There once was a girl who was lost in a storm. She wandered this way and that, this way and that, trying to find a way home. But the sky was too dark, and the rain too fierce; all the girl did was go in circles.

Then, suddenly, there were arms around her. Strong arms-–good strong arms. And they picked the girl up and carried her away.

When she woke, she was lying in bed.

It was a warm bed–very warm–by a roaring fire. The blankets were soft, and she was dry. She looked around the room. There were paintings on the walls.

There was a hot cup of tea on the nightstand.

Hello? called the girl. Hello? Hello?

A young man appeared in the doorway. He looked down at the girl with a kind, quiet smile.

Feel better? he said.

And she did.

The girl stayed with the man for quite a long time, until she had all her strength back.

I guess it’s time for me to go home, she said, and started to gather her clothes.

But when she got to the door, she saw the rain was still falling. If anything, it was falling even harder. So she took off her clothes again, and went back to bed, and lay in the man’s arms a little longer.

This went on for many, many years, and eventually the girl grew very old.

And then one day she discovered on the wall by the door the switch that turned the rain on and off.

She stood there staring at the beautiful day outside, and then down at the simple little switch. She listened as the birds flew by the window, singing.

And then she turned and went back to bed.

In the night, that night, the man woke up.

Did the rain stop? he said. I dreamt it did.

And the girl put her arms around the man and held him tight.

It may have, she said. But it’s all right.

In order of inception and abandamnation:

I.

This one was about this time I went to the beach. (I don’t go to the beach very often.) I was dating this girl, she lived down in Hermosa. Hermosa is like, down by… the water.

I.

I ran into Owen Wilson on Cahuenga.
Owen Wilson, I said, stopping short.
Hey man, he said, how’s it going? Are there are a lot of cops around here?

Cops? I said.
I was kind of concerned.
Like, what do you mean? I said.
Cops, he said. You know, police. I don’t know if I can park my car here.

I turned and looked and Owen Wilson’s car was parked right in the middle of the sidewalk.
Oh, I said. Well, I don’t know. I mean, I wouldn’t do that.

The woman returns from the store with an armload of books. She reads them quickly, one by one, over the course of the next few weeks. But when she opens the last one, the woman frowns in surprise.

All the pages in the book are blank.

Every single one.

The woman takes the book back to the store, but the manager won’t let her return it.

Right there on the cover, the manager says, This book has no words and is non-returnable.

The woman is angry. She wouldn’t have bought the book if she’d known there were no words inside it. But the manager simply will not relent.

The woman leaves in a huff.

She throws the book in the trash.

A few days later, the woman sees a man reading the book on the subway. She gets mad; she screams across the crowded car–

There are no words inside, you can’t read it!

But the man is defensive.

You can pretend, he says. There’s no law against pretending.

I think there might be words if you look at it under a special light, says a woman sitting nearby.

This other woman is holding her own copy of the book.

That’s so stupid! the woman yells. Don’t you see how stupid that is? Don’t you see that’s crazy?

At the next station, a policeman is called and has to break up the fight.

A television crew arrives on the scene.

The woman is interviewed on the news.

She complains loudly about the book for some time.

The next day, the book appears on the bestseller lists, under both fiction and nonfiction. The woman is furious, enraged, appalled. She calls into a radio show and starts to rant. She calls the next day, and the day after that, and then the day after that. She appears again on television, this time in debate with the author.

Your book is a joke! the woman says.

The author just sits there and smiles.

The woman becomes famous after a while. She even writes a book of her own. Her book cries out for the destruction of the first one.

In answer, the first book’s sales jump.

The woman is frantic. She doesn’t know what to do. She feels like she’s going insane.

And then one day on the street a man comes up and spits in the woman’s face.

The woman stands there– shocked, paralyzed. She hadn’t realized everyone hated her. She turns and runs sobbing all the way home. She locks the door and collapses.

She crawls into the bedroom on her hands and knees and hides underneath the blankets.

All night long she lies there sobbing.

She feels like she’s going to die.

In the morning, the woman unplugs her phone. She doesn’t want to be invited on TV anymore. She sits on the edge of the bed for a while, and then, slowly, she rises.

The woman turns over a whole new leaf.

She turns her attention to other things.

She takes up hobbies. She goes scuba-diving.

She even makes some friends.

