"Splice" by Will Willoughby
This is a selection from our Summer 2023 issue, “Stay,” currently available in print and digital versions.
All I can see out my office window is a snowdrift shaped like a deflated crescent moon. The wind is shearing snow off the back rim and throwing a haze of crystals into the bright sky. The way it’s carved out, the drift could be an amphitheater, like there’s a tiny audience out there watching me as I stare back at them. They’re chumps, though, for paying to see this play—some dull drama about an unaccountably sad man confined to an office chair. But at least the phone rings. I pick up because everybody else is at lunch.
“Stone Mill Publishing,” I say.
A male voice says, “To whom am I speaking?”
“Production editor.”
“Does Production Editor have a name?”
“Sure,” I say. “How can I help?”
“Well, I just got my galleys. And I’ll tell you—”
“Okay.”
“I’ll tell you something, friend. This ain’t gonna fly.”
“No?”
“What’s your name again?”
When he says this, I realize who it is. It’s the author of Fallow, Maine: A Photographic Odyssey from Ploughshares to Shore. When he dropped off the vintage photos for his book last fall, he kept calling me Doug. I don’t know where he got Doug. There’s no Doug here. But I tell him my real name.
“Got some time?” he says. “I’d like to get some fixes done.”
“Okay,” I say. “It’s Fallow?”
He doesn’t answer, but that could be my fault. My voice doesn’t go up at the end to indicate a question. Or maybe he’s ignoring me. I can hear him as he extravagantly flips the pages. He wants me to know he’s flipping. Each time he flips, he gives his voice a little extra goose.
He’s not unreasonable, he tells me. But he’s genuinely alarmed by the extent of the first-round edits. Entire captions have been rewritten. Much has been cut. Actual names—the town hall—have been lowercased. Passive voice has been used.
I listen to him. I’m good at listening. I have the endurance for it, but it’s also easier to let them vent. I watch the wind flay more snow off the spine of the snowdrift.
“This,” the author says. He mockingly reads an edited sentence to me:
Frederic Folsom (born c. 1850) poses in front of his Esker Road home with his wife and their son.
Then, slowly, with dignity, he reads the original sentence:
Frederic Folsom (ca. 1850-?), poses in front of his Esker Rd home, his wife, Mrs. Folsum, is standing beside the wagon with their son, ? Folsom. [He pronounces the question marks.]
“This is just a hack job,” he says. “Why was it rewritten?”
“Not sure,” I say. “I remember we had to check the name on the back of the photo.”
“Why’d she take the wagon out?”
The use of she is my cue to tell him I was the editor on that, but things will go better if he thinks somebody else did the hack job.
“Just a second,” I say. I wake up my laptop and open the image.
It’s mostly wagon. A well-bearded Frederic is on the right. His wife is standing to the left, and the boy is up in the seat. Frederic holds the reins of some horses, which are mostly out of frame. A few clapboards of the Esker Road home can be seen in the back. The only reason to mention the wagon, as far as I can see, would be to explain what a wagon is to people who don’t know.
But I say, “There’s definitely a wagon there. Sorry about that. Thinking we just roll it back in.”
“Much appreciated,” he says. “I know it’s not exactly Shakespeare—”
“No,” I say.
He’s flipping again and muttering, “That’s . . . I guess . . . We could leave . . .”
Then, through the phone, I hear a woman’s voice in the back. He starts talking to her. I miss a lot of it because he keeps turning his head from the receiver. Something about having to go soon.
I startle when he addresses me: “Gotta go, my friend.”
“We can go over next steps,” I say.
“Rapidly,” he says.
I rapidly tell him he should use a red pen to mark the pages up. No need for stickies—we’ll go through every page. An editor will implement the changes and consult with him before sending the book to print. So there won’t be any surprises when Fallow hits the shelves.
What I don’t say is that I’m really the only editor here. So I’ll be the one implementing changes and avoiding surprises when Fallow hits the shelves. I feel guilty about the omission, but confessing now will just provoke him. And everybody wins. He gets his gigantic wagon. I get to move on.
The author gets in one last vent about overtrimmed captions, inverted sentences, Capitalized Things diminished by an unseemly down style. By the end of the rant, he’s sated, almost tranquil. He doesn’t say goodbye when he hangs up, but at least it’s over. He’s blown his wad. He’s fine. For now, anyway.
