[FICTION]
[02/13/26]

Jim Considers Forgiveness After Reading the First Four Amazon Reviews of His Book

by Joseph Randolph

By the time Jim reached the third one-star review—“Self-indulgent, over-intellectualized drivel. Like a manic pixie dream nihilist wrote Ulysses on benzos”—he had already chewed two-thirds of a mechanical pencil and accidentally called his ex-girlfriend’s sister.

She didn’t answer, which he took, generously, as a kind of forgiveness.

This was progress. Three years ago, in a similar scenario (re: the public misreading of his short story collection The Consolation of Unfinished Forms), he had started a Reddit thread titled “Let’s Talk About Why People Hate Art.” It got nine replies, all from a guy named @ed_shartin_real, whose most coherent sentence was “u mad bro.”

He had been mad. But today, Jim wasn’t mad. Today, he was trying something new. Today, he was trying forgiveness.

Not Christian forgiveness (which he’d researched during his Catholic manic phase and found troublingly smug), and not therapeutic forgiveness (which felt like asking your brain to notarize a feeling). No—this was something stranger. Quieter. A little hysterical, maybe, but with dignity.

It began that morning, when Jim saw a bird hit his apartment window—smack, feathers, drop—and didn’t flinch. The bird got up, visibly concussed, did a kind of pirouette, and then launched itself again, full velocity, into the same pane of glass.

“It thinks the reflection is a rival,” Jim muttered aloud to no one. “It thinks it’s defending its mate from itself.”

He was still in his boxers. There were salt stains on his hoodie. He hadn’t written anything decent in weeks.

But he was moved—truly moved—by the metaphysics of the bird’s mistake. He put on coffee. He stared at the window. He whispered: “You are forgiven.”

The bird, predictably, flew into it again.

Later, in the kitchen, Jim scrawled a list on the back of a water bill:

  • The bird

  • Everyone I’ve hurt

  • Everyone who hurt me

  • That professor who said my prose showed a “failure of inferential discipline”

  • My Amazon reviewers

  • Everyone who doesn’t like my posts about my writing, art, or music

Then, tentatively, at the bottom:

  • The world

It wasn’t a manifesto. It wasn’t even a resolution. It was a gesture. A draft of a gesture. A symbolic beta-test of the possibility of gesture.

The trick, he decided, was not to feel forgiveness (feelings are unreliable, Jim would argue, especially if you’ve ever been on Zyprexa), but to perform it—to act “as if,” and let the rest catch up. Forgiveness as praxis. Forgiveness as weird little art.

He began with the bird. He Googled “how to prevent window bird collisions,” and the results were disappointing: cut paper hawks, decals, string curtains. But Jim, ever maximalist, chose to tape an entire page of his novel manuscript to the glass. A symbolic warning. A textual totem.

The bird flew into it anyway.

But it left a mark—a soft indent in the prose where its beak struck the word “irrelevance.”

Jim cried, briefly, at the beauty of that.

Then, coffee in hand, he logged onto Amazon.

And now he was on review #4.

“The author clearly thinks he’s smarter than the reader. Congrats. You are. Still not worth $14.99.”

He took a slow breath, clicked the reply button, and typed: “You are forgiven.”

Then deleted it. Then typed it again.

“You are forgiven.”

Then added: “The bird forgives you too.”

Then deleted that part.

Somewhere behind his ribs, a muscle unclenched.

It wasn’t that he no longer cared. Jim would always care. Jim once wept during an insurance commercial because the piano chord resolved unexpectedly into a major sixth.

But today—today he had managed to care stupidly, gently, without performance.

He leaned back in his chair. He looked at the taped-up page on the window. He looked at the dent where “irrelevance” used to be. He imagined the bird out there, dazed but alive, maybe finally flying away.

“Forgiveness,” he whispered, like he was taste-testing it.

It tasted like pencil shavings and altar wine and some unnamed thing he hadn’t felt since childhood—something like preemptive grace.

He went to the list. Crossed out “The bird.” Crossed out “Amazon reviewers.”

Paused.

Then wrote, at the very bottom:

  • Me

And that felt, if not final, at least less unfinished.

JOSEPH RANDOLPH is a multidisciplinary artist and professor from the Midwest. He is the author of Vacua Vita and Sum: A Lyric Parody, and his debut novel Genius & Irrelevance is currently under review. His writing has appeared in Action, Spectacle, The Penn Review, Night Picnic, and elsewhere, and he received second place in the 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Award. His music is available on streaming platforms, and his paintings can be found on Instagram @jtrndph.