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    1 Day
    1 Day
    1 Day
    Ebook53 pages47 minutes

    1 Day

    By Nick Stokes

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A single mother teaches high school literature, parents her young son, and fights through a day. 1 Day, a novelette, was first published by the literary journal Prick of the Spindle.

    From 1 Day:
    "She thinks about making a new letter grade with the top paper on the stack and rolling a J, but she hasn’t smoked pot in a decade and she has a dependent relationship with her job and she doubts it’d be the responsible decision with Max asleep upstairs. She believes in free choice, but she hasn’t encountered it lately, and she’d prefer that her 4-year-old not spark up for a while yet. She gets a beer.
    She writes some things on some papers. Some advice on spelling, grammar, logic. She makes no suggestions about having worthwhile ideas, or pursuing worthwhile objectives. Spelling has rules, grammar has logic, logic has ... She corrects ellipses use. She invents some new letters to write at the top of the first pages. Or rather borrows, a CH from Spanish, an Å from Danish, an Œ from Latin; she doesn't know how to invent a letter."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNick Stokes
    Release dateMar 21, 2014
    ISBN9781310195235
    1 Day
    Author

    Nick Stokes

    Nick Stokes is the author of the novel AFFAIR, first serialized by The Seattle Star, the (anti)-choose-your-own-adventure YOU CHOOSE, and the attempt to consciousness ARTIFACT COLLECTIVE. His short prose and fictions and nothings have been published by Bumf, Paper Darts, Crab Orchard Review, Mixer, Waccamaw, Prick of the Spindle, Knock, and others. His plays have been seen in various venues: DUELS in a built garden at 12th Ave Arts in Seattle and On the Boards NWNW Fest, WAS IS WILL BE MUSIC in a Seattle hotel room, and THE SOUND WE MAKE in Tacoma's Old City Hall. DUELS, produced in 2016 by amador/stokes, received reviews that said such words as "an absorbing work of agricultural absurdity" and "a vibrant, surreal production" and "DUELS presents a cornucopia of senses, languages, themes, and genres ... reminds us what it means to be human" and "Come the f*** on with this s***." He once-upon-a-time packed mules in Montana, lives in Tacoma, and is virtually sometimes at nickstokes.net.

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      Book preview

      1 Day - Nick Stokes

      1 Day

      by Nick Stokes

      Copyright 2014 Nick Stokes

      Smashwords Edition

      This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

      1 Day was first published in Prick of the Spindle, Print Edition #1.

      Table of Contents

      1 Day

      About Nick Stokes

      Other Titles by Nick Stokes

      Connect with Nick Stokes

      1 Day

      SHE IS A person who has good and bad days. Though days are rarely wholly good, and rarely wholly bad.

      The days are holy, someone once said.

      She is a woman, then, who has good and bad moments, though the good sometimes lasts longer than a moment, as often does the bad.

      Misquote. Mosquito. Moscow. The days are gods, is what he said.

      She is a girl who suffers from good and bad spells. Suffer? Does suffer apply equally to good and bad spells?

      She is a red flower who suffers from good spells and rejoices in bad spels.

      You wrote that to be cute, she tells on herself to herself.

      To have fun.

      Was it fun?

      Yes. What do I care about spelling and word choice? I’m not an English teacher.

      She giggles because she’s alone. She is an English teacher.

      Emerson said it. She knows. She was withholding information, like any good teacher, to amuse herself. The days are Gods. God is dead. God is in the details. God gets a D because he’s always tardy, doesn’t do the reading, doesn’t contribute to discussion, and doesn’t give a shit. She’d flunk him, but she doesn’t want him in class again next year. He’d rather smoke dope and shoot spitballs and make eyes at the cute girls.

      She understands. She’d rather do that too.

      She eyes the pile of papers. Mostly they suck. They burst with a sad dearth of sustained persistence, a hyperkinetic digital hodgepodge of fluffy, popular, redundant, hormone-driven thought, and acne. Their independent thoughts conform to others’ independent thoughts. They lack textual evidence to support their assertions.

      What do you expect, she asks herself, you’re not reading Dostoyevsky. They are reading Crime and Punishment. She wishes she’d assigned The Idiot. At least she doesn’t care for that one. She has learned that it is easier to bear the mangling of a story near to her heart if she doesn’t care for it.

      She thinks about making a new letter grade with the top paper on the stack and rolling a J, but she hasn’t smoked pot in a decade and she has a dependent relationship with her job and she doubts it’d be the responsible decision with Max asleep upstairs. She believes in free choice, but she hasn’t encountered it lately, and she’d prefer that her 4-year-old not spark up for a while yet. She gets a beer.

      She writes some things on some papers. Some advice on spelling, grammar, logic. She makes no suggestions about having worthwhile ideas, or pursuing worthwhile objectives. Spelling has rules, grammar has logic, logic has … She corrects ellipses use. She invents some new letters to write at the top of the first pages. Or rather borrows, a CH from Spanish, an Å from Danish, an Œ from Latin; she doesn't know how to invent a letter.

      By the bottom of the stack she is skipping the thesis and playing hooky on the body and barely sneaking in for the conclusion. Again and again she regrets reading the last sentence, but she does it anyway. Strata by strata, each one less illuminating than the one above, she scrapes away the mountain of papers and uses the waste to fill in the low spots of her sagging living room. She assimilates her valleys. She is tired of how they drain her.

      Strip-mined, she retires to bed.

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