The News Anchor Dreams (a short story)

My flash fiction piece "11-6" was just published by Heartwood Literary Magazine at the Low-Residency MFA at West Virginia Wesleyan College. I feel like I've written 4 or 5 pieces that all spin out of visiting the Big Bang Theory set, and you can't really tell it from the piece, but I think this is one of them. It's definitely about moving places with only a modicum of confidence (and slightly more divine faith, but not much) and having your life revolve around your job. 

Here's how it starts.

11-6

11-6

FICTION BY MATTHUE ROTH

The news anchor dreams there is a fire, a very bad fire. The only thing that can stop it is water. Everyone is waiting until the fire reaches the ocean. Until it does, the only thing to be done is to report on it. He reads a list of names, of people and businesses and towns affected by the fire. All the names are foreign. He does his best to pronounce each one correctly, short of putting on an accent, which doesn’t test well with the target demographics and makes him feel insincere.

He reads names. He tries to give gravity to each, knowing that among his audience are people with relatives there, people on vacation from there, people whom he is telling that their families are dead. He can’t linger long, though. There are more people waiting to hear the name of the next town to be incinerated, if it is theirs. He pauses before the next name. It is his own language, his own town—the place where he lives now. He lives two blocks away from the TV studio. He can make it to bed fast after the 11:00 news, and then he can be there bright and early for the morning news at six. It doesn’t feel like it’s burning. This must be some weird quirk of live TV, the way it’s filmed, like the five-second delay in case anybody curses.

But they are. They’re burning, and then everyone is dead.

[ read the rest ]

Famous Typewriters (and the Things They Made)

I flew into and out of San Francisco in a day a few weeks ago. Did I tell you about it? Maybe not, it was a bit of a secret.

By far, the weirdest/best thing I found was an exhibit of famous typewriters at San Francisco International Airport. In the middle of the jetlagged night, it felt like the most important thing I'd ever seen.

4. Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

I read The Glass Menagerie in seventh grade and adored it, although at the time I couldn't tell you why. Probably something to do with the mentally-fragile daughter, whose condition to me was scary and recognizable. When I moved to D.C., my friends Eric and Matthias used to take me to a bar called the Raven, the first time I had a regular bar, where, according to local legend, Tennessee Williams either hung out or wrote his first book. I started a lot of stories on bar napkins but never finished any.

3. Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast

I was always a little disgusted by Hemingway and a little scared of him, but Marty Beckerman's wonderful book The Heming Way did a bit to dispel it, and a bit to empower a looser, funnier sense of disgust.

2. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. In a purely metaphysical, inspiration-centric way, I identify completely with Rachel Bloom's song. I spent a while just staring at this typewriter in surprised silence (well, I was alone, so it wasn't that surprising that I was silent). Imagining his fingers on those very keys, the pure physicality of it all, the way that every time you hit a key the letter is permanently imprinted, no highlighting and deleting, no going back. Merely existing in the same place at that typewriter felt more dangerous than anything I've ever done. It was a dare never to use a computer again.

1. The Beatles, Introducing the Beatles

And the Beatles. I've never been crazy about the Beatles -- not that I don't like them! I really like them! -- I just, well, never thought they were the ultimate band or the only band that ever existed or anything like that. But also, I never thought about them writing songs. Or writing songs in an actual draft/reworking/another draft/final way. Would they write the words "I'd like to be your man," go back and forth about the word order, the rhythm, change "I'd like" to a declarative statement like "I want," and then Ringo tells you that you need a concrete image and you finally, finally type in the middle of the night, "I want to hold your hand"? Maybe that's not how it happened. But something happened. And the moments their keys struck paper, it turned into something.

The Moment When All Prayers are Answered

When you pray by the first light of dawn, the Talmud says, Heaven pays attention to your prayers immediately. And when you time your prayers so that they culminate with the Amidah prayer at the moment that the sun breaks the horizon -- again, according to the Talmud -- that's the moment where the gates of heaven are flung open unreservedly, so that any prayers are answered immediately and without question.

My daughter is still on East Coast time. She woke up at 5:00. This is the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean from the villa we've been staying at. (We're down the street from Julia Roberts and one of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Although, at this particular moment, none of that earthly name-dropping stuff seems to matter.)

