“Mostly Anna wanted to say something. No, not something – she wanted to say the right thing. The exact words that could console and empathize, that acknowledged his pain without belittling it, that apologized genuinely and completely for her intolerable ineloquence. Instead she was quiet.”
Jessica Nicholson, Say The Right Thing, Everest Magazine, 2013
Not very long ago I received a surprising and important email. It went like this:
I expect you'll find this strange, but I read some stories in this magazine years ago by an author of your name. I found these stories remarkable. Recently I've come across your essays on your site, and they are even more remarkable ("Do You Have Any Vodka For My Friends Fishtanks?" is a particular delight), and happen to have somewhat similar prose - crisp, varied sentences, apparent near-tangents that are anything but, etc. The similarity got me wondering, is all.
I've only a stranger’s selfish curiosity, and I'm sorry if this is only an uncalled for bother.
I wish you the best in the banal horror we live in.
Brandi Flickinger
I wrote back
Thank you for your email and your kind words. I am so glad you enjoy the essays and it is always so encouraging to have someone say so. A remarkable coincidence… but sadly I am not the Jessica Nicholson of whom you speak. I would love to read some of the pieces my doppelgänger has written. So please send a link. Best back in banal horror.
And Brandi replied
Of my honest words, you are welcome. I am glad you also find them kind…. Remarkable coincidences are such a curious thing, sufficiently abundant in life, but if given in the same supply to fiction the fiction is made ridiculous.
I would have supplied a link immediately, but I feared the website lost. Happily, the Internet Archive has stored the first issue for us…
And there they were. Exceptional, beautiful, haunting words. Me, perhaps on a particularly good day. Me, if I had more courage. If I could only stop worrying about what everyone else thought. Me, If I could say the right thing. Comforting, knowing she is there, somewhere. If only I could actually find her.
I thanked Brandi and asked that they let me know if they ever had any luck working out where she was. They replied:
I will absolutely let you know, if ever I discover who it is…. I confess it's meaningful someone else read them and found value in them.
That anything can so easily drift into not only obscurity, but near oblivion, is one that haunts me. It is a notion I think is obviously true in the general, but is sharply realised in specificity, however cruelly subjective such specificity can be.
***** Not the end *****
I have put pictures of the stories here, because they are difficult to access on the Internet. To access the full publication go to https://web.archive.org/web/20130826035035/http://www.everest-magazine.com/currentissue.html and download the pdf.
