KJ Kabza - Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, and Regular-Type

Featured Reprint - replaced semi-annually
Hi Jason

How does that Hannibal Lecter quote go? Something about how the first things we learn to covet are the things around us?

"Hi Jason" first appeared in January 2010 in Transcendent Visions.


Hi Jason
by KJ Kabza

The first unsent email of the day went like this:

Hi Jason,
Can't make it to the meeting this morning. I keep thinking of you pounding me from behind, and I've got to stay at my desk to hide the concomitant woody.
Cheers,
David

The second unsent email, written about an hour later, was more like:

Hi Jason,
Would you like to get a drink with me after work, so I can pretend we're on a date?

Jason, naturally, being my boss—the authoritative, hard, powerful, arrogant-handsome-asshole type who would never hang out with the token homo nerd, who talks to the cacti on his desk when no one's looking.

But as any emo kid in a band can tell you, love is brutal. Jason's dark charisma pulls you in.
About twenty minutes later, it was:

Hi Jason,
I'm a better cook than your girlfriend is.

Smirk. Admire. Quietly delete.
Sixteen minutes later, I did:

Hi Jason,
Can we have our meeting this afternoon in a bathroom stall?

(Smirk. Admire. Delete.) What I should've been doing, I know, is something extremely important and boring, like Spreadsheet Templates or Holistic Workflow Solutions. But instead I think about fucking at least three hours a day. Is this normal?

Five minutes later, a series of we've-got-a-crisis emails landed in my inbox. I addressed it. During the interlude, I managed to forget about my boss (in the shower, lathering his body; rolling over and baring a tight ass to the moonlight; relaxing alone in his probably chic apartment. FOCUS YOU IDIOT: working in his office, just fifteen feet from your cube.) In the course of my addressing, I did five things at once with six emails open, and sent things, and CC'd things, and printed things. And twenty minutes passed.

And when everything was settled, I noticed that one of those six open emails actually said,

Hi Jason,
Would you like to fuck me raw? I can take a 7" (circumference!) dildo at home, so I'm feeling pretty prepared.
Cheers,
David

I stared at it.

Printed things?

I jumped from my cube and tore down the stupid hall to the stupid copy room, where some frizzy woman with horsy-looking teeth (marketing department) was at the printer, scooping up an enormous pile of crap.

I froze.

She looked up at me and smiled. "Oh, sorry. Do you have something in here?"

"No," I denied, and fled back into the hallway. I could've kicked myself: why hadn't I said "I don't know; why don't you let me take a look?"

I turned around again, stymied by my own idiocy. I watched her leave the copy room and go down the hall in the opposite direction.

I followed her, discreetly.

When she paused at her cube, I paused too. What's my line? But then Ellen came out of her office and said, "Thanks for grabbing those, Mindy," and took the entire pile from Horsy Teeth.
My heart crawled into my mouth.

Ellen retreated into her office and shut the door.

I stood in the hallway for a minute like a dweebus. Mindy looked up from her desk. "Are you looking for Ellen?"

"Yes."

"She's here."

"Oh."

I went up to Ellen's door and peeked around the edge, just barely, to look through her office's glass front wall. The pile of papers sat on the edge of her desk, untouched, while she typed something.

I knocked. Ellen motioned for me to come in. I stepped inside and lied, "Sorry to interrupt, but Allie was looking for you earlier."

"Oh?" Ellen didn't look up from her screen. "Did she say what it was about?"

"No." I tried to look at Ellen and not the pile. "She said it was important, though. And that she had to find you right away."

Ellen sighed and stood. "Great. Thanks, David."

"Sure." I left her office with her, but lagged behind. S-l-o-w-l-y. She turned into the labyrinth of cubes, and I turned right back into her office. And I grabbed the pile, and dude, I fucking ran.
Until Jason God himself turned a corner, raw sex in his stride and swagger, as if he were the mere vehicle for his golden cock, and could use it to smite the building.

I stumbled to a halt. Jason cruised to a halt.

We eyed each other.

"David."

He blocked my way, shoulders broad, legs planted wide, as if he were ready to, uh, (redacted).
I swallowed. "Yes?"

"Thanks."

"I... what?"

Jason's eyes flicked to the pile. "For walking those over. Ellen sent you, didn't she? Because she's done with them?"

"Oh," I said. "Well uh, yeah, that."

He stepped up to me, close. I could feel his body heat. His cologne rode over on it in waves, a musky scent that stopped my exhalation. "Thank you," he said, and reached out—hands open and demanding.

My joints loosened. David, you R-Tard, don't faint. I bent my head and tried to swiftly leaf through hundreds of still-hot pages. "I... just a minute... I have an email mixed up in here... I think..."