I don’t get home until after sunset. I feed and walk Charlie and then sit with him on the couch while I eat cereal. He looks like a seventy-pound potato. I think about taking him for another walk, but it’s pretty cold. I end up watching dust rising from the lamp instead. I flick the shade, and particles spiral up, shift, and twist like a murmuration.
It’s not exciting, I admit. Like it wouldn’t be much of a movie. You never see “When an ambiguously doleful guy flicks a dusty lampshade, he must confront the sinister consequences.” I do start talking to myself, though. That’s something. If you’re doing the movie for this, just a quick note that people might think I’m talking to Charlie, but that’s only half true. You can tell by the content. For example, I say, “Just tired.” And, “It’s fine.” And, “It’s his teeth.” “He skipped his nap.” “I’ll get him.”
You’d be tempted here to pan to a picture of my wife and son in happier times, but that’d be obvious. Also, I don’t keep pictures like that around. Those go in the basement.
But I do flash back. You could use that. I flash back to that Saturday morning last June. The sun is still low and harsh. The car’s packed, and my wife and son are heading out. Instead of getting in the car, he circles back. He asks me why they should stay. I say, “Nobody asked you to stay.” He repeats it: “Why should we stay?” “It’s best you go.” “You want us to go?” “No, I don’t want you to go.” “But you just said go.” “I know.” “Then why should we go?” “It’s time to go, bud. Just go.” There is, of course, a sudden hugging. There’s prying away. There’s crying. It takes a while to get him into the car.
I try to push the scene out with something else. Maybe him a few summers earlier when he’s launching rockets. Or even earlier when he’s at swimming lessons. Or before that, he’s running at me when I pick him up at daycare. He’s running at me so hard that he knocks me down, and it becomes a regular thing, so after a while, I learn to kneel and brace for impact.
None of this works. I keep seeing him circling back to me in the driveway, asking why they should stay. Repeatedly, I tell him to go. And repeatedly he goes. They both repeatedly do.
For a long time, I sit with Charlie. I listen to his thick breathing. Then, as breezily as possible, I say, “Apparently I went pretty heavy on Fallow.”
His eyes snap open.
“Lowercased town hall,” I say. “I know! One of many town halls, buddy. A town hall, indefinite article!”
He rests his snout on my leg. His ears are pinned back.
“It’s alright,” I say and pet him.
The writing had some problems, though.
I get up, grab my work laptop, sit back down, and open the file for the book. On my screen, the Folsoms stare at me like the vintage undead. I paste in the original caption and make some edits, but I leave the wagon in:
Frederic Folsom (born c. 1850) poses in front of his Esker Road home. His wife is standing beside the wagon with their son.
I intend to leave it like that because I want to stop thinking about it. It’s enough. It’s a compromise. It’ll fly.
For some reason, though, I change it again:
Frederic Folsom (born c. 1850) stands in front of his Esker Road home with his wife and son, who’s sitting up there in that enormous wagon.
Then I do this:
Frederic Folsom (born c. 1850 and now dead) stands in front of his house—his house—down off Esker Road. His wife is standing as far from him as possible. Their son looks drugged. That’s some wagon.
Then this:
Frederic Folsom (born c. 1850) has nothing better to do than hang out in front of his Esker Road home and make Mrs. Folsom stand at the other end of their ginormous wagon while their empty-eyed son, whose last name is also Folsom, sits up top like a shit.
And this:
Frederic fucking Folsom, sporting the jagged beard and truculent expression of a self-absorbed asshole born in the mid-nineteenth century, manages to stand upright in front of his house on Esker Road. That woman? The one with the pissy look? That’s the wife. The vacuous boy, their spawn, has the same surname and is, through no fault of his own, plunked atop the massive wagon. All of them are dead now.
I hit undo until I get back to the compromise version. Then I slap the laptop shut, lean my elbows on it, and palm my eyes.
Charlie nervously thumps his tail.
I scratch his ears.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’m not mad.”
I oversleep the next morning and forget to drink coffee before I leave for work. I figure I’m late anyway, so I stop at a gas station to get some coffee and a breakfast bar. It takes longer than I think it will. There’s a line of chatty characters who want everybody to know they’re characters: “How’s it hanging,” “Lower’n it used to,” and so on. The banter continues while they slog through the choosing and buying of scratch tickets.
