Fiction Coming to The Zionist Voice
Our first fiction post in our upcoming series
Dear reader,
Over the weekend, I drove up to Santa Barbara to see my favorite band, Weather Etc.., (née Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra).
They were celebrating the ten year anniversary of their album, Well Soon, which is an absolute masterpiece, and you should all listen to it. This is an unapologetic plug for their music.
Something about listening to that music in a college town took me back to the days of my youth, those halcyon days of 2015 and 2016, when everything seemed so much simpler.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.
But in my nostalgic reverie, I remembered who I was back in those days, before so much of my life was consumed by this global madness.
In those days, I was just a writer, writing for myself, just trying to make sense of my world.
Long before I was compiling my novel or building my collections, I was just writing for the sake of writing. I wasn’t finding modern stories I wanted to read, so I just decided to write them myself.
Before October 7th, I was in the process of putting all of that writing together into a novel called Wresting Beauty From the Darkness.
It is my pride and joy.
I know all of the characters, and they know me, and I talk to them everyday.
In the 400+ days since October 7th, I have not been able to access the part of my soul that wrote fiction.
I suppose the situation in the real world felt too pressing for me to justify spending any time in an imaginary one.
But as this Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra concert reminded me this weekend, life needs to be lived in the fullness of its color, even when the world around feels so drab and dark.
And so, I have decided to return to my fiction and begin publishing some of it here. The first story I share will be available for everyone, and subsequent stories will be available to premium subscribers of The Zionist Voice. (Which you should be, by the way, it’s what all of the cool kids are doing. Antizionism and bad writing are so last year, 2025 is going to be all Zionism and all poetry. Upgrade your subscription now so you can tell all of your friends you were into The Zionist Voice before it was mainstream.)
I love these stories, and I hope you will too.
Today, I am just going to share a little taste with you. This is the introduction to a longer story called Fuck Boy, which will be released in full for premium subscribers next week.
And so, without further adieu, here is the introduction to Fuck Boy.
Fuck Boy
For anyone who ever wanted a kiss in the rain and got fucked by a thunderstorm instead.
I never lied, but I didn’t really tell the truth either. I guess we all kind of did then. Things felt so strange then, like time was out of place. Decadent. Decadent nihilism, that’s what it was. We all had more than anyone could have needed, but we had so much less than we could have had. But we didn’t really want more things; we didn’t really want anything. We just wanted a different age. An age with more. An age with less. The human race had evolved itself out of evolution and defeated the spectre of death. There were no more wars to speak of, no famines, no plagues. We lived every day without fear of our own demise, and we resented ourselves for it. Life would have been better if the stakes were higher, or maybe if we were dead, or maybe if we overthrew capitalism or something like that. But no one really wanted to overthrow anything, they just wanted to feel like they could. Like they could have, if only they’d lived when they were supposed to, when the world was worth living in. But we’d passed that point, and we were living out the epilogue, the last couple of chapters of humanity before G-d would tie up all the loose ends and finally finish the book. Fin. That’s what we were waiting for, the Fin. We were each trying to flesh out our characters into three-dimensional protagonists before the book closed and we were eternalized as the caricatures of ourselves that we so dreaded. But it never came, the Fin. So we had to keep on living, living out the last boring pages of a book that’s already gone on far too long.
So let’s begin the story there, at the beginning of the end.
~
“I know she doesn’t exist. I know she’s not real. I know that she’s imaginary, and I know I made her up, but I don’t care!”
“She’s imaginary Javi! I’m flesh and blood. You can see me, you can touch me, you can hold me! How can you possibly even consider comparing me to a girl who only lives in your head!”
“I’m not comparing.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m leaving.”
~
The backdoor slipped shut behind Javi as he tiptoed out of the house. He threw his hood over his head, turned his eyes to the floor, and marched down the long driveway. The sun was up, the air was cold. The wind eroded flakes of dirt and ice into the air and whipped them into Javier’s eyes. He cursed New Jersey. He cursed its dismal weather, he cursed its dismal women, and he cursed his dismal self. He missed home. His eyes were red, he wanted to sleep, but that part of the day had already passed. He spited her his insomnia, even though he was always the one asking to sleep over. A blue jay flew above the dumpsters in the alley, and he felt that horrible combination of pride and shame one gets when he knows the shape of an alley too well. He counted his tasks on his fingers. Shower. Shower and coffee. Shower and coffee and dress. That’s what he had to do now, shower, and coffee, and dress. That was first. Then he’d have to face the day, face the day and get through it. Once he got through it, he could go back to Melinda’s house and start it all over again. Melinda. How had Melinda managed to make her way back into his life? Well, it wasn’t Melinda who had made her way back into his life. It was Melinda, the name, really. Melinda number 1 and Melinda number 2 were, or I guess are, fundamentally different. Melinda, however, as a form, as an idea, as a theory, was consistent. She was a Melinda for sure, just as much as she was also Melinda number 2, and perhaps another Melinda could have become a Melinda number 3 or number 4, but, for now, Melinda had but two forms, number 1, and number 2. And while they each believed themselves to be the number 1 Melinda, neither Melinda number 1 nor Melinda number 2 ever really understood that, to Javier, there was no number 1 Melinda. But they never knew that. They never really knew Javier. All they knew is that they wanted to be his number 1 Melinda. Javier, however, wanted something else.
FUCK BOY
~
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