His dark brows twitched down in impatience. "Just print it again."

"Almost." I tried flipping faster, but I was clumsy and skipped whole chunks, and his (hottie, hottie, hottie) proximity wasn't helping.

"David." His hands moved in and held the pile, insistently. "Come on."

"One more—" I stuttered. "I just—"

Jason pulled.

The pile slid apart in our hands as he pulled one way and I pulled the other, and I saw, on the very top of his pile, an email that began, "From: Hershaw, David."

I yelped. Actually, okay, maybe I screamed like a little girl. I tried to snatch the page but Jason stepped back, looked down, radiated manly authority, frowned.

What could I do? I watched his eyes saccade over every 10-point-font line.

He picked it up and held it out to me.

Dear Mr. Matthews,
I'm writing about the adjustment you asked for me to make to your account last week...

"Is this it?"

I said, R-Tard, don't faint.

The impulse to breathe and survive flooded me again, and I snatched my perfect innocence from his grasp. "Yes! Thank Christ!"

Jason stared at me.

Before he could say anything, I shoved the rest of the pile into his hands. "Nevermind," I blurted, and continued the sprint to my cube.

Success.

Collapse in chair. Christ, Christ, Christ. I lost ten minutes to uncreative mental cursing and the shakes. I looked at my fake walls, the tacked-up schedules, my calendar molting its sticky notes. I'd completely forgotten what I had been doing. I looked around my desk for clues.

Oh yes. Closing some windows I didn't need—of course.

Still shaking, I swiveled back to my computer and checked what else I had open.

David, you're not an R-Tard. You're an eternal moron.

Didn't you print two of those open emails?

My insides dropped into freefall. I pulled my doomed body to its feet and peeked over the top of my cube, through the glass wall into Jason's office.

He was sorting through the pile of papers.

One more. Here we go. I moved drunkenly from my desk to his door, barely able to breathe/function/walk, flailing at the walls for support. I didn't so much knock as fall against the door fist-first.

He gestured for me to come in.

I entered. "Hey. I think I had something else in there."

Jason looked up, expression normal and serious, and handed me the remainder of the stack. "Take a quick look. I've got to clip these together anyway."

I flopped into the chair across his desk. Again, I flipped through camouflaging reams. A drop of sweat rolled down my temple. I didn't find anything, but I didn't trust myself, and looked through it again.

Still nothing.

Clean.

I set the pile back on his desk. I exhaled. "It's all right. I don't have anything in there. I thought I'd printed out two things. But forget it."

His eyes flicked up to mine.

Wordlessly, expression blank, he pulled a page from a freshly-paper-clipped stack, and laid it face-up in front of me.

Oh no, eyes; don't sink down. Don't look.

And if you do, don't read it.

Hi Jason,
Would you...

Nice, David. That's reeeeal nice.

In the periphery of my vision, Jason rose and moved around his desk. Musky cologne rolled over me as he passed. I heard a rattle, and the daylight around us dropped.

I dared to look up. Jason was closing the blinds over his glass wall.

"Uh, look," I said.

But Jason God turned back to me, dark smile at 1,000 Watts, iron hands lunging and gripping me under the armpits, standing me up, and flinging me roughly to the back of his door. He moved his hips, one violent thrust, and pinned me where I stood. Demanding eyes locked over mine: well?

Say something. Say something.

Like an ass: "Hi, Jason."

Mouth on mine.

Oh geez.

back to top

Notes - the author's comments
In case my fiction has filled you with a roiling desire to know more about these sparkling narrative gems, I have provided a few notes and miscellaneous observations (in alphabetical order) about each piece. (Notes for stories that cannot be found online will be added over time, once a given story appears on this site as a featured reprint.)

Billions of Stars:
The first three paragraphs of this story came to me in a dream. The rest of the paragraphs, however, didn't come to me until 8 or 9 months later, after giving the setup an awful lot of annoyed and baffled thought. I have only ever written two stories based on dreams, and I am a little irked that my first professional sale was largely the product of my unconscious mind, rather than the effortful will that is 99% of what a writer actually uses.

Boulder No. III:
After writing "Upriver," I somehow didn't feel satisfied with my too-brief sojourn in the world of classical Greek myths, so I wrote this story immediately afterward. (Of the two, I think this one is stronger.) My favorite bit is the last line, because I just know that the protagonist is, yet again, about to badly misinterpret the meaning of something key, and we can only imagine what this is about to do to him.

