Syntax

by Timothy Boudreau

Robert Anasch

Tilden had discovered the announcement while scrolling through his phone during his lunch break: “Guinevere Allen, author of Spider Silk and Wasp Paper, Traverse the Infinite and Orchid, Ovid, Arachnid, will lead her first ever cross-genre workshop. Send a thousand-word sample of your best work and a thousand-word essay detailing why you wish to attend. Up to three successful candidates will receive an in-depth initiation into Guinevere’s unique modes and methods.”

After the sentinel waived him past the checkpoint, Tilden recalled their initial response, an email both exhilarating and terrifying: “Dear Applicant: Congratulations. You are hereby invited to the second stage of screening, which will be held at the former Llewelyn Estate located in the Green Mountains of Vermont.”

He parked his car, slipped his keys into his pocket and followed the signs into the entrance labyrinth. The labyrinth walls were seven feet high, the path lined with gravel. A right, two lefts, another right: Tilden chose his way without thinking, as if willed by an unseen force, until the labyrinth resolved around a final curve of thick boxwood and thrust him, stumbling and squinting in the sun, into the interview area.

“Greetings.” Guinevere Allen was much taller than she appeared in her author photos, in a pearlescent blouse and knotted neck scarf, standing behind a lectern with a clipboard and a glittering silver pen. Additional hedges bordered the interview area; an aspen in back provided the lectern a crescent of shade.

“I — love your sentences,” Tilden said. Her eyebrows were dark, thick and powerfully arched — but there was no question of Tilden looking directly into her eyes, not yet.

She sighed. “Many people love my sentences.”

How could he describe his love for her syntax, except via the medium of his own watery sentences, the paltry sentences of a lame imitation, the wan, scrawny sentences of a literary weakling? “There are — so many unsuspected things,” he managed to say. He was garbling it all, he couldn’t help it. “Sharp corners, clauses darting out of alleyways.”

“Please,” Guinevere touched the back of her spiky silver hair, “let’s move on.”

In his mind he flipped through the index cards of notes he’d used to prepare. Mythology, wildlife, the internal logic of the galaxies. But was Aeschylus a god, a mortal or a poet, and how in heaven’s name was it pronounced?

“First,” she lifted her eyes from the clipboard, “what questions do you have for us?”

“I,” he hesitated, “I wondered about — where you get your ideas from — ”

Her sigh this time was nearly imperceptible. “One has to remain open, to sense when the flow is upon them, to ride the wave until it breaks.”

“Of course,” he touched his glasses, “yes. I — ”

“Naturally the strictest discipline is also required.”

“But I was wondering — ”

“Does your family have money?” A thrush trilled in a hedge as Guinevere frowned at the clipboard. “Because that will be held against you.”

“My sister and her husband were just denied for a new car loan, um, and my mom works part-time at Kohl’s. So I guess — no.”

“Ah,” she raised an eyebrow. “As you know in the long run that’s much worse.” She lifted her head, peered at him down the length of her nose; her nostrils quivered. “Tell us a little about your work,” she said, “its genesis, its germination.” She put “work” in quotes, as if she were being generous with the word.

“I — um — usually things come to me when I’m not expecting them — ”

“Yes.”

“I keep sticky notes nearby at work just in case.”

A red squirrel alit on the edge of the lectern and performed a few soft-shoe steps, before stopping with a shoulder-swivel to twist off its head like an astronaut taking off a helmet, tucking it at its side in the crook of a tiny chestnut arm. With a piercing cry a raven plunged out of a cloud, snatched the head and flew away, and the squirrel’s lifeless body fell backwards off the lectern into the grass.

“Do you experience that as a comedy or a tragedy?” Guinevere asked.

The deflated squirrel body pulsed briefly before disappearing into the grass like a poured out cup of coffee. Tilden swallowed. “It makes me sad.”

“Understood.” A brown spider the size of a saucer lowered itself via a web strand from the aspen, pausing at the edge of the lectern to produce several silken spinneret-spun strands rolled into the shape of a pearl, which it left in Guinevere’s palm before again ascending. She glanced musingly at the pearl before tossing it to Tilden, who caught it against his chest.

“What’s the first thing to strike you about this?” she asked.

It was tiny, tidy, the size of a gumball; it reflected the sunlight as if in glistening dewdrops. “It’s sticky.”

“What uses might it have as a magic token, or talisman, in a poem, a scientific essay, a tale of fantasy — ?”

“I — um — could think of a few — ” As Tilden rolled it between his fingers, the web fibers disconnected one by one and drifted away, caught in the breeze, like dandelion fluff or stray wisps of silvery cotton candy.

“I see that you’ve wasted it,” she looked away, “so we’ll move forward.” She now wore a tank-top featuring a panda with a mohawk and gleaming red irises. “Panda Bunks,” it said below, in a surging font suggesting a punk band, cutting edge cartoon or anarchist political party, though he couldn’t judge with what degree of irony she was wearing it.

“Tell us what you know about the basic laws of physics,” Guinevere began. As she hammered on, Panda Bunks glared at Tilden with increasingly flaming irises. “Tell us from which mythic traditions you primarily base your personal poetics. Describe for us the metaphoric structures you most favor.”

These were like a series of blows aimed at a dazed boxer too weak to cover up. Tilden shook his head; his knees buckled; he reached around for something to steady himself. “I’m afraid I never — finished school basically and don’t have the answers to many of those type of questions.”

“Noted.” Guinevere penned something on the clipboard. “Shall we continue, or have you had enough?”

At last — in an appeal for mercy — he met her eyes, which were a magnetic cobalt blue that brought shimmering back to him his favorite passages in her works: longing’s echo in the pull of celestial bodies orbiting in deep space’s eternal midnight; the whisper of a wind-brushed acorn. “I guess I’ve had enough,” he said, looking away.

“So — we’ve read your work.”

The words sent a shiver across his shoulder blades, started a buzzing, a blurring in his intestines. “Yes?” Did she see how her gaze — as if she were regarding a poor first draft that was better off discarded — made him tremble? That his hands twitched at his sides, his eyes glazed behind his glasses?

“Don’t worry, Mr. Tilden.” He stood close enough now that Guinevere could have placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder, though he knew this would have violated the silvery sacrosanctity of her pulse, her power. She said, “I know a few who started with your talent and background and ultimately became successful. Success meaning simply the completion of work which touched at least one other of the world’s beings.” She stroked a majestic eyebrow with her thumb; Panda Bunks’ expression softened, its irises glowing a gentle aqua green. “That of course is all we can hope for.”

Tilden shivered, felt a coolness sweep down his spine, followed by a wash of warmth. “Thank you.”

“Unfortunately the time has come.” Guinevere set down the clipboard. “Naturally we’re declining your application.”

“Naturally.”

“We’ve enjoyed your visit, but we’re afraid you do not meet our current standards.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“We wish you luck with your future endeavors. Please follow the raven to the exit.”

Though his mouth was dry, his legs heavy and his head ached like an over-tolled bell, Tilden’s last thought as he shuffled after the raven into the exit labyrinth was of Guinevere’s stories, reviews, op-eds, essays. No matter what happened to him or his dreams, the gaunt blandness of his un-workshopped bones and phrases, her work would live forever, glowing in near and distant print and web outposts — all those perfect sentences, sharp, cunning, uncanny.

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Timothy Boudreau lives and works in northern New Hampshire. His recent work has been nominated for Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, and a Pushcart Prize. His collection Saturday Night and other Short Stories is available through Hobblebush Books. Find him on Twitter at @tcboudreau or at timothyboudreau.com.