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“The title is not included in the word count…” was a finalist in our recently concluded 71st Short Fiction Contest, and is published with the consent of the author.

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kaboompics.com/via Pexels

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The title is not included in the word count, which means a person of superior intellect such as Kevin, thought Kevin, could seize upon this oversight and venture far beyond the bounds of the word coun

by Scott Cash

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Suddenly¹ the² splendiferous³

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¹ Like so often in life, Kevin’s genius was curtailed by others. His dream of a wondrously complex character study with narrative development, and twists and turns and pirouettes and majestic swoops like a soaring eagle, no, an osprey, much better, more exotic, a soaring osprey, even though those two words together sound like what a surgeon might solemnly declare to a quivering patient, “we need to conduct an emergency soaring osprey to relieve the swelling on your pineal gland”, yes, all this within the endless territory of the title, with a meagre 3,000 additional words in the body of the piece for the dramatic denouement, was blocked, not by the rules, but by a technicality—a 200-character limit thoughtlessly imposed by some computer programmer. Who were they to mandate that a title not go beyond 200 characters? Who made this computer nerd the arbiter of great literature?

…..Like the time he brandished a sheaf of 15-year-old vouchers which each guaranteed to the bearer a triple cheeseburger for one dollar but the girl at the counter repeatedly said ‘the system won’t accept it’ as frustrated customers banked up behind him, and Kevin argued his case until the manager arrived and then the security guard arrived and he was ushered from the restaurant.

…..‘The system won’t accept it’ seemed the inevitable response to everything Kevin tried. The ‘system’, this nebulous entity that thwarted his every attempt to get ahead in life.

…..Kevin drummed his fingers on the desk as he considered this unexpected impediment. 200 characters for the title plus a measly 3,000 words for the body. Unless… unless….

…..Footnotes.

…..Of course.

…..A footnote is not part of the story. It’s an addendum, a clarification, an optional extra. A place for rambling digressions and snide asides. Like that guy with the bandanna, David Foster Wallace, who wrote the book nobody could finish as they got lost in the footnotes, wandering dazed in the 8pt type that rose up from the bottom of every page like immense Saharan dunes. Or that story by Nicholson Baker (the one about the shoelaces, not his many books of eccentric erotica). But now Kevin would be laughing the last laugh, laughing hard and long, when he trounced the opposition who had spluttered out 3,000 words about a pet poodle, while Kevin had produced an immense literary epic that covered many important themes.

…..Why, he could add a footnote to every word, and stack footnotes upon footnotes, building them up like a layer cake^a.

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^a When Kevin’s ex-wife Glenda was mixing and preparing to bake a sponge cake, he said don’t you need to put the layer of cream in now, and she laughed and laughed and said no, you silly billy, the cream goes in later, once it’s out of the oven, and then somehow that innocent remark lived onⁱ, like cockroaches or herpes, being endlessly retold at dinner parties or when baked goods were present, and later resurfacing during the divorce proceedings, as reputed evidence that Kevin lacked commonsense.

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ⁱ Out of the millions of words spoken by, and to, us over our lifetimes, a tiny percentage, maybe 0.001%, will be remembered. It’s a wonder we bother to speak at all, given the only things people will remember are inadvertent insults or ill-advised confessions.

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…..But unlike Wallace and Baker, and the many other devotees that Kevin could recall but chose not to mention at this time, the vast majority of Kevin’s story would live amongst the footnotes. For someone of such immense intellect and talent, restricting his output to 3,000 words was an insult. If he had written War and Peace, after 600,000 words, never mind covering both war and peace, they’d still be at Anna Pavlovna’s soiree (which, incidentally, was the point Kevin reached before he put down the book).

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…..Now that he was freed from the shackles of the word count, like a released prisoner emerging blinking in the harsh sunlight as he took his first steps outside the prison gates and contemplated his next move, Kevin had the trifling matter of the actual story to consider. He took a deep breath. Hmm. So many options. So so many options.

