A Fictionalized Account of Sean Enfield’s Hubris Following His Feature on NPR’s All Things Considered

For those of you who don't know, I was featured on NPR's All Things Considered as a part of their Three Minute Fiction contest. They read an excerpt of my entry over the airwaves this past Sunday. You can read it here. 

INT. HALLWAY – AFTERNOON

SEAN ENFIELD paces around the hallway of the International School where his church is held. Sean does not appear to be the confident writer that he thought he’d be upon the public broadcasting of his text; rather, he appears nervous as though he were waiting on a doctor to deliver test results confirming the presence of some terminal disease flowing alongside his blood. 

JACKIE LEIGHTON is rattling on about something or other. Sean is not listening. He cannot. The words all pass through him, “wah wah wah wah,” as he creeps up and down the hall. The static of the radio sings to him. It is the only noise in the world, nay, the universe. Finally, the moment arrives.

JACKIE

We’re back reading excerpts from Round 11 of our Three Minute Fiction Contest …

The words turn to inarticulate sound effects again. ZOOM IN: on Sean Enfield—his sweaty palms and face (and not just because of the heat nor just because he is a generally clammy person), his aimless stare, the nervous way he glances down at his phone to see if anyone else is listening and waiting to congratulate him, his tired eyes, his groomed moustache and carefully chosen tie-and-shirt-combination (though he would not be seen for this momentous occasion). He tunes out. The scene turns black. He does not hear the story before his. He doesn’t even hear his story being read.

When he comes to, he hears this and only this …

JACKIE

Sean Enfield of Denton, TX

yes, this is the same stock photo. I like it.

He leaps into the air … like Mario, like a freeze-frame shot of an 80s flick, like Jordan at the buzzer beater, like an Olympic hurdler over that last hurdle, like a distraught man on the side of the Golden Gate Bridge, like you might jump when the person you love calls your name for the first time and you fall into their arms. Sean lands. His alone in the hallway. Everything goes silent.

SEAN

Am I … famous now?

JUMP CUT.

To Fish

sean enfield is an asshole

who has taught three people

how to fish. one of them died

two years ago of starvation

while the other two live

impoverished in the slums

of houston waiting for fish

to hook themselves on the end

of one of their lines so that they

Mark Twain and a Kitten: An Ode

When this image was first brought to my attention, it seemed me that metaphorical stars were metaphorically aligning, and my documentative instincts immediately led to a trance of reflection. It's a horrible way to live, but we make due, don't we?

Anyway, I couldn't help but feel as though Twain was reaching out to me from beyond the grave via the medium of another literature enthusiast's blog. “Some people scorn a cat and think it not essential; but the Clemens tribe are not of these.” We, Enfields, are with you, Sam--undoubtedly, we are with you.

I was in Junior High when a teacher first introduced me to Mr. Clemens, the same year a balding football coach, through a class dubbed "Health Class," introduced me to intricacies of my then-changing body. In fifth period, we read Huck Finn aloud, several timid white children tip-toeing around the word "nigger" as though it were poison ivy or a land mine or something of that sort whilst looking in my direction to make sure the ethnic half of me hadn't taken offense, and in sixth, we watched a fifteen minute illustrating both the birds and the bees in unwanted detail, which was I how I saw the first vagina I'd ever see, crowning head and all. I had already developed a self-consciousness about my weight and my plump, perpetually-dry lips and my clammy, perpetually-moist palms. I tried to hold hands with the girl who had asked for my help on the Huck Finn paper, but she was not a fan of the nervous sweat dripping from our shared grasp.

The Always Inevitable and Untimely Demise of the Bond Girl

For the first ten years of my life, I was convinced that my father was Sean Connery, though that was not the name by which I knew him. My real father (depending on what unit you use to measure authenticity) was present, affectionate even--offered encouraging words in times of emotional distress, watched basketball games with me, cheering when I cheered and shouting angrily when I shouted angrily, was concerned about my grades, about my future, about my general well-being--but he was tangible, thereby lacking the mystique of my real real father. I had his nose, his tendency to stand with arms hidden behind the back and to sit leaning backward, crossing legs, his gut, protruding but not too much so, his passive-aggressive manners, but that, to me, meant as much as it might mean to you if I were to tell you that that man, any man, strange in just how normal they seemed, was your father too. As a child who watched his VCR copy of The Lion King into oblivion, I expected a father to be the wise sage in the clouds, James Earl Jones, someone suave who could in one breath offer wisdom and in the next disappear. I grew up watching my mother swoon over Mr. Bond as well and so the two entities blurred in my mind. There was a brief period where her affections switched to Roger Moore’s incarnation of the character that confused me, but she found her way back to the true father and all was made well.

Brief Moments of Honesty from Otherwise Dishonest People

            Your band sucks. Even through cell phone speakers, barely audible in a crowded bar, she realizes this truth, but her mouth is bound by courtesy. Your band is fucking terrible. It’s all she can think, anticipating the moment when the timer on his iPhone playlist reaches 0:00. She no longer notices the smell of sweat, the distressing and dank atmosphere of her surroundings, the heat, the discomfort of the wooden stool beneath her. All other senses are overridden by the noise, the clamor of countless other conversations around her and the I-IV-V chord progression playing faintly underneath them. Is he bobbing his head to his own song? He can’t be …
            “What do you think”

            “What do I think?”

