REALISTIC STORY / UNREALISTIC STORY

"This is a realistic story about terrorism and human suffering and human fear!" b/w "And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea"

Below is a pair of stories written together in 2008 for a since defunct lit website created by Mike Young that asked contributors to provide a realistic story and an unrealistic story (I think that was the prompt, though realistically I only barely remember). Please enjoy.

REALISTIC STORY

I had a dog inside my eyelid—

Wait, we can’t start off like that.

This is a realistic story. I have my head on straight.

To be certain, there are realms of science that would indicate I have not and will never have a dog inside my eyelid. The dog would be too large, being the idea. And also: how would a dog end up inside my face? That, sir, is absurd.

But what could it have been inside my eyelid that morning that caused me such discomfort as I lay on the floor beside my naked mother?

There was something twitching in me, a little meat noise, some kind of something scrunched and so much blood.

There is always something in me.

I asked my mom to sit up and look into my eye some and see what it was there but my mom would not sit up. She had her arms over her head, squealing. She feared the roof would soon collapse—come raining down on me and my mother and all our precious junk. My father was up on the roof again. My father with his hatchet, peeling up the shit job the roofers did replacing the shingles my father ordered off the online, shingles made from living women’s skin.

Shit, man. Fuck.

The shingles weren’t made of women’s skin. That is ridiculous. Worse, that is completely unrealistic. Who would kill someone for shingles? Even if they had, if I could be convinced, how would we know for certain the skin was female? I can not believe in, and therefore even conceptualize or therefore read, a story that would allow that kind of flagrantly willful admission. What would be the father’s motivation to do such a thing as line his home with dead women? Tell me at least where and when the narrator was born and whether he has a moustache! Tell me who he loved and what he wanted and what he would become—this is what we need to know. This, for holy fuck tits sake, is what makes a story we can, with our eyes, read.

So then the roof shingles were made of whatever your common everyday roof shingles are made of—though really, I’m not quite sure of even that. Is it paper or like cardboard or something? I’d look it up, but couldn’t I just say roof shingles?

What kind of shingles appear on the roofs of homes and houses in short stories by William Trevor? That’s what I should find out.