Visions of Foster Excerpt – The Worcester Journal

by Jeremy Levine

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“I’m just saying,” Evan was saying, wielding the diner’s glass ketchup bottle, “if Dunkin’ sells doughnut holes, someone should be selling bagel holes. Little rolled-up balls of dough, stuffed with various kinds of spreads. Cream cheese, butter, jam.”

“How is this about my story about Cheryl’s breakfast?” Clint asked.

“It’s not. It’s about my bagel project.”

“Fine. How would you get the fillings in there?”

“How do they get the jelly in the Munchkins?”

“How would I know?” He gestured for the ketchup bottle. Evan handed it to Clint, who began shaking it over his burger with little regard for how the high volume of condiment would soggify his sandwich. “But maybe there’s something different about bagels that makes it not possible.”

“Or, I’m the only person who’s had this idea so far. Oh Jesus.” He dropped his grilled cheese sandwich back onto his plate and drained his film canister-sized water glass. “That was so hot.”

“I’m pretty sure everyone’s had this idea before,” Clint said, watching Evan fish into the bottom of his glass for an ice cube.

“Why haven’t you done it, then?” Evan popped the ice into his mouth.

“I figure everyone else had tried and failed.”

“This is why nobody votes.” Evan pointed an accusatory french fry across the table at him, ketchup dripping onto the table in prodigious splotches.

“Is that why?” Clint asked, mopping up the wayward condiment.

“It is.” Evan didn’t help Clint out with the ketchup absorption effort. “It’s called the collective action problem. I read about it.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, wherever you read about this stuff.”

“That’s not really what the collective action problem is.”

“Regardless. When a bunch of people have the ability to do something, the incentive to actually do it yourself is incredibly small.”

“I guess that’s true.”

An intermission of munching followed. Evan had finished half of his sandwich (apart from the crusts, which he never ate) when he broke the silence with “You and Cheryl are pretty serious, huh?”

Clint finished chewing. “We’ve only been together a few months.”

“Yeah but you’re living like you’re pretty serious.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“The story you told me about making her breakfast and meeting your editor.”

“What about it? Girls sleep over at your house and you make them breakfast, are you serious with any of them?”

“No, but the fact that you thought that swinging the ever-so-perilous run-out-of-the-house-and-cook-her-breakfast maneuver even qualified as a story that I would be interested in alerts me of something serious.”

“But the two of us,” Clint made a little pointing gesture so that Evan knew that he was the one being referred to, “have been friends for so long, this is the kind of stuff we talk about. I’m out of really good stories.”

“Well, we could be talking about more interesting things than a breakfast you made three weeks ago, but you shot down my bagel idea.”

“Hey—”

“Look, all I’m saying is that your readers better not get shafted by your new definition of a good story. Because they don’t want to read three hundred pages of you making breakfast.”

“Well—“

“And that, when you two do settle down and have your 2.5 kids, don’t forget about me and all the bullshit you put me through over the years.”

The patty on Clint’s burger nearly slipped off the bun. “Have I made it seem like that that’s what’s going to happen?” he asked.

“I don’t know. The breakfast thing seemed like a bad sign.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.” Clint raised his teeny diner glass. They clinked and Evan tossed his back so one or two ice chips unstuck themselves from the bottom and fell into his mouth. He crunched on them for a little while, then said “So, once you saved the world by preparing breakfast, how’d your meeting with your editor go?”

“Fine. This book is weirder.”

“How so?”

“Like, it’s kind of fucked up, structurally speaking.”

“Why’d you write it like that?”

“It just felt like it needed to be that way. The narrator’s life is totally collapsed—“

“Spoilers.”

“And so it didn’t feel psychologically right for the story to be told in a normal way. It needed to be more haphazard because, as she remembers it, that’s how she sees it. Trauma isn’t chronological, it just all hits you at once. Like if you were sentenced to twenty years in prison, the effect of that dread would happen to you all at once, as a unit. You wouldn’t think about the fifteenth year and then the sixteenth year.”

“Ok.”

“Did that make sense? I’m going to have to explain it a lot and I don’t want it to not make sense.”

“No I think it makes sense. I mean, I haven’t read it, so I can’t really put it in context, but that didn’t sound too out in left field.”

“Thanks.” Clint picked at his coleslaw and spent a minute or so ogling a particularly Kramer-esque gentleman across the diner. “Besides, I would never ask Cheryl that kind of question.”

“About your writing?”

Clint nodded.

“Why not?”

“She hasn’t really gotten over the fact that I’m a famous novelist.”

“Hey, Mr. Modesty.”

“I mean, it’s true. And sometimes, you know, it’s great. Like, I’m sure it helped me get that first date—”

“Helped?”

“Shut up. But I can’t run an idea by her because she still has too romantic a view of
the whole process. You’re jaded enough to give me a real opinion.”

“Plus I’m not wooed by your incredible breakfast-making skills.”

“That too.”

Jeremy Levine is a recent graduate of Clark University, where he now works. He likes to read, write, and write about weird novels.