…..You know, being a creative genius was both a blessing and a curse, because he had the ability to write about absolutely anything, whether the tale of a sweet-natured girl growing up in a remote village in Afghanistan, a hardened criminal freed from prison and now out for revenge, or the inspiring tale of a 43-year-old recently-divorced man in Cleveland, Ohio.

…..That last one has something to it, thought Kevin. A certain ‘Jenny say Kwa’, as the French like to say. Yes, he decided. I will tell the tale of an entirely fictitious character, a 43-year-old, heck, let’s make him 39, from a mid-sized city in the Buckeye State. A man with a heroic quality, handsome in a subtle way, with a sparkling wit, and a frighteningly immense intellect which heretofore had been unrecognized by society, largely on account of his startling originality, i.e. being ahead of his time, which was the chief reason for lackluster grades in school and community college and how he now found himself working for his ex-brother-in-law Carl at Carl’s Carpet Kingdom even though Carl had made it clear that he should look for another job. But this story, the brief 3,000 words in the body, plus the bountiful plains of the footnotes, will tell of his triumphant ascension to his rightly position at the pinnacle of the intelligentsia.

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…..Kevin patted himself on the back, both metaphorically and literally. Despite the actual words being as yet unwritten, this was shaping up to be something very special. The words, the succession of letters and spaces, that’s the easy part. Now I have the idea, I just have to launch into it, he thought. Let the muse flow through me. He held his pen poised over the page, like the pointer on a Ouija board, waiting for something to happen.

…..Kevin drummed his fingers on the desk, made some clicking noises with his mouth, and then chewed on the end of his pen. I’m too tight, maybe a little whiskey will loosen things up, he thought. Kevin went to fix a drink, then decided to clean out the plughole in the kitchen sink and re-align the books on his shelf so the spines were even and then permitted himself a break to watch the final twenty minutes of Charlie’s Angels while devouring a pack of Doritos, before returning to his desk.

…..Coleridge might have woken from a dream with the poem Kubla Khan already formed in his mind, and Kerouac barely left his desk as he gobbled down Benzedrine and hammered away at his keyboard on a 120-foot scroll, the words flowing like the gin at a 1950s jazz club, but their piffling output hardly compares to the heft and complexity of what I shall produce, thought Kevin. So rather than trying to visualize the story as a whole, this gargantuan, life-changing magnum opus, I just need to write it little by little, like eating an elephant. One word, one bite, at a time.

…..So, first word. Hmm. Arguably the most important word of the lot. It sets the tone for everything to come. Mess this up and you’re already floundering. A man adrift in a raging torrent. Kevin went to top up his drink.

…..It’s crucial to grab the reader’s attention immediately, Kevin decided, as he swirled his ice cubes. The younger generation especially, with an attention span that would bring shame to a goldfish, they need instant gratification. If that first word doesn’t do it for them, they’re swiping right, left, up, down, get me out of here, show me a cat farting or a baby belching, anything to shield them from having to think!  Or consider a more mature reader, they’re in their local bookshop, attracted by the brilliant cover and glowing reviews from the finest writers of the day, and they turn to the opening page and straight away, wham! They’re hit with….

…..‘Suddenly…’

…..Perfect.

…..What a start! This ain’t a story to be messed with, declared Kevin. It will quite literally blow you away. But not that literally.

…..It took Hunter S. Thompson 34 words to get to the ‘suddenly’ part (concerning bats, or what looked like huge bats) and I’ve done it in one.

…..I’m well on my way to a spectacular opening sentence, Kevin realised. It’s not gonna be one of these wishy-washy first sentences, like Monsieur Proust’s sleep-inducing “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” What?! Wake me up when that one’s over. And he expects us to read seven volumes of this? No, no, no.

…..“Suddenly…”, that’s the stuff. They’ll be queuing round the block to buy his debut story collection if that first word is anything to go by, thought Kevin.

