his childish fantasies he knew, in his subsubconscious, that he would never be published. He didn't care enough or ever work at it hard enough to get any better, and mostly he tried to imitate other writers, many of whom he had never read. Therefore, his page was often blank.

Feeling the mint dissolve to nothing on his tongue, he pulled out another Lucky Strike cigarette. Maybe this was why he wrote all fucking day. It was a beautiful excuse, a perfectly logical reason to smoke cigarettes. How many writers, intellectuals of their own class (barring self-help writers of political pundits), had wasted their lungs away to ash as they pulled cigarette after cigarette down their breathing tubes? Probably too many to count. Not that he would know, though. He didn't know much more than this stupid story had a stupid title character, and since it was his first one, perfectly valid. He struggled through a few pages of dialog and descriptive scenes before pitching it to the ever-friendly and non-judgmental trashcan. He started again, this time writing the exact same story with the exact same dialog and settings, except without a title character. Sharise Stewart Shepard was now floating in the entirely pure ether of "unused title characters" that exists obliquely in the brains of everyone who has ever dreamed of writing. What if he tried a simpler moniker, one like Johnathan Edwins? It didn't fit. The pronouns had to remain feminine: it upset the whole flow of the story if he made tiny dashes on every single S, hanging so precariously already onto the firmer base of HE. S looked as though it would roll over at any moment, toppling over and crumbling into oblivion, a dust cloud rising over the skyline. He felt wary of harming the weak, and therefore left the S's. Barring the chance of a transsexual, the protagonist would have to be female. What about Katherine (Kat for short) Gould? Kat could fill the position left so horribly vacant with the disappearance of Sharise, yet he felt as though he were selling out, doing himself some sort of injustice by limiting a name to such a simple three-letter nickname. Kat. Fat. Rat. No good. Disgusted, he slowly capped his felt-tip pen (the kind his horrid French teacher so famously outlawed after the Cherokee Falls Incident) and gently set it down on the worn table which held all of the answers.