Mostly I’m okay but sometimes there is a sound like a boiler coughing and choking and coughing and a very large flat iron object, flat like a steam press, descends from the sky and crushes me into a grotesque flattened bug. Like in those Wile E. Coyote cartoons, except I don’t get back up.
Dave looks a little bit like Wile E. Coyote. It’s the eyes, I guess. They’re not bloodshot, but they look like they should be, and they say, “I will eat you if an anvil doesn’t drop on me first.”
Dave’s my boss. He replaced my old boss, Dave. The first Dave’s eyes didn’t look like Wile E. Coyote. Otherwise he was indistinguishable from the new Dave. I may have been the only one who noticed the change. It’s hard to say because I don’t talk to anyone else at work. If there is anyone else at work.
Anyway. I was in Dave’s office because he was telling me that I needed to summarize better. I wrote summaries of famous books for busy people who are cheap but want to say they’ve read famous books. Not War and Peace famous books. More like biographies of George Washington which don’t dwell on the slavery and self-help books called Unfuck Yourself with the u asterixed out because unfucking yourself means unfucking your profanity first.
Anyway. “This summary is shit,” Dave said, without asterixing anything out. “I have read it through and have no idea how to unfuck myself. Did you read the book?”
“Well, it’s not really something you can exactly read?” I said. I often put question marks at the end of my sentences with Dave as a distraction to throw off pursuit. “There is not much in there? I did try to say that? In the part of the summary where I said, “Unfuck Yourself is a book and there is not much in there?”
“Yes,” Dave said. “I saw that. Our readers don’t want to know about the not that isn’t there. They want the not that is. Go out and give it to them. Read the book again and do not leave out any fucking thing.”
That’s not really what happened. I don’t go to work. I don’t know what Dave looks like. I don’t know what Dave’s predecessor Dave looks like. It’s all virtual. They both look like a screen. I guess I do too, mostly.
Dave didn’t send me back to unfuck myself either. He just fired me. You can do that with freelancers. That’s why they exist.
“You won at that failed relationship because you achieved exactly what you set out to accomplish in the first place,” is a central concept in Unfuck Yourself that I put in the summary for our readers who do not want to read. And why do you achieve what you set out to accomplish when you have a relationship that is fucked? That’s because, “Your brain is wired to win.”
Obviously, based on my summary, I wanted to get fired by Dave who is a blank screen. He wanted to get fired by the next Dave. And that one wants to get fired by the next. We’re all really just a single brain that is constantly winning by failing. Except for Elon Musk. He really wants to win. And that’s why he’s the leading capitalist. That would be my summary, if I was still summarizing.
Everything is really in your mind, is the bullet point. The world is you and you have control. The zombie apocalypse isn’t really happening unless you want it to. For instance, you might want to have Dave or Dave devoured in the zombie apocalypse. Either one could have their throats torn out while you look on, applying hand sanitizer. To your hands. Or to their throats. It’s safer to disinfect.
I don’t want to sound bitter. Lots of people have it worse. Writing summaries isn’t a bad gig, and if it is, I got fired, which seems like a win. I think what I’d most like to do is to get paid to feed goats. They always seemed restful. I remember feeding them when I was little. Those demon eyes and the jaws chewing. It was sunny and my parents were sitting on the car, a grey station wagon. The muffler had busted, and the mechanic had fixed it with a Dr. Pepper can. I don’t know the details. I sometimes imagined it there, shaking back and forth, the “Dr. Pepper” a vibrating blur, as we trundled wherever we were going in that ugly car.
Honestly, I’m not sure if that happened or not. You sometimes get things lodged in your head and you don’t know why. Is your subconscious always in control, leading you to ruin or fortune? Maybe you’re to blame for everything. The goats are extinct, their jaws no longer working. You look up at a sky that’s as flat as your mind. It’s descending now, the shadow blotting out the sun, if there was a sun. Eventually you won’t get up.
Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His full-length collections are Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024), Gnarly Thumbs (Anxiety Press, 2025), Meaning Is Embarrassing (Ranger, 2025) and Brevity (Nun Prophet, 2025). Bluesky: @nberlat.bsky.social.