Helen Keller Really Lived: A Novel

"So this is what it comes too."

Helen Keller Really Lived 409 So this is what it comes too. Menjá nadúli. Literally, you conned me, you filled me with air. But you know that. Literally. It is in the ten pages of “Russian slang and colloquialisms,” that you cribbed from http://everything2.com. Ten pages of virile mat thrashed into Roman serfage, because Cyrillic is Greek to you, súka. You filled me with air, inflated me with linguistic esprit, only to kill me, once again. A whack job, a hack job, a bumbling though evidently not humbling execution of this misbegotten faux-bilingual sequence of phonemes, this so-called Timor Zinkovsky. Oh sure I may live on, if our pile of otstóy finds a publisher—live on, as much, or as little, as you, 410 Elisabeth Sheffield “Elisabeth Sheffield.” You, who have snatched away all I had to live on for. A dangling preposition, as my darling, dimwitted amateur grammarian would point out, referring to Practical English and the Command of Words, if she could read these words. If she could, but she can’t. She never could, I understand that now. Not a word, from the very beginning, or should I say end, from the moment of the fictive death of Timor Zinkovsky in the fictive life of Selina Van Staal. For shame. Or to quote sweet Gracey P., your literary superior: “Everyone real or invented deserves the open destiny of life.” Even after death. I am not going to let you off. You have committed a murder , ended a life, if only on the page. Not to mention plagiarized the plot of a Hollywood movie. Two crimes against literature in one book. But all the more reason for me to dog you: what use is a paper trail, without a tracker to follow the pulpy reek? And already Bad Betty, in my investigation of your capital offense, I’ve found in these pages answers to nearly all the classic capital questions: the Who (you), the What (me), the Where (here), the When (now), the How (no need to reiterate). Only one capital question remains: Why? Why? That answer is not here, in these writings, in this file you have titled WIP for “Work in Progress,” in imitation of the inimitable James Joyce. Maybe it is somewhere in your head, entangled in some neuronal sixth sense mess inaccessible even to you. If that is the case, no help there. I believe, however, that it is in the looseleaf notebook that lies next to your laptop. Snorting around, I found these scribblings—stopped short by their stale intellectual stench: Helen Keller Really Lived 411 Epitaphs. They once spoke to us. “As thou art so was I. As I am so shalt thou be.” As I am so shalt thou be… Now we speak to them, even though “over six million accounts on Facebook belong to dead people…”(http://www.creative applications. net/webapp/above-the-cloud-archaeology-of-social-networks). But it’s just us doing the talking, tagging their photos, posting mylar balloon sentiments on their pages. Crap like wish you were still here, bro. Miss you, sis. Hi Mom, I’m a mom now, too. Hey pops, just bought a new Infiniti. You’d love the ride. No attempt even at projection or to summon a voice from beyond the grave. No conception of anything beyond the banal payfor -view here and now… We can’t stop yakking on, to listen, even if they could speak. So I suspect that you killed me for irony’s sake. But irony is dead, détka—everyone’s known that for years. ...