The Family Fang

by Kevin Wilson

“Okay, I’m beginning to think that you don’t understand the problem,” Annie said. “What’s the problem, honey?” her mother asked. “I don’t want to take my top off. I don’t want to take my pants off. I definitely don’t want Ethan to take his pants off. I want to film the scene the way we rehearsed it.” “Well, that sounds pretty boring to me,” her mother said. “That does not surprise me,” Annie said and once again hung up the phone thinking that she had chosen to surround herself with people who were, for lack of a better term, retarded.

The phone rang but no one moved to answer it. There was not one person that the Fangs wanted to speak to that wasn’t already sitting at the table. The machine took the call into its own hands, Mrs. Fang’s voice flatly saying, “The Fangs are dead. Leave a message after the tone and our ghosts will return your call.” Mrs. Fang, the one at the table, holding her smoothie, began to titter. “When did I leave that greeting?” she said.

“We live on the edge . . . a shantytown filled with gold-seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” Buster, stunned by the strangeness of it, pressed repeat, turned up the volume, and held this matchstick of a device to his ear as if listening to radio static for the voice of a long-dead lover. “ . . . the law is skinny with hunger for us,” the recorder said, and Buster took out a pen, opened to the title page of his novel, and scribbled the phrases down so that he could see the arrangement of the words on paper.

“Think of the subtext,” his father whispered to Buster, gripping him in a bear hug. “A play about forbidden love will now have the added layer of incest.”

“A terrible idea,” Hobart had said after the ceremony, embracing the Fangs, “elegantly rendered.”

Caleb nodded, embarrassed once again at having disappointed his idol. He vowed that he would do better, would burn away all his previous notions of art. 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

There had been much discussion in regards to attire before they had begun their trip. Buster had suggested fedoras and rumpled suits, unfiltered cigarettes, tie clips. Annie thought perhaps matching black suits and Lone Ranger masks, crushed-up amphetamines, manicured fingernails.

“It’s what we do; we distort the world; we make it vibrate, and you kids did it without any help from us. No direction. No idea of what would happen, and you created such chaos. You manufactured it from somewhere inside of you.”