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    What Never Happened: An Observation
    What Never Happened: An Observation
    What Never Happened: An Observation
    Ebook27 pages24 minutes

    What Never Happened: An Observation

    By Nick Stokes

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    About this ebook

    An observant boy goes to the park, returns home, and has a conversation with his mother in a fabricated, unlikely, never-happened, plausible, impossible, invented, realistic coming-of-age story. What Never Happened: An Observation, a short story, was first published in Waccamaw, Issue 7.

    From What Never Happened, An Observation:
    I was a boy. (Dear reader, for the last time I say to you, please remember that this is only a story, meant to comfort friends, relations, and acquaintances, and as such it only exists in your head and those heads who have heard it.) As a boy, I was not especially different than other boys, though I was somewhat indifferent towards them. Of girls, I remember the existence of none save my mother and other assorted relatives: a passel of cousins, an aunt, and a grandmother. I was predominantly interested in myself, though not in a selfish way. I was simply not aroused by games of sport or make-believe or conversation. Allow me to make myself clear: sport, make-believe, and conversation were three of my most cherished pastimes, but they were activities I preferred to conduct with myself. With others these pastimes were diluted, somehow losing their piquancy.
    What I was most passionate about, though, was observing. I would sit for hours in the same spot, quietly taking mental note of my surroundings. I would not speak my observations, nor would I write them down. I would simply take mental note of the position of a fork on a table, of the number of tines it had, of the sharpness of those tines, of the curvature of the head, of how gracefully the head met the handle at the neck, of any ornamentation on the handle, of any fingerprints. I would note the construction of the table, how its disparate parts were joined, the lay of the grain of the wood, the pattern of the sunlight splashed on the tabletop, the angle of sunlight entering through the window, the shape of a leaf outside the window. When I could fit words to my observations, I did (silently), but I never forced the issue. I did not wish to force my surrounding reality to conform to words if no words were adequate. For example, if the pattern of light on the table was rhombic, I would say so silently to myself, and so too if I could say with reasonable probability that the light passing through the window (forgiving refraction) entered the kitchen at an angle of 30, 45, or 60 degrees while my mother spread peanut butter and jelly on bread for me, I would use just those words. But more often than not, the pattern of light was decidedly unrhombic and indeed indescribable, just as the angle of the sunlight’s penetration was generally immeasurable and inestimable. In such instances, I would wordlessly observe and make wordless mental note. The words, after all, were not what I was after. Words were merely tools. I was after the thing itself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNick Stokes
    Release dateMar 24, 2014
    ISBN9781310328404
    What Never Happened: An Observation
    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

      What Never Happened - Nick Stokes

      What Never Happened: An Observation

      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/.

      What Never Happened: An Observation was first published in Waccamaw, Issue 7.

      Table of Contents

      What Never Happened: An Observation

      About Nick Stokes

      Other Titles by Nick Stokes

      Connect with Nick Stokes

      What Never Happened: An Observation

      THIS IS A story I tell people when they seem to want a story. You can tell when this is so by the expectant look in their eye, or by how they hold their brain in their hands and ask you to take it for a while, please. How can I deny that look? (Think puppies in the kitchen begging for scraps, or a full-grown dog whimpering for the leash.) I can’t. The weight of another’s want is too much for me, and I begin. As I begin the story, sweet relief spreads like butter across their face. (Yes, their is a plural possessive pronoun and face is singular, but I have not misspoke, for all of the people to whom I tell this story have but one face.) They smile, nod, and coo in understanding. As an incidental side effect (in the interest of full disclosure I tell you), when I tell this story I often feel a certain dissipation of pressure in my sinuses and from behind my eyeballs, as when air hisses from a balloon. In my experience, both parties involved find a tissue or hankie useful.

      But I reiterate: this is fiction. What I tell you is a lie. The events as I will relate them did not happen, are not happening, and will not ever happen. If you reflect on it afterwards, I think you will realize that events in real life do not transpire as

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