By the time I get to the office, there’s an email from the publisher in my inbox. She’s put the entire message in the subject line: “Find me before ten, please? EOM.”
Just before ten, I knock on her office door. It opens immediately, like she’s been standing there. She’s a thin, vivacious woman with close-set eyes and dark, straight hair to her waist. I never know how to act around her, how to field her enthusiasm.
“My good man,” she says. “Can I take your jacket, sir?”
I’m not wearing one. I raise my index finger and try to smile. I sit in the chair facing her desk. She gingerly mounts the corner of the desk.
She says, “How are things in your world?”
“The world is good,” I say.
“Good good. You’ve had the lion’s share lately.”
“Indeed,” I say. After a few beats, it’s clear she’s not going to speak, so I say, “It’s a lot of work.”
“You’ve been holding up?”
“Holding up,” I say.
“I got a thing in a minute,” she says, “but a little birdy told me you and Fallow had quite the confab yesterday.”
I fake a blank look.
“Do you feel good about it?” she asks.
“Sure.”
“You two get along.”
He’s a condescending prick. But I say, “We get along.”
“I don’t know how you’re so patient with him. I’d be—” She makes the sound of an explosion and uses her hands to indicate that her head is exploding with impatience. “Anyhoo, I got a mission for you, should you choose to accept.”
My mission, she tells me, is to shuttle the author’s vintage photos up to his house in Fallow so he can check some names and finish marking up the page proofs. He’ll relinquish the proofs for immediate return to the office. I’m to be reimbursed for mileage.
“Today?” I ask.
“It needs to go to print Friday.”
Since I don’t have a credible excuse, and since I’ve already proven I can talk to him without exploding, I choose to accept.
I go home to walk Charlie before leaving for Fallow. I don’t get up there until the afternoon, and it takes me a while to find the author’s house. It’s a Victorian under an elm on Main Street, which sounds cinematic, but it’s not nearly as nice as the other houses on the street. The wraparound porch is crammed with flotsam coated with blown-in snow—half packs of shingles, empty kitty-litter buckets, a rusted air conditioner. I grab the bin of photos from my back seat and step onto the spongy planks of the porch. I ring the doorbell with my elbow.
A blond woman in her thirties opens the door. A sharp cat-urine reek hits me from inside and triggers a sneezing fit. I twist my head away and hold the bin out to the woman, who takes it. Sneezing, I step down into the icy driveway and grab a tissue from my car. The woman watches me wipe my nose.
“You good?” she asks.
I give her a thumbs-up.
She yells into the house, “Dad!” She tells me to come on inside.
Inside, vague paths meander through magazine stacks, laundry baskets, cardboard boxes. The woman leads me down one of the paths to the living room, where the author is sitting at a computer desk with his back to us. The woman drops the bin on the floor beside him. I imagine a dander cloud billowing out and rolling toward me.
The author glances at the photos, twists around, and booms, “Mr. Stone Mill!”
He’s thin and athletic and carries the weight of his age with grace. He’s lithe. His white hair is pulled into a pony tail, and his blue eyes are sharp and younger than the rest of him. He stands up and sticks his hand out. I shake it.
“This is my helper,” he says, motioning to his daughter. “Kara.”
He doesn’t tell her my name, but at least he doesn’t call me Doug. I’m about to introduce myself when there’s a sound from upstairs, as if something the size of a remote control has hit the floor.
“Go check,” the author says to Kara. She leaves.
The author says to me, “I should be thanking you for the photos.”
“Not a problem,” I say and sneeze into my hands loud enough that it could count as shouting. The tissue from before is falling apart, but I blow my nose.
He says, “I just need—” There’s a bump from upstairs, and he looks up. The ceiling tiles are water-stained and have tuna can lids screwed into them for stability.
“It’ll take me a few minutes,” he says, gradually pulling his gaze from the ceiling.
I should respond, but I’m suppressing a sneeze.
“Here,” he says. He swivels his chair toward me and pats the backrest. “Sit.”
I obey.
He shuffles some papers on his desk and pulls the page proofs out from under a stack. Yellow stickies sprout from every page. He drops the proofs on the floor, sits cross-legged by the photos, and opens to the only page with a red sticky.
