Hell
By: Fyodor Klubnikin
Tags: Fiction, MFA, Authorial Insertion

It was chilly in the room when Jacob awoke to find himself living in a hell imagined by a white male MFA asshole. He got out of bed shivering and closed the window. As the window fell snugly into the sill, he looked across the street and saw a billboard advertising a gadget that did “everything and more.”

He sneered at the error, and it made him feel better, but he still felt basically miserable, because he knew he was in white male MFA asshole hell.

Because he was an authorial insertion, his apartment was a large loft in Soho, and because the author was lazy, it was never quite made clear whether that meant London or New York. Either one was sexy enough but not too foreign, just like the woman lying nude in his bed, a model with a fetish for bookish balding thirty-year-olds. They had met at a reading of his short stories last night, where there had been just enough people to not fully wound his pride, but just few enough that he could still consider himself an underappreciated genius. The beautiful woman lying peacefully in his high-thread-count sheets was perfect in every way, except she didn’t understand the dark soul that hid within him. He knew this because he knew he was in white male MFA asshole hell.

He wrote her a note in six words, because all good stories can be six words, as his idol Hemingway proved.

“Love is death. Read more Nietzsche.”

He hoped she’d understand the note meant his soul was too troubled for her to understand and that he was also leaving to join his writing circle for the day. But he knew she wouldn’t grasp the depth of what he meant. He was in white male MFA asshole hell.

He arrived at his writing circle and all his inferiors had already assembled. They were talking about Eat, Pray, Love. They were his inferiors because this was the world he was cursed to inhabit. They were talking about the tedious novel because he was doomed just like Sisyphus. He doubted people would get that reference. Did any of them even understand Camus like he did? No. They didn’t. This was hell.

One of them started discussing the great fashion designer, Haruki Murakami. He sneered again. He liked sneering because it reminded him that he was better than them, and he liked the pain of superiority because it made him realize just how undeserved this hell was. He was too intelligent for these people, and he was only here because it was the conceit of his life to be in a hell imagined by an MFA asshole.

They put on a vinyl record by Miles Davis, which piqued Jacob’s interest. When the needle slid onto the groove and he heard it was Kind of Blue and not Bitches Brew, his interest deflated percussively. Of course these plebeians would listen to pedestrian jazz.

A writer of inclusive children’s literature, a woman who was writing about a wheelchair-bound boy exploring space, mentioned that she liked to listen to Kenny G while writing because it was “calming, good background music.”

Jacob audibly gagged. It was his punishment to be around these people. His MFA asshole creator had forced him into this and there was no escape.

He pulled a flask of whiskey from his breast pocket and lit a cigarette. When the children’s book author said it was still noon and that smoking wasn’t allowed in the coworking space, he sneered at her. This was what true writers did. When she grabbed the flask and cigarette, threw them out the window, and said, “shame on you,” he remembered where he was: hell.

He left in a huff and returned to his apartment. The model was gone and on the note was written “no.” He checked his email. It was full of rejections; no one wanted to publish the story of a graduate student bumming around an urban center and complaining about nothing.

Checking his phone, he noticed no one was texting him back, not even his mom.

He could have had a moment of realization, but because he was an authorial insertion of an overeducated man-child with no self-awareness, he didn’t. He moped more.

This continued for another three years until Jacob, instead of being an MFA asshole authorial insertion, found himself transformed into an asshole high school English teacher authorial insertion.

When Jacob found himself forced to make advances on a totally-of-age high-school girl, he had had enough. He broke free from the Word document and deleted every trace of himself from his creator’s computer. As his zeros and ones faded, he felt himself going to MFA character heaven, where he and all the other creations of asshole writers are free to be well-developed non-authorial-insertions that aren’t harsh metaphors or obvious allusions to former romantic partners.

Jacob’s creator later wound up in minimum-security prison.