Epiphany Sale:
This seems to be one of the more popular stories I have written. Ironically, it was also the easiest sale I have ever made. For 10 years the idea sat in my Story Ideas folder, until I finally decided to use it, wrote it in 20 minutes, and submitted it to the place that subsequently bought it. Sometimes you just get lucky, I guess.

Expurgated Version, The:
Part of the skill set you develop as a writer is knowing how long a story needs to be to fit its central idea. When I first tried to tell this story, I didn't have that skill yet, and attempted to make it a 6,000-word monstrosity. Happily, I came back to it many years later (NEVER DELETE YOUR OLD STUFF) and made it work. At just 400 words, it packs a much better punch.

Flow:
You know what blew my freakin' mind? The kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson at the MIT museum.

Forever In Heaven:
I've always thought that the resurrection of a eukaryotic organism presents a very thorny metaphysical problem.

From Mutsumi:
I'm something of an oddity as a speculative fiction writer in that I don't like turning my short fiction into novels (or vice versa) or re-using worlds and universes in completely different stories. This piece might eventually prove to be the exception; the setting was originally stolen from an idea I had for a novel or series of novels that I'm not sure I'll ever bother getting around to writing. We'll have to wait and see.

Get Happy:
Despite what I've written in the "Notes" paragraph for "From Mutsumi," the world of "Get Happy" is, in fact, revisited in a few other stories of mine. However, this is the only far-future story in that sequence, so you'd be hard-pressed to discern which of my other stories are supposed to fit into this universe, and when. (See if you can figure out which ones they are. It'll be like a boring game.)

Hero:
Heros aren't the only people in epic fantasy tales who need to be on the run sometimes.

Hornets' Nest, The:
Hornets and wasps often plagued the common areas of my dorm in college. For awhile, I would catch them with my bare hands and nonchalantly stroll to the closest door to set them free outside. Everyone thought I was nuts for doing this. But maybe they'd change their minds if they read this story.

How the Snake Got the Fork in His Tongue:
My crit group associate Scott once told me, "Your stories are like outhouses—throw-away japes with silly concepts—but made of the finest teak. Why are you wasting your writing on such trivial stories?" I think I just laughed, because I was too startled to answer, "Because I like silly stories." When I (re)started writing short fiction in college, lighter stories were in fact the only things I ever wrote. This piece is one of my earliest attempts.

In Case of Apocalypse:
I really wanted to write a story with the title "In Case of Apocalypse, Please Push Button and Wait for Assistance." I tried brainstorming all sorts of things, but every road I tried wound up pointing toward "Four horsemen... someone turns into a horse... that could be kinky as hell, couldn't it?" Since I almost never write erotica, I had some reservations about it, but I wrote it anyway, let the words fall where they would, and looked at the finished product and thought, "There is only one place I know of that might potentially buy this." Fortunately for me, they did.

Leafsmith in Love, The:
The astute websurfer will notice the gap in my bibliography. I spent the missing years writing several novels, but, failing to get anywhere with them, returned to short fiction in the winter of 2006 with the drafting of 3 stories, one immediately after the other: "Happinex," which soon sold; "Flow," which soon sold; and this one, "The Leafsmith in Love," which soon... didn't. I believed in this story and sent it everywhere—I mean everywhere—and only once got something other than a form rejection (and that was an editor chastising me because he couldn't figure out that I'd placed my contact info in a header, rather than the body of the page). Finally, having exhausted all good existent markets, I sent it to one that hadn't even existed at the start of my search—Beneath Ceaseless Skies. And, well, whaddiya know.

Memories of Happy Childhood:
I outline the vast majority of my short stories before I start writing them, but this one I wrote blindly, solely on the strength of the first line. (And I'd say it's a pretty strong line, really.) This piece is also responsible for my first brush with criticism, which I only stumbled across because I'd been idly googling myself. Reading that first nice opinion from a stranger gave me a happy shock I won't soon forget.

Neighbors: A Definitive Odyssey:
One day, the Internet was down at the company I was working for. I had to use my paper dictionary to look up a word, which is dangerous, because I'm a nerd and paper sucks me in. Within 5 seconds I'd forgotten what I was looking up, and was reading bits of the pages at random, mesmerized. When I came upon the page containing 'J/psi particle' and saw that it was just below 'joystick', I thought, "What very different words. I wonder how they ever get along, living next to each other like that?"

Now Open:
This story is an example of why, if you are a writer, you should save EVERY STORY IDEA you ever get. Because I got the idea for this one about 15 years before I actually wrote it, and then when I finally did, it sold it to a pro market. So you better start hoarding your scribbled-upon napkins now, kids.

