Caleb mouthed Mrs. Thewlingston’s name as he looked up at her reading his dot matrix printed pages. Her expression wasted little time sapping his enthusiasm every time she forcibly returned a smile. He tried to remain defiant as her words, “I don’t think this is working,” fell out. The rest was a flushing toilet bowl as she droned on and he stared at the certificate behind her desk, “2nd Place Short Story, New Shoreham Gazette, ’78”
The leek soup bubbled and Caleb’s mom dropped the screenplay on the table to tend to it. His eyebrow’s tweaked; she’d managed to conveniently miss the RISD college brochure. “It’s interesting,” he heard from the back of her head, “but I didn’t really believe Mrs. Haversham would treat her son that way. As a mother—” Her remaining comments bounced off the back of the stove and he dodged them in an imaginary game with the sound turned off. Touching the still warm laser printed copy, he felt pride…and loneliness.
Caleb raised his hand so Antony could see him and yelled, “Over here!” His boyfriend fought through the pack, enduring a lecherous grab from a Providence banker, before arriving finally to a waiting bourbon. “You can’t afford that,” he proclaimed, then downed it in a single gulp, “but since you insist.” The two laughed and before the remnants settled, Caleb put his hand on the bar and stoically asked, “What did you think?”
Antony pulled out the manuscript, laid it on the bar and lovingly said, “I don’t think I’m the right audience, Cal..that doesn’t mean it isn’t good!” With that, Caleb’s technique of drowning the rest exceeded its capacity and his eyes welled with tears. “I failed,” he thought as the bartender tapped his glass and asked, “Another?” Avoiding eye contact he shook his head, but as the bartender moved off, Caleb caught his own reflection in the mirror. The face of a writer, and the glaring cliche, hit him like a bad metaphor. Antony grinned, “Find your answer, Dorothy?”
The bookstore was half full in Caleb’s eyes when he closed the cover. He let himself enjoy the applause and grinned at the 25% off poster in the back. With incredible joy, he said into the mic, “Thank you for coming.”