His Mysterious Ways

He was an arty kid from a non-arty family. He liked to write, and his family didn’t get it. “What are ya doin’ up thar?” they’d holler up the stairs while watching the football game. What he was doin’ up thar, of course, was writing.

They thought the things he wrote were weird, or morbid, or immoral. He sometimes used bad words and wrote about sex. His stories didn’t have happy endings.

His family all agreed: If they could bring just one book to a desert island, it would be the Bible. It’s the only book anyone needs.

“But the Bible has bad words and sex in it,” he would sometimes dare to point out.

“The Lord has His mysterious ways that our little pea brains will never understand,” they would reply, and they’d leave it at that.

What kept him going was the thought of all the other writers out there – not just the famous ones whose books he read over and over again, but the ones just like him who had yet to be discovered.

He would go to the Barnes & Noble in his hick town and look at the mural above the Starbucks café: Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, all those guys. He imagined himself up there, in some Barnes & Noble of the future, and a kid like him looking up. A never-ending chain.

One day when he decided he was ready, he submitted some stories to contests. He felt nervous but also excited each time he licked shut an envelope flap – finally he was reaching out to his brotherhood, his true kin. He hoped they accepted him.

They did not. He lost every contest he entered. Finally he stopped entering them.

Our little pea brains will never understand.

–C. Chapman