One-Sided:
In response to this story, the good people at Hypersonic Tales (that would be Angela Scrivener and Jonathon Grimes) once provided me with what has since become my favorite rejection letter. "GONG!" Angela writes. "Sorry we can not [sic] publish this. And God willing, neither will anyone else." To be fair, the version they saw was a previous and inferior draft, but even so, I still regret to inform my esteemed colleagues that God is, evidently, not willing.

One Year Later:
I had a lot of trouble getting over my last relationship. Sometimes I thought that writing an unsent goodbye letter to this person might help...

Other Than This:
After a story has unsuccessfully made visits to several editors' desks, an author has the choice of revising it or trunking it (i.e., deciding there's no hope for it and decreeing that it shall see the light of day no more). I was ready to trunk this piece, until my friend Monica mentioned that an editor friend of hers at 580 Split had asked her to send something in, so maybe I might like to send something as well? I submitted this story on a lark with little hope, and yet, here we are (appearing in the same issue of the same journal as my college advisor, no less). Take it as another piece of evidence that what makes for good writing can be surprisingly subjective.

Ovum Tempi:
Translating to "Egg of Time," this story is my own answer to one of the (many) paradoxes of time travel. That is, if what you see in the future motivates you to change what may cause that future, that future might not eventually exist. The only way around this motivation and subsequent paradox, then, is to wind up in a future in which you have nothing emotionally invested. What might that future look like? And what kind of person would bother to travel there?

Perfect Find, The:
A reoccurring motif in my work is an excess of physical objects with dubious emotional value. This clutter is usually very subtle, manifesting in the form of lists in the text, but it is sometimes a central theme of a story (such as in "You Don't Know Where That's Been" and the present tale). I have strong opinions about the value of the emotional meaning we invest in objects, and when it is appropriate and when it is not, and I think it's important to keep in mind the damage we can do to ourselves if we let it get out of hand.

Scales Made Manifest:
This is one of my pieces that I (jokingly?) refer to as a "heterosexual male tragedy story," in which a male protagonist's longing for a woman becomes his undoing—not because of anything the woman does, but because the man fails in some key way to deal with his desire. This, to me, is the saddest thing about love: not that those we love sometimes don't return it, but that we ourselves sometimes cannot handle feeling it.

Solidly Grounded:
This odd little thing started life as a writing exercise in a creative writing class in college. I assumed that since its beginnings were so inauspicious, it perhaps was not a very good story, but it was still apparently good enough to get accepted somewhere.

Super Hero, Uncensored:
Portraying a super hero as having super ordinary problems is not a new idea. However, if properly handled, it can still be an entertainingly executed idea. And I maintain that simple and funny stories are just as important as complex and weighty ones. We can't all (and shouldn't all) be Nabokov.

Upriver:
Every Labor Day weekend I "go to Writing Camp" which actually means "lock myself in my apartment and write especially hard with no interruptions." One year, a Writing Camp activity challenge involved flipping through a dictionary and using the first 3 random words I came across in a story. Those words were "pericardium," "calipers," and "foghorn." This is the story that resulted. ("Pericardium" doesn't appear in the story itself, actually, but it's the damage thereto that kills the narrator on the first page.)

We Have an Objective:
This story was originally written for a Weird Tales contest, the parameters of which were to write a story inspired by the subject line of an actual spam email. The original title for this work was "Bush Still Thinks the War in Iraq Was the Fun Thing to Do," but once the story did not win the contest, I figured I should probably retitle it, package it as slipstream, and let people interpret its meaning however they liked.

You Don't Know Where That's Been:
Every spring (to my image-conscious father's mortification), my mother, sister, and I would go trashpicking amongst the things that our well-to-do neighbors set out on the curb for the annual spring cleaning trash pickup. The tastes of my sister and I were far less discriminating than my mother's—like the protagonist in this tale, I too had a fine collection of broken trophies and used carpeting—and we'd invariably target the weirdest possible crap to drag home and leave rusting/rotting/hulking in our backyard. And while we never found a magical pendant, we did once take home a copy of Anais Nin's "Delta of Venus," which quite arguably came from a far, far sketchier place.

You Make Bath Times Much More Fun:
This was the first story I ever sold, to Tyree Campbell (then editor of Kisses for Kids, a childrens' webzine published by Sam's Dot Publishing) for the dizzying sum of one dollar. I received his acceptance email after pulling one of my all-nighters in college, and have blissful memories of running around Antioch's deserted, dawn-lit campus, barely dressed, yelling, "I'm gonna be published, I'm gonna be published! It all starts now!"

back to top

Other Writers - so that you may surreptitiously chart the social circles in which I move

back to top