The Family Fang

by Kevin Wilson

Buster wanted to be very happy; in his desperate moments of self-absorption, he felt that the earth was powered by the intensity of his emotions. When he mentioned this to a psychiatrist, the doctor said, “Well, if that’s the case, don’t you think you should be out doing something a bit more, I don’t know, worthwhile?”

It was time for a vacation, so they all got fake IDs.

Daniel Cartwright had written two novels that felt like movies and then started writing screenplays that felt like TV shows. He wore a cowboy hat all the time now.

The movie was so low-budget, Mr. Fang wondered if the actor who played Donald Ray had actually cut open his hand for the scene.

After she agreed, Daniel placing the porkpie hat on Annie’s head as if rewarding her for a sound decision, the two of them sat on the floor of her living room while she had another glass of whiskey and Daniel ate another Pop-Tart. Wasn’t this how adults acted? Annie wondered, feeling slightly proud of herself.

Buster did not want to talk about writing. It had been years since his last novel had been published, a spectacular failure at that. His literary career was encased in ice, held in suspended animation, lost to future generations.

He would teach himself to dislike what he actually liked, to approve of what he did not totally understand, in the hopes that he would come out the other side with something that resembled inspiration, something that would make him more famous than Chris Burden or even Hobart Waxman.

Hobart took nearly five minutes to find a comfortable sitting position on his George Nelson–designed Kangaroo chair.

She was slightly jealous of how easily he could carry his art around with him.

Neither Annie nor Buster, itching in their new clothes, unaware of the exact nature of their parents’ plans, believed they would ever totally understand what their parents meant when they said fun.

Buster, somehow, sheer force of will, had eaten the entire liver without once chewing. He had the constant, insistent need to gag, but he fought the urge. He would not ruin the evening before the evening had been ruined.

Lucy was wearing a white blouse, the first four buttons undone, with a pair of horn-rimmed glasses hanging from the V of her neckline, complemented by a black-and-white checkered skirt, and she looked, to Annie, like the coolest librarian on the face of the earth, someone who spent most of her time having sex in the stacks.

“I should probably leave,” Lucy said, not checking her watch, not trying to pretend that she still had any tangible reason to leave other than she knew it was time to go.

he heard a voice, a pitch that suggested sudden pubescence,

the two of them, their hands trembling, watched a Buster Keaton movie where Keaton was slammed, flipped, and thrown through walls. And each time something disastrous happened, Annie and Buster watched with amazement as Keaton, his face impassive as stone, merely righted himself and kept moving along.