[FICTION]

[01/28/26]

Writers

by Danielle Chelosky

I waited outside Peter’s apartment for ten minutes. We were already late for the literary reading, which was a twenty-minute walk away. On the stoop, I started a book I’d just purchased, a buzzy novel by a girl who once spilled beer on my shirt, but I was expecting the door to open at any moment, for my reading flow to be disrupted, for the night to begin. When he finally emerged, I was only three pages in and despising it, the short sentences trying too hard to be clever, the snobby characters trying too hard to be unlikable. I asked what took so long. He said he had been masturbating. You’re a fucking pervert, I said, a disgusting, rude pervert. I threw the book in his garbage can and we headed out, picking up hard seltzers from the bodega on the way, drinking them out of a paper bag.

He wasn’t listening to me as I was recounting the dream I’d had the night before. He was striking match after match trying to light his spliff as we walked, but the flame kept going out immediately, and we were too in a rush to pause for even a second. I was fighting Rachel, I said, you know, Rachel, who just got that major book deal, I don’t understand how, there’s no way in hell it’s actually good, but anyway we were fighting at the top of the staircase and I just pushed her, and her body fell down the steps in this terrible way, I could hear her bones cracking and finally her skull smashing against the floor and I knew she was dead, and so I was staying on the down-low, basically in hiding, and then word got out that she was dead, and somehow no one reached out to me, no cops, no detectives, I was fine, totally off the hook, but then the guilt crept in, it overtook me at once and I wondered if I should turn myself in, then I woke up.

Finally the spliff was lit. As if I’d said nothing at all, he began prattling about his idea for a novel. He said it would be about a writer who only writes longhand, and he writes a book that’s a thousand pages long, his magnum opus. Then he absentmindedly leaves the stove on while he goes to walk his dog, boom his whole house burns down, most importantly, his manuscript is all ash. He devotes months, years to rewriting it. But once it’s done, he hates it, he’s convinced he couldn’t recapture his greatness. Only it’s the exact same as before, it just wasn’t good to begin with. Oh, and there’d be a sex scene with the dog. Those were very in at the moment, he said.

The literary reading was packed. No seats, nowhere in the room to stand. Peter and I leaned against a wall in the hallway, listening to the reader, who breathed self-consciously between sentences. Peter whispered that he liked this experience, all readings should be like this, a disembodied voice. The boy with a buzzcut next to us gave him a look and shushed him. Peter didn’t like that. Despite wearing floral button-downs and romantic line work tattoos, Peter could get combative. One thing led to another and they were shoving each other, fists in the air, my wineglass in shards on the floor, shouts filling the bar. All of a sudden the bouncer materialized, pushing through the crowd, grabbing Peter by the collar, throwing him onto the street. I followed. The reading was boring anyway, I said. He mumbled a sullen yeah and we meandered. There was some blood on his face. I was talking about my dreams. Dreams of sucking strangers’ dicks, stealing fruit from the grocery store, getting lost in labyrinthine bathrooms with endless stalls. He stared at his phone, typing away. After a few minutes my phone buzzed. It was an email from Peter, from his newsletter. Four full paragraphs titled The Fight. That was fast, I said. Is it good, he asked. Yeah, really good, I said, having not read it, having no intention of reading it.

DANIELLE CHELOSKY is the author of Female Loneliness Epidemic, among other books.