“antumbra” was previously published in the Winter 2020 edition of Third Wednesday Magazine.

antumbra

Do I know him? Of course, I do. He moved to town when we were teens. Everyone thought it was a riot that our first and last names were the same. And since he was bigger and older, like by a month, he got to keep the name and I got called something else. I’ll tell you, giving someone a nickname should be a crime. You have your identity and then someone kidnaps it and you can’t even pay a ransom to get it back. I know, I know. Your name’s not really you and a rose by any other name blah blah blah. Well, what worked for roses didn’t work for me. When you’re fifteen and the head cheerleader is walking around with your name on her tongue, it really hurts to know she’s talking about someone else.

Yeah, we went to the same college. Even shared an apartment. I don’t know why we wanted to be writers. Maybe we just liked the idea of being miserable. He used to read to sick kids in hospitals and then go write about it and our teacher lost her mind. He was melancholy and sharp and made you think about what it was like to be alone. I don’t know how he tapped into that. He was always so damn popular. But I guess that’s talent for you – he just saw something and he wrote the hell out of it. All that time, I was planning to get published before him and stake a claim to my real name but then he wrote that story about the toddler with Stage 4 Lymphoblastic Lumphoma and they gave him the Pushcart Prize and that was that. My name would never be mine.

After graduation, he got into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and I didn’t and we fell out of touch. I came home and started seeing Nicole – she was pretty and smart and didn’t know it, which is the only kind of girl I seem to attract. Right after she moved in, I got an email that looked like it was from myself. I wrote back and connected with myself online and before long I was liking my own posts. Man, I never got tired of seeing those pics from Iowa. There I was drinking beer at the Foxhead. It was like I was there.

Right after he was in the New Yorker, the condom broke and Nicole hit me with that pro-life stance I never saw coming. We got married and I took a job doing technical writing – if you ever bought a blender and thought the warranty was surprisingly concise, well, all I can say is you’re welcome. We had the kid and, let me tell you, I combed the world to come up with a name no one else had. Nicole went back to waiting tables and I worked from home. One night, who do you think showed up with a stuffed dog and all this know-how about putting kids to sleep? He had a gift for me: an uncorrected proof of his first book. He’d called it Antumbra and he spent five minutes explaining the meaning of the word, which wasn’t necessary, but try telling him that.

It was real spectacular. Naturally, the critics fell in love and he was buried in awards. I started to wish people knew my real name. I would have liked being mistaken for him. It would have been pretty grand.

As for what happened next, well, what can I say? I was at the Goodwill when I heard and I went into a kind of shock. It’s funny. You publish a book and spend all this time thinking about what the Booker Prize people are going to think but you forget about everyone else. That guy who shot Lennon bought Catcher in the Rye and wrote “This is my statement” on the inside flap. You think Salinger imagined that would happen when he saw his uncorrected proof? You write what you write. You never know what’s going to come.

I don’t blame him for giving up writing. The media had its field day. Antumbra: the book that shot up a school. Go look for it online. First thing you’ll see is all those dead kids. And the whole trial, the shooter kept saying how Antumbra really “inspired him,” how it sort of “woke him up.” So if the writing told him what to do, what does that say about the writer? If I had written Antumbra, I’d have stopped writing too. Losing your name is bad. Try losing your art.

Last time I saw him? Over Christmas. I was at the welfare office and he was on his way to the cemetery with a bunch of flowers. He looked terrible. Said he was working on grade school textbooks. He asked if I was writing and I told him we’d had another kid and the only time I wrote was when I spelled out words with alphabet soup.

“Shame,” he said. “I always liked your stuff.”

That kind of floored me. For months, I’d been wondering if I ever really had the knack. But hearing this from him was like getting a message from my younger, cockier self. It was a good, tough shock and it knocked me out of the park. I started writing on my way home. These days, I’m doing it on the bus and and early in the morning, when everyone’s still asleep. I’ve filled a whole notebook with clever thoughts. Of course, I’ll have to use a pseudonym. And you can bet I’m worried about who might read my stuff. I worry every time my kid breathes. But you can do something in this world or you can do nothing and I’ve been doing nothing for way too long.

Hey, if you ever find him, let me know. I kind of hate that he’s disappeared. I’d like to know where he went.

About the author:

Joel Fishbane‘s novel “The Thunder of Giants” is available from St. Martin’s Press while my short fiction has been published in a wide variety of magazines, including Ploughshares, Witness, and the Saturday Evening Post.

In the artist’s words:

After 40+ years as an award-winning commercial photographer, Jeff Corwin now focuses on fine art photography. Simplicity, graphic forms and repeating configurations personally resonate. Recent career highlights include: numerous museum exhibitions; gallery shows; work in permanent collections; features in numerous fine art publications; and representation by several contemporary galleries.

During my infancy as a commercial photographer, I quickly learned the real nature of my job – to communicate my clients’ needs. I was not there to serve myself. So, how to bring attention to the subject, or hero, of the image was always at the forefront of my approach. Composition was one tool to weed out extraneous content. But my most powerful tool became lighting on location. It also became my favorite part of the job. After years of shooting landscapes in my spare time, I decided to bring those same powerful strobes I used for commercial work into the landscape. And as with my commercial photography, using these strobes in my fine art photography became a technique to not only guide a viewer’s attention to what I considered the subject of an image or improve a graphic quality that is almost right, but also to provide me with delight while solving visual problems, as I had commercially. Once during a magazine interview, I was asked about the nature of my work in relationship to my interest in contrast. I think my answer was “it’s amazing how much time I spend lighting to make a situation look dark.” I know that she was asking about my lighting style in my black and white work, but it made me realize I like contrast in other ways as well. Contrasting theories, contrasting politics, how contrasting relationships work, the nature of competition with colors. It reminded me of a quote by Stanley Kubrick, “However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” (I would love to be able to ask him if he was being metaphorical or literal. I feel and hope it’s both.) I have always questioned myself regarding the origins of my style, but never to the extent of being unable to answer the question. It simply is. Because I am so much more passionate about light than I am about snapping the shutter, it has become the device I will use, both naturally and artificially. Whatever I am shooting, if the light that I look for is not there I will “supply” it if it is possible. Yeah, God’s light is pretty damn cool, but it’s not always how or when I want it. Sometimes natural light just needs to be augmented. (Sorry, God…)

“In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.” — Sir Francis Bacon