² And then after the opening word, there are so many choices. Like a chess grandmaster, after opening with the unexpected pawn to g4, he could make any move. But really, not like chess at all. Chess was constrained by the board, by the rules for each piece and the positioning. There were only sixteen possible moves after 1 g4. That’s nothing! With writing, he was free!! He could go anywhere. So many possibilities, so wonderful the opportunity. But then, chess of course did have the advantage of providing some guardrails. Helpful to work within some constraints. Writing was like being plonked on an alien planet without a map. Or without oxygen.

…..Perhaps follow with a pronoun. He, she, it. You, I, we. Introduce a character as soon as the curtain rises. Maybe some sinister figure about to cause harm. But this is my story and I’m not having someone else hog the limelight, Kevin declared, so this first character, this first pronoun, must be the main protagonist, the hero of the piece. Then there is the crucial decision of first-person or third-person^b. First person allows us to see the inner workings of this intellectual colossus as well as the deep well of emotions within him. But on the other hand, third-person allows me, in my role as omniscient narrator, to effusively but objectively praise the hero, in ways the first-person cannot.

…..Third-person it is.

…..Kevin leaned back in his chair and read his story aloud: “Suddenly he…”

…..Wow! This is gripping stuff! That’s even got me hooked, he thought, and I’m writing this stuff. But is it too much? Kevin realised he was sweating, from the exertion, yes, but also from

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^b Or the more uncommon Jay McInerney / choose-your-own-adventure second person. A bold and restrictive choice for such an early stage. Unlike Jay McInerney, you decide that second-person is not the way to go, and you reject this idea.

the immense tension he had created in just two words. There’s action and then there’s James Patterson Industries level of action. I need to just slow down a bit. Kevin took a deep breath then resignedly crossed out the entire second half of his story.

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…..Forget the pronouns, I’ll go with an article instead, he decided. And since I am a man of action, surely I must choose the definite over an indefinite article. It’s the most-used word in the English language for a reason. It’s like the Walmart of words. Name a writer and I bet they used it at some point. Except that one French guy Georges Perec (or Gorgs Prc) who got famous for not using the letter ‘e’ and then handed it over to his English translator and said “good luck with this job, pal.” Except it probably came out sounding much cooler in French, like “Tu n’as hasard, mon ami.”

…..Yes, ‘the’ will work just fine, thought Kevin, as he added it to his document.

…..‘Suddenly the…’

…..Kevin sat back and admired his revised story. Two words down, 2,998 to go. That’s a lot of words, plus a gazillion more in the footnotes. Kevin felt a little uneasy and went to fix another drink.

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³ The trouble comes with word number three. The sentence is building up nicely but it needs a noun. It wants one bad.

…..Or an adjective. That will stave off the need for a noun. And given he has an unlimited  number of words up his sleeve, he can sprinkle the story with all the delightfully descriptive adjectives he wants. But I must select a versatile adjective, Kevin said. This is crucial. No need to write yourself into a corner, like being trapped in a labyrinth of your own making. And while ‘Suddenly the…’ is undoubtably brilliant, it does have the vague whiff of the dreaded popular fiction. This story of course belongs in the literary canon, so we need an appropriately highbrow descriptor. A ten-dollar word that leaves the reader with no doubt as to Kevin’s genius, à la Will Self. My story should educate as well as delight. If their reading is interrupted every few paragraphs by needing to reach for the dictionary, then all the better.

…..Kevin opened his crossword dictionary to the long-word-finder section and ran his finger down the page until he found an adjective. ‘Quixotic’. Even Kevin didn’t know what that one meant. He read aloud the definition: “Having or exhibiting ideas and goals that are original but not practical and usually doomed for failure.” Well, that doesn’t sound appropriate at all, he thought, and quickly dismissed it.

…..He tried again. ‘Quotidian’. An exotic word to mean the mundane.

…..It should be a word that’s hungry, that’s champing at the bit… we’ve built so much momentum through those first two words, agonized and sweated over them, it would be a shame to hit the brakes. Something like….ferocious. Or rapacious. Salacious. Hmm.