Even from where I’m sitting, I can tell his markup isn’t a markup. Instead of making red-ink alterations to the edited text, he’s stapled strips of paper to the proofs. They’re the original captions. He rummages through the photos and eventually pulls one out. He checks a name on the back and, with a black pen, corrects a name on one of the strips. He stands up and bends the proofs into a thick taco shell.
Kara comes back. “Okay?” he asks her.
“She just drifted off,” Kara says. “I checked the tank.”
The author winces and hands me the taco shell.
I don’t know how to explain it to him. His stapled captions are a single global change: “Pls. go fuck yourself and use the book I wrote in the first place.” Does he think I’m going to type all that in? Even if I did, it’d still need to be edited. I’d have to start over.
I say, “Just so you know—“
“What’s that?”
“There are things that’d still need to be changed.”
“For example.”
“The editor would need to make some changes.”
“It appears,” he says and knuckles his eyes. “Seems we need to talk.”
When he stops rubbing his eyes, he staggers for a second like he’s drunk. He forces a smile, which steadies him. Then his mouth straightens, and his red eyes level on me.
“Let’s get down to brass tacks,” he says.
He leads me over to a dining room table heaped with mail, magazines, old coffee cups. He picks up an armful of debris and piles it on the far side of the table, clearing off a small lagoon in front of us. An ancient spill has hardened into a dusty, sticky island at the center.
“Wait,” he says.
Wait for what? What does he think I’m going to do?
He strides off, comes back with a couple wooden folding chairs, and bangs them open. We sit down with the printout on the table, and he starts flipping through.
On page 48, he hammers his middle finger on the picture of the Folsoms. “This is what I mean,” he says. “This right here. Whoever hacked this up hacked it up good.”
“We talked about that,” I say.
“And I thought we had an understanding.”
“I thought so too.”
“What’s the understanding, then? To you, I mean. You tell me what you think the understanding is.”
“What do you mean?”
With the measured tone of somebody who just took a seminar on measured tones, he says, “Tell me what you’re planning to do with my caption based on our common understanding.”
“You wanted to mention the wagon.”
He flaps the stapled strip back and forth. “Tell them to use this. This right here. Exactly what’s written here. Who’s doing it? Not the same one from before.”
He glowers at me. I let him glower. Then I say, “Nothing to worry about. We’ll take care of it.” And I mean it. For one, it wouldn’t kill me to just restore his captions, make a few tweaks, and move on. Plus, I should get going. The light outside is getting gray, and the room’s getting colder. There’s Charlie to think about. I reach for the proofs.
He holds them down, though, and says, “Know that I don’t hate you.”
“You don’t hate me?”
“You’re a good hombre,” he says. “I harbor no ill will toward you or your ilk.”
I stare him down until he glances away. There’s only one reason for somebody to say something like that—to lay the groundwork for being the good guy. He’d been the reasonable one, he’d claim. He’d tried to make things work. Some people, he’d say, just have an axe to grind.
“I need to go,” I say and start tidying the pages.
“The galleys,” he says.
“They’re printouts,” I say. “We just print them on the office printer.”
“The printouts, then. I need your assurance we’re good on that front.”
The stickies are making it hard to straighten the pages. Starting from the beginning, I pull them off and neatly pile them on a crinkled lunch bag on the periphery of the heap. I whack the proofs upright on the table until they look almost as clean as they used to be. Then I stand to go.
“Hold up,” he says. “You think you can do that for me?”
“Do what?”
“Give me my book back.”
“We’ll figure something out,” I say.
“I used to work at a newspaper, you know. The one downtown? I worked there.”
“That’s nice.”
“First summer out of college,” he says, “I did whatever they asked. I even delivered them. I kept my eyes peeled and my ears open. I learned the trade. I taught myself. By the time I left, I could do the whole thing soup to nuts.” His chair creaks as he sits back. “You, though? You seem done. Like done done.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “It’s fine.” But he’s right. I’m done. I wasn’t always done, though. I used to like the job, even take pride in it. I’d go in and do things. I’d change things. Make sense of things. At some point, though, something changed, something I didn’t want but couldn’t stop once it had started. Now I go in so I can stare out the window, and I come home so I can stare at the lamp. So done is the word. He’s right about that. But what’s that to him? It’s my job. It’s what I do. It’s what’s left. Does he think I wouldn’t fix it if I could?