Without the controversy the woman’s anger stirred up, the book starts to slip from the bestseller lists. It slips and slips for weeks and weeks, until one day it just disappears.

The woman’s own book disappears as well.

The woman doesn’t even notice.

The years go by. The woman meets a man. She falls in love and gets married. She has children and raises them and lets them go and watches them start families of their own.

She and her husband go through some hard times, but in the end they stay together.

And then one day, late in life, the woman’s husband dies.

For months, the woman is unable to sleep. She wanders through the house, feeling lost. She turns on lights, and turns them off. She sits down, gets up, sits.

One evening in the attic, going through her husband’s things, the woman finds a copy of the book.

She hasn’t thought of the book in years.

Slowly, she opens it up.

To her surprise, there are words inside– lots of words, printed plain as day. She turns to page one and starts to read.

She reads all night long.

And in the morning when she gets to the very last page, the woman finds herself softly crying.

It’s the most beautiful book she’s ever read.

She wishes it didn’t have to end.

*This story first appeared in The Bicycle Review.

There is no point to this. The point is that I’m getting sick. I just noticed it an hour ago. Suddenly I am blowing my nose. Out of nowhere. And now feeling a little wonky. So I took some vitamin C and ate about 14 pounds of sautéed spinach and now I am sitting here waiting to die. If the pig flu gets me tell them I was an okay guy. Kind of quiet and not very good at tennis, but basically decent.

When I was in fifth grade, I was in love with Shirlene DuJack. We used to draw pictures of TIE fighters together. It was the ideal relationship. The only problem was that the school bully, Wayne DeCourte, was also in love with Shirlene DuJack. A fact which I found annoying. Apparently he felt similarly, because one day he announced that the two of us were going to have to fight after school for the hand of Shirlene DuJack. This made sense to me, so I agreed, with one stipulation: I had piano lessons that day, so could it be tomorrow? Wayne said sure, and we shook on it. It was all very gentlemanly.

(A Helpful Guide)

Step Number One: Figure out what the story’s about. Try to have it not be about bears. No one likes bears; they’re big and stinky. Animatronic bears are even worse.

Two: When you’re done, write your story down. Try to make it about ninety pages. These ninety pages are your screenplay. Congratulations! It’s done!

This is a photograph of being in love.

It’s a picture of a feeling in a moment.

It’s a record of a time when the whole world came alive.

I took it from inside a girl’s convertible.

The bad thing about being in the mental institution is that everyone there is crazy.

It really wouldn’t be so bad if not for that: it’s clean, it’s quiet, the food isn’t bad, and on top of that, there are plenty of doctors, so if you choke on something or have a stroke or a heart attack your chances of survival are increased.

But then, on the other hand, everyone’s crazy.

And when you’re crazy, that’s not what you need.

I dreamed that I was walking through a graveyard with my girlfriend.

(I don’t have a girlfriend.)

But there we were, walking along. And then we came to this gravestone.

Only it wasn’t a gravestone; it was some kind of big stone sign.

You see, there was this poodle there, buried in the ground.

Well, it’s official: after 37 years on this planet– 37 years of being chased by homicidal maniacs, trapped in mazes, falling off cliffs, forgetting how to drive stick while the steering wheel comes off in my hands as I navigate particularly treacherous mountain roads, having my teeth fall out when I show up late for school with no pants on only to find my term paper was due the day before, falling into the ocean while clutching my computer which contains the only copy of the book I’m writing, oh and going back to college and finding that somehow I wasn’t assigned a dorm room and have to live on the street oh but I didn’t register anyway and all the classes are full and nobody seems to care about my predicament– um, stop here, sentence too confusing.

I finally had the most fucked-up dream of my life.

If I weren’t listening to Judas Priest right now (Sad Wings of Destiny) I would never have the strength to talk about it. But luckily I am!

So. I had this dream. And in my dream, I was in… Walgreen’s!

I wrote this today on line at Chipotle.
The girl in front of me tried to cheer me up.
“It’s okay,” I said, “I’m just working on a story.”
“I guess it’s not a funny one,” she said.

I don’t know if you noticed, but a few years ago Johnnie turned around. He used to be walking left; now he’s going right.

When pressed, the Johnnie Walker company explained that leftward leads to the past, while to the right lies the land of the future. And if there’s anything Johnnie stands for, it’s the future.