Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events Read Online Free

more stories in November, both about a man whose wife is dying of cancer. He had a weakness for depicting dreams, long, overtly symbolic dreams, and I found that the stories themselves read like dreams, I suffered them like dreams, and after a while I forgot I was reading. Like my high-school band teacher used to tell us, “Your goal is to stop seeing the notes.” This never happened to me, every note was a seed I had to swallow, but now I saw what he meant.
    Toward the end of the month, I was sick for a week. I canceled class and lay in bed, frantic with half-dreams. Carrie appeared, disappeared, reappeared. I picked up my father’s stories at random and reread paragraphs out of order. I looked for repeated words, recurring details. One particular sentence called to me, from “Under the Light.”
    That fall the trees stingily held on to their leaves .
    In my delirium, this sentence seemed to solve everything. I memorized it. I chanted it. I was the tree holding on to its leaves, but I couldn’t let them go, because if I did I wouldn’t have any more leaves. My father was waiting with a rake because that was his job, but I was being too stingy and weren’t trees a lot like people?
    I got better.
    The morning I returned to class, Jacob Harvin from Prep Writing set a bag of Cheetos on my desk. “The machine gave me two by accident,” he said.
    I thanked him and began talking about subject-verb agreement. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept peeking at the orange Cheetos bag and feeling dreadful gratitude. “Someone tell me the subject in this sentence,” I said, writing on the board. “ The trees of Florida hold on to their leaves .”
    Terrie Inal raised her hand. “You crying, Mr. Moxley?” she asked.
    â€œNo, Terrie,” I said. “I’m allergic to things.”
    â€œLooks like you’re crying,” she said. “You need a moment?”
    The word moment did it. I let go. I wept in front of the class while they looked on horrified, bored, amused, sympathetic. “It’s just, that was so nice ,” I explained.
    Late in the week, my father called and I told him I was almost done with one of his stories. “Good so far,” I said. Carrie suggested I quit writing for a while, unaware that I already had. I got drunk and broke my glasses. Someone wrote Roach with indelible marker on the hood of my car.
    O ne day, I visited Harry Hodgett in his office. I walked to campus with a bagged bottle of Chivas Regal, his favorite, practicing what I’d say. Hodgett was an intimidating figure. He enjoyed playing games with you.
    His door was open, but the only sign of him was an empty mug next to a student story. I leaned over to see SBNI written in the margin in Hodgett’s telltale blue pen—it stood for Sad But Not Interesting —then I sat down. The office had the warm, stale smell of old books. Framed pictures of Hodgett and various well-known degenerates hung on the wall.
    â€œThis ain’t the petting zoo,” Hodgett said on his way in. He was wearing sweatpants and an Everlast T-shirt with frayed cut-off sleeves. “Who are you?”
    Hodgett was playing one of his games. He knew exactly who I was. “It’s me,” I said, playing along. “Moxley.”
    He sat down with a grunt. He looked beat-up, baffled, winded, which meant he was in the early days of one of his sober sprees. “Oh yeah, Moxley, sure. Didn’t recognize you without the . . . you know.”
    â€œHat,” I tried.
    He coughed for a while, then lifted his trash can and expectorated into it. “So what are you pretending to be today?” he asked, which was Hodgett code for “So how are you doing?”
    I hesitated, then answered, “Bamboo,” a nice inscrutable thing to pretend to be. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back to reveal the livid scar under his chin, which was Hodgett code for “Please