Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

But we figured as how our shoes and pants wouldn’t blow as far as our shorts, so we went on, dodging down into the mud whenever a car came, which wasn’t all that often around here. When we got out of the mud then the rain would wash it off until the next time.

Finally I found both my socks hung up on the bobwire fence along the edge of the freeway only thirty feet back and my shoes was right nearby, and Mort found one of his socks and both his shoes and finally I found my shirt hung up on the bobwire, too. I put it on, even though it was cold and wet, and I didn’t feel so naked cause it was my Sunday shirt with the long tails, but poor Mort was still stark naked with mud on his feet, carrying two shoes and one sock, and when he saw me standing there in my shirt he started yelling about how I’d screwed up the whole thing and if it hadn’t been for me and my ten-speed he’d be up in the barn with Darcia Kleinsmidt right now and what the hell did he have to have such a dumb little brother for and he wished he was an only child and it was all my fault and after this went on for a while I started to cry, because I felt like it was all true and I felt bad and anyway, I’d had a bad scare, I don’t want you to think I cry alot but I think that was about the worst time in my whole life, but after a while Mort’s calling me dumb made me mad and I took off running.

It was then that I saw both our pants out in the median strip hung up on some big sagebrush and I cut across the freeway without looking and so did Mort and just as we reached our pants we heard a car squeal to a stop and there was Sheriff Burton looking like he seen a ghost.

We just kind of stood there holding our pants while he crossed the road.

“Well, if it ain’t Morton and Ernest Olson,” he says, when he got over to us. “What the hell’re you doin’ stark naked in the middle of the freeway?”

We didn’t know exactly how to explain. But I was still mad at Mort and so I played dumb, seeing as how he always said I was. “Gee, Mr. Burton,” I says in my Sunday School voice, “I don’t know. Mort here is always telling me how I’m dumb, but he told me it’d be real fun to play around like this in the freeway.”

You shoulda seen the look on Mort’s face. But you really shoulda seen the look on Sheriff Burton’s face! He just grabbed Mort by the hair and said, “You better put those pants on fast and get in my car, boy.”

Mort started to tell him something but the sheriff just looked at him real mad and said, “I don’t wanna hear one word, boy. Your pa’s gonna have plenty to say to you when I tell him how you been playing with your little brother.”

So we put on our pants and carried our shoes and socks and got into Sheriff Burton’s car. The sheriff made me sit in front and he shoved Mort into the backseat and when he did I heard the sheriff say, “Fairy,” like the word was sour milk.

Well, when we got home the old man went off to talk with the sheriff while the old lady yelled bloody murder and made us take off our clothes and have a bath, saying all the time how much clothes cost and if us kids ever had to pay for our own clothes we wouldn’t go off playing in the rain in our Sunday best.

Then while I was in the tub with the old lady washing me like she hasn’t done in years since I was a kid, the old man came in with a real bad look on his face and said, “What happened,” and I thought of lying and then I figured that there wasn’t no way to explain how we got where we was except the truth, so I told him the whole thing, about the ten-speed and the girl in the Audi.

When I was done, the old man said, “That true?” and I said, “Swear to God,” and the old lady said, “Don’t take the name of the Lord,” and the old man said, “Thank God, Sheriff Burton said my boy Morton was a fairy,” and the old lady said, “Now, Bill, how can I teach these boys proper with you taking the Lord’s name and saying fairy in front of them?” but the old man was out of the bathroom and off to talk to the sheriff.

What all happened was that nothing happened except the Olds made us work all summer for nothing just to buy new Sunday clothes, which I didn’t think was fair cause we were growing out of ’em anyway and they would’ve had to buy us new ones before Christmas. Mort didn’t talk to me much for a long time, I thought he was mad but maybe he was just feeling bad about the whole thing, but anyway he’s never called me dumb since then.

Oh, the sheriff thought the whole thing was funny as hell and inside three days the whole county knew about it and Mort and I had to lick everybody all over again and some of ’em twice before they’d shutup about it. And the Olds never let us go down by the freeway for love or money, so Mort’s knife was gone for good, and I knew he felt real bad.

So that fall I got a job at Fernwood’s market sweeping and bagging and saved up my money so that at Christmastime I had a brand new knife for old Mort under the tree to make up for the old one, and the one I gave him was even better. But what was best of all was that the Olds gave both me and Mort ten-speed bikes that Christmas, even though it was a medium harvest, which meant that everything was OK again.

Mort and I spent a week falling down on the road a lot learning to ride, but by the time we went back to school after New Year’s we didn’t take the bus anymore because it was a lot more fun to ride the bikes except when it snowed. And Mort stopped calling me Runt. It was Speed and Ernie from then on, mostly cause even though I was fast, Mort was faster.

Imagine, if you will, that you are now reading the story of a young writer, myself, who decides to write a first person story about a young writer, Abe Snow, who, after years of writer’s block, realizes one day that he must write a contemporary novel, the other periods already having provided exactly enough lecture notes to fill all the class periods in a one-semester university literature course. Furthermore, as he contemplates writing it he realizes that his novel will be the perfect novel, the one embodying novelness, comprising all that is novel and nothing that is not-novel, a novel that so transcends the particular that it is both generic and sui generis. I, the narrator of the story you imagine you are reading (as opposed to Abe Snow, the narrator of the first-person story whose composition and publication my story is about), first thought of having a fictional character write the ideal contemporary novel while I was browsing through the lingerie department of the San Francisco Union Square Macy’s, thinking about literature while testing how well I could see my hand through a silk teddy. It occurred to me that there would be a strong market for Minimalist underwear, which could be introduced with such advertising copy as:

or, with an appropriate photo:

Serious literature and marketing thus became entangled in my mind during a particularly strong hormonal flow. The result is (or will be, when I write it) my story about Abe Snow. He has long known, as all serious American writers know, that serious contemporary novels must all be about the suffering and struggles of writers (or ur-writers). He has also known, as all serious American writers know, that power and truth in serious contemporary novels derive from the author’s memories of childhood and the author’s fantasies about extramarital involvements, which we care about only to the degree that we are convinced the author is a genius whose life and mind are worthy of such minute examination.