I sit back down and push at the debris to widen the lagoon. A stack falls off on the other side. He stands to see what it was.
“That’s fine,” I say. “Sit.” I slap the proofs down, turn to page 48, and put my palm on the Folsoms. “This sentence,” I say.
“Shit,” he says. “He was a smithy. Folsom was a smithy. I meant . . .” He pats his pocket for a pen.
“Listen,” I say. “Listen to me. We need . . .” I look for a word he’ll understand. “We need to fix this.”
“It’s fine,” he says.
“It’s broken.”
“Pray tell.”
“Well there’s style. Like circa. House style is just italic c.”
“That’s not standard.”
“And when you know the birth date but not the death date, it’s just born whenever. And we don’t abbreviate Esker Road.”
“It says that on the sign.”
“And there’s the name. That’s just a typo. It’s Folsom with an o. We checked the photo.”
“The photo could be wrong.”
“There’s a comma splice.” I point to the caption and drag my finger under the words: “Frederic poses comma his wife is standing. Two sentences spliced together. You could start a new sentence or throw a conjunction in there. Whatever. But you have to do something. You can’t just leave it.”
“We could very well leave it.”
“What I’m saying is your markup—what you’ve done here—doesn’t help. It’s the . . .” I’m short of breath. “It’s the opposite of help.”
He holds out his hands like he’s cradling a large glass bowl containing all his points. He says, “What I’d like—”
“I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to do with this,” I bark. “Type it in? Paste in the original? That’d mean starting over. I can’t start over. I worked hard on this. I wasn’t trying to undermine your voice or whatever. I’m just doing my job. That’s it. Making it correct, making it readable, making it fit the space. So if you think I’m gonna do it again . . .”
He flares his eyes. “You said—”
“You can’t just put things back the way they were! Things don’t go in reverse. The arrow of time won’t allow it. This is where we are now. Here. Right here. No matter what you do, no matter what you want, things are different now. What they were before, that’s not a thing anymore. What they are now, what they will be, that’s all we have.”
I pant and keep my eyes on the lagoon.
The author says, “You’re upset.”
“Jesus fuck,” I say.
“Listen,” he says. “I get it.”
“You get it?” I dig through my pockets for the old tissue.
“I just don’t want you to cut stuff,” he says. “That’s all. It’s the cutting I don’t like.”
I wipe my nose.
“But here’s the thing,” he says and leans in close. “You’re obligated to do as I say. I pay your salary. Now you’ve got my markup—”
“It’s not a markup.”
“You have my markup,” he says and crosses his arms.
I clap once with my palms flat. The sharp crack makes him flinch. I gather the proofs and head down a path to the front door. It sticks when I open it, and it’s hard to close, so it sounds like a slam. Once I’m in the driveway, the author yells something at me from inside.
In the car, I crank the heat but shiver until I get out onto the highway. It’s dark by then, and the snow has started up again. They’re those lazy, floppy flakes that don’t fall straight, but they rush my headlights as I drive. The plows haven’t been through yet, so it’s hard to see the lanes. I’m following somebody’s fading tracks.
I could put things back, I suppose. Be a good hombre. Restore due to the fact that. Resurrect his question marks. In the hurricane chapter, the streets could be inundated with floodwater. Sundered boats could dot the salt marsh. The venerable oak on High Street could sadly uproot.
The car bucks as ice crunches under the tires. I jerk the wheel to the left.
There’s always sabotage. I could, just before sending his book to print, thin it out. Take what I took and then take some more. Delete some adjectives. Exile the adverbs. Omit articles at random. Through simple subtraction, render his book too broken to fix.
The tracks are nearly gone, but I grip the wheel and step on the gas. I can tell the tires are slipping.
And I could kill the dedication. Remove the chapter intros. Eject names from the acknowledgments. Maybe exterminate the captions altogether.
Not the Folsom sentence, though. That stays. Frederic Folsom, a heavily bearded blacksmith born in the mid-nineteenth century, must always pose in front of his Esker Road home with his horses, his wagon, and somewhere in the picture, two people whose names he can no longer remember.
Will Willoughby is a copy editor and writer who’s oddly proud of his redundant name. He earned his English degree from the University of New Hampshire and now lives in southern Maine with his wife and daughter. He enjoys woodworking, astronomy, and talking to his potato-colored dog, Charlie.