…..‘Suddenly the salacious…’

…..He allowed himself a moment to enjoy where this might lead. But unless you’re Henry Miller, dirty talk draws in the punters but not the accolades.

…..Still, it had given him an idea. Alliteration. Kevin could create cunning combinations of cleverly-conjured keywords. Kevin flicked through his dictionary. His finger landed on ‘supercilious’. He read the definition: ‘behaving in an arrogantly superior way’. That’s as bad as quixotic!

…..Suddenly Kevin’s eyes alighted on another word, higher up the facing page: ‘Splendiferous’.

…..What a glorious word! While Kevin’s target audience was his peers in the writing community, even simple folk could guess at the meaning. Splendid, magnificent, excellent, special, beautiful.

…..‘Suddenly the splendiferous…’

…..Kevin put down his pen and admired his work, almost as if he had finished the story. And in a way, it would be a shame to continue. The more he wrote, the more closed the text would become. In Borges’ telling, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ contained all possible stories. And while Ts’ui Pen wrote copious versions of the story, filling shoeboxes with innumerable manuscripts, a simpler, more elegant, solution would be to have written very little. Unless you emulate Ts’ui Pen, the more you write, the less you can say, because you have selected only one path to follow. There was that famous story, commonly, but wrongly, attributed to Hemingway about the baby shoes. Just six words, but containing a universe of heartbreak.

…..The most perfect story, the story that can encapsulate everything and nothing, would be even shorter, just one or two words, or maybe three. A writer whose pen had barely grazed the paper.

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…..Kevin reread his story from start to finish and laughed with delight. This was probably the happiest day of his life. He didn’t have that conscious thought, but I am thinking it, and I am saying it. We seek happiness in so many ways that are dependent on others, like having the perfect job or a loving and loyal partner, but we ignore the things that we can control, the things that bring us, us as unique individuals, the greatest joy. And this moment, cramming words into a footnote like poking stuffing up a turkey’s rear end, is just about perfect.

…..Kevin decided that he deserved a break after such a fantastic start. He went into the kitchen and poured another drink, finishing off the last of the bottle, and then yanked open the sliding door and stepped onto the narrow balcony, buffeted by a blast of wintry air. His whole life had been restricted by rules and regulations, social norms, and word counts were just another way the man tries to keep us down. But now Kevin was taking a heroic stand. Limit myself to just 3,000 words? I would prefer not to, as his great hero Bartleby might say.

…..“Death to word counts!” he cried, waving a joyous fist in the air. “Viva la writer!”

…..Kevin may have been rather inebriated by this point, but at 3am on the balcony of a cramped apartment, with the lights blazing and his mind blazing, he was alive! He could stand there with whiskey in hand, looking out over the slumbering city, feeling like a lighthouse keeper gazing across the jet black ocean. His light was the only one visible for miles, a marker that he was special. Kevin felt an overwhelming euphoria. Forget the global acclaim, the bidding wars between desperate publishers and the tearful groveling return of Glenda. Forget all of that. This, this moment, was why Kevin wrote. To feel the unbridled joy of creating an entire universe and transcribing it onto the page where it will live forever.

…..“Viva la writer!” he shouted again, even louder and longer this time, imagining his words expanding rapidly into the night sky, and then slowly coming to settle upon the unsuspecting city like an immense shimmering net. Kevin took a last satisfied look at his new domain, then stepped back inside. The page was calling him, and he was far from finished. He had defeated the word count, just like he would defeat any other challenge that came his

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Scott Cash is a writer from Whanganui in Aotearoa New Zealand. He lived for many years in the United Kingdom and now lives in Melbourne, Australia. His short stories have been finalists in multiple competitions, including the Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction, Anthology Flash Fiction Competition, Limnisa Short Story Competition and Wyndham Writing Awards. Outside of writing, Scott enjoys travel, reading and sports, especially soccer and athletics. Inside of writing, he is at his happiest.

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“Where the Music Wasn’t Allowed,” Jane McCarthy’s winning story in the 71st Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest

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