Q: So what’s wrong with you, anyway?

A: I did not come here to be raked across coals for your amusement! If you wish proper discourse in a civilized Q & A format, I am willing to abide, but such attacks—

Q: Okay, okay.

A: —will hardly be stood by and tolerated, that you can lay money on.

Q: Understood. Truce?

A: Truce.

Q: Again?

A: If you wish.

Q: And so.

A: Proper, this time, mind you.

Q: Most proper. Seat?

A: Thanks so very much.

Q: My pleasure. Anything else?

A: I assure you I am quite comfortable.

Q: To begin?

A: Again?

Q: By all means.

A: Then by all means. By all means, then.

Q: Then your childhood.

A: ah-ah ah ah.

Q: No, not an attack at all.

A: You do plan to edit this before publication, don’t you?

Q: I could hardly ever be accused of such slovenly effort as to not.

A: I wouldn’t think you could stand the reputation.

Q: It would be a bear. To be thought of as loose.

A: Out of control.

Q: Unconscious.

A: Random, even.

Q: Don’t make me cringe. Shall we begin?

A: Certainly a writer seeks a seamless narrative, one seeming to arise from nature rather than contrivance, narrative born not of the writer but of the universe itself, but also a writer seeks credit for successfully being able to contrive the seemingly noncontrived.

Q: Most certainly.

A: For certainly a writer such as you who slaves so hard to offer a completely tamed text whose trickery and dancing and card tricks should seem more spontaneous than sculpted seeks at least a modicum, maybe even a nod, of credit to your effort to produce such a facade of a lack of effort.

Q: The endless trap.

A: The ends seem unattainable, don’t they?

Q: Eternally receding to be sure.

A: Worth the effort?

Q: Not if you justify the effort only by the attainment of awards.

A: And rewards.

Q: And rewards.

A: What else would such an effort be done for?

Q: The effort is ideally made for the effort.

A: Cut that down a bit and you have a bumper sticker. Surely you don’t find yourself believing that?

Q: In my best moments, I do.

A: What are the best?

Q: The moments in the effort, of course.

A: And the worst?

Q: The moment the effort is complete.

A: Then what?

Q: Then it’s all sell, sell, sell.

A: I sympathize.

Q: I’m doubtful. The effort behind a giant banana toted by twelve gnomes for a hundred years as punishment for excessive nose-picking seems hardly an effort for a noncontrived narrative.

A: What nonsense.

Q: I concur.

A: How do you know of such a thing?

Q: Just completed by you, if I’m not mistaken.

A: Complete is such a final term.

Q: Even if not: where in this conceit is the opportunity for something more mundane, more familiar, more seamless to echo our previous concerns?

A: Something familiar there for all, I’d imagine.

Q: An eighty-foot banana? Twelve gnomes with raw nostrils dragging it along?

A: Beloved, you make it all so cut and dry. It’s more complicated than this, you know. It is complicated as seamless, natural life is complicated: one of those poor fellows has deviated his own septum with his incessant fingering.

Q: Where begins the seamless, natural course of events in all that? It all seems as everyday as bubonic plague.

A: The seam is beneath the opening wound, of course. That wound being the betrayal a reader feels when a story has nothing to do with the world he or she is familiar with. When one’s world is startled from orbit, one tends not to be looking for the new orbital path but remains constantly in reference with the old one. The world spins in a new direction, but we look only for where we are not rather than what new plan our Designer has set out for us. This is a great advantage for hiding a seam.

Q: But wherefore a banana? Surely a spiky pear or even an elephantine turkey drumstick would serve such a purpose. Where’s the necessity, the confines that say a banana must be here and nothing else?

A: The universe is a confine, beloved. The banana serves to open the wound only in that it is a ball and chain to the droning gnomes. But despite being huge and a method of contrition, it is a banana after all. That much is certain, and that much lets all who wish to know there is still a familiar world here after all, for we know what bananas are and we can even sympathize with having picked our own noses too much.

Q: But what of the spiky pear? Couldn’t that be as equally familiar?

A: How real is a spiky pear to you? Have you looked on it in choice produce aisles as a sincere possibility for refreshment, or have you looked upon it solely as a wax oddity?

Q: Well, if you’re going to put it that way.

A: And a drumstick?! Can you group the intricacies of dragging carved poultry? Must they retrieve straggling strips in their penance? Which end would they drag it from? From the bone end, or do they fashion some kind of harness around the severed joint? And would the skin still cling through the endless dragging? Tell me, if you were sentenced to move a hormonal banana, where would seem the most natural place to start pulling it from?

Q: The stem, of course, provided it has been broken from its bunch with proper care.

A: There. You see? An image alienating and homey both.

Q: But gnomes?

A: Would you prefer miniature rhinosceri with little sense of etiquette? But then, how do they go about picking at their nostrils? Some kind of land-bound squid, then, perhaps. Those tentacles must give a devilish temptation to stick them in any available orifice. How about miniature cloned Richard Nixon’s? But wouldn’t these demand even the slightest scientific rationale? Can we afford to take so long to familiarize the audience with the unfamiliar?

Q: Point well taken. I suppose you’ll say a story should be clear of its intents within the first five syllables.

A: Pshaw. I wouldn’t even give it that long. If the title doesn’t set it just right, the effort is clearly in trouble from the get-go. Twenty-two points, plus triple-word-score, plus fifty points for using all my letters. Game's over. I'm outta here.

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