Satisfaction

Don’t annoy me. I’m a writer. 

Oh, and don’t annoy my sister either. She used to lead hillwalking expeditions at a summer camp, but she wasn’t allowed to choose her staff. Every year, she ended up working alongside a Flat Earther who believed maps were fiction and their lines of latitude and longitude were lies. 

That wasn’t my sister’s only annoyance, of course. As a trained and experienced outdoor leader, she would ask each group to wear flexible, quick-dry or double-layered trousers for the day. Meanwhile, her assistant staff would go around giving everyone permission to wear jeans for hillwalking. Seriously, people like that need to end up in stories. Disaster stories.  Satisfaction by Fiona Jones

It so happened that I subsequently wrote a short story in which a man joins an expedition to Antarctica to find and photograph the edge of the world. In dazzling ambiguous light he peers over an edge, falls down a crevasse and breaks his skull. The automated recording doesn’t corroborate his story, so of course he photoshops his evidence and goes on lecture tours expounding his beliefs. 

It’s not revenge—not exactly. But it gives me some level of petty satisfaction. 

In other stories: 

A woman who prides herself on her connection to “Nature” but who buys plastic plants, gets pursued by a very real wasp. 

Someone who has assaulted a poet is acquitted after the judge reads one of the poems in question and declares it to be reasonable self-defense. 

A literature class decides that Orwell was wrong in his predictions, and finds their teacher suddenly replaced by a telescreen. 

A hostage tries to alert her friends by inserting common grammatical errors into a text, but nobody notices or comes to her rescue. 

A mean old woman experiences Heaven in an NDE, doesn’t like it, and determines to take the other turning next time. 

A tiger rug wakes up, slowly gathers power, and starts attacking humans. 

And so on. 

If you annoy a writer, sooner or later you will probably end up in a story, either as the victim of terrible consequences (try reading Dickens) or as a caricature of vicious behaviour towards others (try reading Austen). Sometimes you can figure out an author’s pet peeves just by reading their books (Rowling). Or you can detect someone’s childhood trauma threaded throughout their work (Dahl). 

I should probably add that a story isn’t ALWAYS an act of aggression. I once had a relative questioning me (not very graciously) about similarities between one of my story characters and a mutual, er, acquaintance. I admitted that experience of real people’s personality traits may add dimension to the portrayal of fictional characters, but any discussion of intent is entirely at the author’s discretion unless they’ve actually doxxed someone. 

I therefore leave it to the reader to wonder what is my problem in this drabble: 

The Sins of Erin

“But, as a Christian church,” said the minister’s wife, “we must welcome all sorts—” 

“And include them on the Tea Rota?” Beryl glared. “Full-fat milk she brought last Sunday. Full-fat!” 

Heads nodded. 

“And her cake was far too rich!” 

“I’ll talk with her. But I’m sure she meant no—” 

Beryl snorted and let the matter drop. The rest of the Prayer Meeting dragged. You can’t always pray for what the Church really needs… at least until the minister’s wife goes home.

 There is another way, if you know how to draw a pentagram. Erin would disappear before Easter. 

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