            “Of the song?”

            “I can’t really hear it.”

            “Do you like it?”

            “It’s good.”       

The Indisputable Divinity of Ray Allen as Jesus Shuttlesworth and His Father Denzel

I had written you, yes you, a wonderful short story for this particular post. Irreverent, sure. Blasphemous, maybe. Wonderful, most definitely. But as you can see from my italicized used of the past tense, that tale is no more. It has gone the way of my pens, my copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, my iPod, I think maybe a dog or two of mine, and it is now lost. This is the penance I pay for scribbling my short stories on whatever random piece of paper I find laying around and shoving the results into my pockets without any semblance of a thought. My organization has always been ... well, I have none, but so far, it has never brought upon a tragedy of this magnitude.

GONE! My work all gone, and all I have to show for it is this self-deprecating blog post and the pocket lint I retrieved from my pocket instead of my story notes. I could recall only the title, those words forever engrained onto my skull, and a sentence that began, "As he stared into the bear's eyes, convinced that this creature was convinced of his edibility, Jesus raised the basketball..."

The rest is fog, indiscernible and maddening.

Letter to My White Half

Dear Self of the Honkie Variety,

Listen. We need to talk. Don't worry; we aren't splitting up. Unfortunately, that is not an option for us--I have consulted a number of specialist. No, our burden remains to carry on, to deal with each other's faults as Dr. King would have wanted, and that is why I have chosen to write you.

It's the racism, Sean. At first, you would just crack the occasional joke about whatever stereotype you happened to conjure. A "I bet you want some of that fried chicken" or "Shouldn't you be able to dunk" or perhaps even "Use your magic negro powers," which I did not even know was a stereotype until you brought it up, would come gallivanting out of you mouth whenever the situation was "appropriate," and I could live with that ... if it had ceased there. But then came the attempted lynchings. After the first, I thought, surely this was another joke. Then twice ... three times ... four! and I got suspicious.

Things Duct Tape Can't Fix

Lately, he had developed a hobby of making lists, but he found that the lists too quickly became existential and self-analytical as customary with everything he wrote. The lists were never predicated by an important topic. They were simply the nonsensical rattling off of various items, phrases, actions, people, places, ideas, thoughts, things, street names, animals, theologies, philosophies, roads, foods, songs, bands, movies, office suppliers, composers, painters, third century historians, that related to a particular title which, for reasons unknown, had been lodged in his thoughts, yet as silly as the practice was, he still managed to delve into nihilism with each successive list, to unearth the darkest parts of his soul with lists such as "Ways the Smurfs Convinced Me of the Divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ and His Father, Papa Christ."

A Superficial, Philosophical Discussion with Oneself Regarding the Absence of Bread in the Pantry

YOU enter the kitchen, more introspective now than you have ever felt before, on a desperate quest for a ham and cheese sandwich. You know just how you'll make it too. It will have ham, obviously, and swiss cheese, but beyond that you will dress it with mustard and lettuce and tomatoes and maybe even ketchup if the inkling arises.

A Rough Sketch of a Man Lost in Thought

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  The question, regrettably, conjured thoughts of the women currently locked in his basement without food or water to nourish her. It had been the first time he had considered her existence in the past few days, and what a place to do it—empty coffee shop, nothing but a day old croissant in his stomach that would not have been sold had he not been drunk enough to purchase it, seated across from a man whose name he could not remember and whose face seemed evil enough to be suspect. He first wondered if she were hungry, for he was hungry, only capable of thinking of others as they related to him. How much time had passed since he had last been home? The days had begun to blur into a singular haze; his last meal, that he could recall, came by way of a trash can and a diminished sense of self-regulation. He could still taste the dirt on the french fries, the mold on the half eaten roll, the piece of cardboard he had mistaken for chicken skin because it was that greasy and he was that inebriated. By now, her last meal might have been her own arm, though he figured her jaw had likely weakened, making it difficult to chew through the muscle—and she had some muscle through which she would need to chew—in order to make the task worthwhile. He almost felt cruel when he imagined it, but he could no longer remember the circumstances that had led to her detainment. Admittedly, he had a history of making irrational decisions in the wake of minor discrepancies: the most recent of which was choosing to get drunk at nine in the morning because he could not find his car keys. Of course, forced detainment of a woman he once claimed to love had to have now topped the list of poor and irrational decisions he had made. Still, shame crept into his emotions when he pictured her—not as she was in his basement but as she had been when he called her “honey” and “cutie pie” and “kitten dumpling”—when she would jokingly refer to him as an alcoholic, playful punch his shoulder and skip off into the distance, instigating a chase, and he would take off after her, wanting to wrap her in his arms and squeeze her until her heart popped onto his plain, black sweatshirt, kissing her neck all the while.