Out of Office, But Still into You

Hey! So by the time you're reading this, I'm going to be far, far away, running to Israel for this odd Young Jewish Innovators convention. If you miss talking to me, TeensReadToo just posted a pretty lengthy interview with me about Losers, Neil Gaiman, the ZZ Top/Hasidic Jewish episode of The Simpsons, and a bunch of other stuff. And A Wrinkle in Time comes up for the fourth time this week. Here's a cool deleted-scenes type moment from Losers:

You have the chance to go back and change a scene from one of your previous releases. What book would you choose, what scene would you change, and how would you alter it?

There's one scene in LOSERS about a girl Jupiter likes, and how they both wind up in a very random and very suddenly emotional place, and he winds up discovering her eating disorder...and then something big happens. I totally understand why we took it out -- it was too much of an unexpected turn in the book, and it didn't really fit with everything else that was happening to Jupiter -- but I still think it's a great scene, and it still fits into the Jupiter chronology. It's been getting under my skin, how a 14-year-old guy deals with dating someone who has an eating disorder, and I think it might be growing into its own book.
keep reading > 

Praying (They Don't Think I'm Gonna Blow Them Up)

I'm reporting to you live on location from the airport lobby. At 6:00 AM, the place gleams with a shine usually reserved for window-washing commercials and baby's backsides. Even when it's hygienic, it still has that suspicious airport smell. I couldn't tell you why. I think it's just part of the way G*d created the world.

Anyway, it's not 6:00 AM anymore. It's a little past 9, and the place is a lot more filled and a lot less gleamy. And I'm in Terminal 5, the JetBlue terminal, instead of Delta, where my flight is, because people who fly JetBlue look less gloomy and because there is free (and non-hiccupy) internet.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We arrived at the airport and checked in at 6:02 AM. Turns out, Delta instituted a new policy -- YESTERDAY -- that you can't check in baggage less than an hour before a flight. Need I say that our flight was at 7:01? So the rest of the fam ran ahead, and I hung back to be the proud defender of our baggage.

And to try and scrounge for another seat. Now, I have anxiety issues. At 7:00, there was a flight that they couldn't get me on because they tried too late. At 7:45, same thing. Eventually, it was 8:30, I still didn't have a ticket, and I was getting dangerously aware that the latest time I could possibly pray was rapidly creeping up.

So what's a boy to do? What, indeed, except go and throw the politest, most courteous s#!+-fit that he could. And smile politely afterward and explain that he needs a ticket.

Sometimes, all you need to know is how to speak the language. Not more than five minutes later, ticket in hand, I sat, confident and assured that I still had nearly six hours to kill before my flight, and unwrapped my talis and start to pray.

This was the point where I noticed something was amiss. People were staring at me. And not in that hey-didn't-you-write-a-book-I-read way.

I started swaying into the prayers, trying politely to ignore it. Then I took out my tefillin and started wrapping the black straps around my arm.

That was when they started looking at me like I was about to blow something up.

It's pretty understandable, actually. I mean, I have nervous and paranoid fantasies all the time. I'm always thinking in terms of a worst-case scenario. (Like, for instance, whenever we're headed for an airport, I just know we're going to miss our flight. Totally baseless, and it never actually happens...whoops.) When some dude who looks like an alien with upside-down antennae covers himself in a white cloth and begins wrapping possible-dynamite-but-it's-actually-leather around himself, there aren't too many things that it could be.

And so, if I saw myself praying in an airport, I'd probably think something was up with that, too.

I tried to ignore it. I couldn't, of course, but I had a script in front of me in the shape of a prayerbook, and I just tried to do the best that I could.

And then I turned -- as I often do -- to Lost. Itta's been watching the whole series nonstop, and last night, in the middle of a stakeout (in a boat, watching for signs of the evil people who might not be evil...oh, never mind), one of the characters -- Sayid, the former Iraqi soldier turned US spy -- whipped out his prayer mat and started praying.

It was so nonchalant, and so much a non-event, that it almost seemed natural. The same way that the characters on Friends were always running to and from each other's apartments without knocking, or that a good friend uses the bathroom in your house without asking where it is, Sayid just took five minutes to do his Allahu Akbars.

So I did the same thing. Just straightened my posture, straightened my concentration, and started to pray. I don't know if anyone noticed -- anyone but myself, that is -- but I kind of got it going on. And I came out of it a little out of breath, a little sweaty (it is an airport, after all), but feeling pretty exhilarated. And it was the best praying I've had in a while. No one came up to me to compliment me on my praying skillz, but by the time I was done, I really thought they might.

And, by the way: JetBlue is not always the cheeriest terminal around. For the past 15 minutes, they've been playing all of George Michael's most heart-wrenching synth ballads. And I'm not even supposed to be listening to music in the first place.