I wrote this in part as a joke response to a conversation about an anthology call for a story that “writes a wrong.” So I pitched an idea to write something wrong: Ideas, language, structure —everything breaking down.
And then over the last few days I had the feeling that this was about more than just word play. Maybe it described where we actually are.
Maybe we are, as the last line says, dumb kids with a fire and a gas can.
Read on:
Aw, it was wrong.
Oh, doggit, was it wrong.
Stealing a little kid’s lunch money wrong.
Sending tourists to the darkest, deadendingist wrong direction where they was gonna have to K-turn in the woods wrong.
Where there was, like, bears.
So wrong there want no definition in Webster’s for it. Ya coun’t look it up.
Where people said “gunn-nu” when they meant “going to” and you had to ask someone else the question because every time you axed a question they looked at ya like ya was from Mars.
Then someone would point in a direction and you’d follow the finger because ya was choosing between being upset or embarrassed because ya did’t know how to get from Point A to Point B in a place ya’d never been and end up in the woods with bears.
That’s how wrong it was.
Deliberately, purposefully, not accidentally, no roll of the dice wrong.
Plain wrong. Irretrievably wrong.
****
It happened.
That day.
That day it happened.
And we was all Billy Joel, you know, We didn’t start the fire.
Because it was supposed to have a start, you know, a place to start, like an idea, which is why it never stopped because no one knew how it started.
It was just wrong.
Way wrong. Wronger than the Charlie Finley Oakland A’s gold uniforms. Wronger than the Trail of Tears.
Like leaving her at the front door with a broken heart and blaming her for it wrong.
Like hate is wrong, betrayal. Like the wrongest thing that ever could be wrong. The most wrongest thing that ever was wrong.
And it was.
Because it got hard to explain, like because the words, did’t stick, maybe like the vowels and the nouns and the verbs stopped matching and it was likened to a notion that we didn’t want to explain it because we forgot how when all the pleasantries of language dribbled into a collection of sounds, train, box, thing, hand, flower, do-be-do-be-do, one, five, twenty, thirteen, like Voyager coughing the last of its electronic beeps and doops that reads like sumpin written by a bad typist without spell-check.
That’s how wrong it was.
And we stood like dumb kids with a campfire and a gas can wondering how fast we could run.
