Page 10 of A Storybook Wedding

Then, in what seems like the blink of an eye, the next deadline approaches. I explain that I just need a few more months. “I applied to Yaddo and got accepted,” I tell my editor. “That’ll help.”

“Sure, Nate, but we should really get a move on. Strike while the iron’s still hot and all that.”

The iron is in the back of the damn freezer as far as I’m concerned.

I get back from Yaddo. I’m working on something now, but I hate it. There’s no passion there. It’s just words on a screen. Like fifty thousand of them, but it’s shapeless. Makes no sense. I could care less about the protagonist. It’s going nowhere.

Another deadline creeps up. “This is the last time, I promise,” I tell my editor.

“It has to be,” he says. “They’re pushing back at me from the top. I’ve done everything I can to stave them off, dude.”

“I get it,” I say. “I just got a job working at an MFA program. It’s exactly what I need to cross the finish line. I’ve got to be around other writers.”

“Whatever you need to do, Nate. Just get it done.”

Now, here we are. Tomorrow afternoon, I’m leading a seminar about character development, and holy hell, the impostor syndrome is eating me alive from the inside out. Today, I let a bunch of adult bullies make a student cry. I’ve written about twelve words since I got here yesterday, and now I have to go to lobster night, which should be great but is actually just a social experiment where just shy of a hundred people don plastic bibs and rip apart sea creatures that look like giant red cockroaches in some display of—I don’t know—New England opulence? Everyone keeps staring at me like I’m some kind of celebrity, which did not happen at Yaddo, and I don’t feel like I can talk to anyone except for Dillon Norway, the guy who hired me and who is actually really chill but is busy, you know, leading the whole residency, so it’s not like he’s available to just hang out and talk shop with me until I get inspired. The other faculty members look at me like I’m some sort of science experiment they’re trying to figure out, except this one old lady who glared at me as if I stabbed her cat with a screwdriver when Dillon introduced me. Ann? Agnes?

Alice. With a French last name beginning with D—Deville, perhaps, like Cruella. C’est une chienne, in my humble opinion. And I’m half Canadian, so I’m allowed to say that.

Just calm down, man, I tell myself. Bitching about eating lobster. You’ve got some real first-world problems, huh?

So I do. I take a breath. I sit at a picnic table. I put on the white bib. The lady with the too-tight-T-shirt who drove me here in the school van serves me a lobster. I smile, because I’m polite. The faculty and students around me chitchat about something or other. Then I crack the stupid red shell open, dip the meat in some hot butter, and eat it.

Never for a second thinking that I’m about to look death in the face.

When I wake up, I’m in a hospital bed, in some sort of—I don’t know—hallway, maybe? There’s an IV in my arm. And I’m definitely hallucinating, because I look to my left and see the girl from my workshop—Cecily—on the opposite side of the hallway, dry heaving into a bucket in a bed just like mine.

I mumble something incoherent.

She looks over at me, appearing oddly reminiscent of an owl. All I see is a pair of blue glasses over big brown eyes, the rest of her face covered by the rim of the oversize orange Home Depot bucket. White stenciled block words on the side of the bucket read, You can do it. We can help.

I’m in the fucking twilight zone. This is one hundred percent not real.

Except when she stops retching, she says, “Huh?”

I try to move, but my middle cramps up and sends a sharp wave of nausea over my body. “Oh, shit,” I say. At least I think those are the words that come out of my mouth. The pain is blinding.

“You okay?” she asks weakly.

My eyes are squeezed shut, and I am rendered mute, afraid that if I open my mouth again, I’m going to puke all over the place. I shake my head no. Definitely no. I am not okay. I am the opposite of okay.

I hear her shift in the loud-as-fuck bed she’s in, and there’s some kind of sound, like a buzz or something. Within seconds, I can sense a third person in our general vicinity.

“You rang?” an unfamiliar female voice says.

“For him,” Cecily replies. Her voice sounds hoarse.

“Ah, he’s awake. Well, good morning, Mr. Ellis,” the voice croons. Yes, croons, like as if she is trying to sing me a lullaby. “And how are we feeling?”

I try to open my eyes, but my intestines are waging full war with my colon, and something is about to happen that I most definitely cannot watch. My body lurches forward involuntarily, and then, there it is. An overwhelming amount of vomit comes out of me, caught miraculously by the unnamed lady who I cannot look at. A hand appears on my back, making gentle circles that do nothing to soothe me as the contents of my entire gastrointestinal system unleash themselves into—I peek—another orange Home Depot bucket.

Are we at the Home Depot right now? I wonder.

Once a few waves of sickness pass over me, I somehow feel momentarily a little better, and I push the bucket away, unable to view its contents. I have a real thing about puke. Not a fan. I’m one of those if I see you vomit, then I’m going to vomit people. So you can imagine the gravity of a moment like this—where I’m not only sick but sick in mixed company, in front of a student, of all people. And in public. Like, are there no rooms here in this long-ass hallway?

The hand moves from my back to the front pocket of her nurse-uniform shirt, where it procures a pocket pack of tissues, which the lady (who looks a lot like my aunt Rose: tall and skinny with pockmarked skin, a winning combination if there ever was one) hands to me. “That’s it, Mr. Ellis. Get it all out,” she encourages me. “You all done for now?”

I nod, and the small movement sends a fresh wave of nausea over me. “Where are we?”

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