Creative Fiction(Barry) “Your poem’s pornographic,” Charlie Raffles observed in a deliberate, matter-of-fact tone. There was nothing mean-spirited in the observation. The middle-aged black man, dressed in steel-toed work books and an ash grey, janitor’s uniform was simply expressing a subjective point of view.

Darrel Haney smiled back with haughty aloofness. “I think you’re confusing intelligent erotica with its trashy counterpart.” Tall and thin with a receding hairline, Darrel had been married three times and, rumor had it, was currently separated from his most recent domestic acquisition. While the six other participants in the creative writing program, which met weekly at the public library, wrote short stories, personal memoirs or novels, Darrel submitted poetry, most of which was flagrantly risqué.

“No, I ain’t confusing nothin’, Charlie insisted. “I been stumbling across intelligent erotic back to the nineteen sixties, when it was all the rage.” The black man spoke softly, in an unhurried, no-nonsense manner. He wasn’t trying to sway opinions so much as articulate a heartfelt conviction. “It was always dumb as shit and chauvinistic.” Charlie folded his hands on the table next to a disheveled pile of notes; the arthritic fingers were badly swollen. “Unintelligent erotica… that’s what I used to call it.”

None of the other participants, myself included, were willing to venture an opinion, as a tense silence settled in the room. The writing instructor, Janet Goodwin, a plump redhead with granny glasses, simply glowered at the black man, who she viewed as eccentric. “You are certainly entitled to your opinion, Mr. Raffles, but it would be nice if a month into the writing class you might submit a snippet of your own writing.”

Charlie raised a manila folder crammed with a mishmash of crumpled papers, waving it in the air. “Yeah, well I’m still getting organized, but I’ll have the final revisions pulled together soon enough.” Glancing up at the clock, the instructor noted that it was almost nine o’clock. There would no more talk of intelligent erotica or salacious poetry until the next session.


“There’s my old friend!” A short while later in the parking lot, I cornered Charlie Raffles cracking open the door to his Ford 150. Our relationship dated back twenty years. When I entered middle school, Charlie was newly arrived on the janitorial staff, transferred from a nearby district. A good-looking, stockily built man, he went about his duties with a closed-lipped, congenial manner.

“Damn!” Charlie muttered. “I should have mentioned Anthony Adverse.”

“Anthony what?” Charlie had the unsettling habit of talking in cryptic, half-baked messages, assuming that the listener was privy to his insular logic.

“It’s a novel written in three volumes by Hervey Allen back to the 1930’s.” Charlie threw the fact out like it was common knowledge, the sort of literary trivia everyone with a third grade education ought to know. “Around page three hundred of the first volume the author introduces a new character, a nymphomaniac.”

“Darrel Haney would have loved that,” I noted. “Intelligent erotica at its finest!”

“Just the opposite.” Charlie flashed me a contentious look. “It’s phenomenally good writing… nothing like the steamy, contemporary trash you read today.” “Carrot Top hates me,” Charlie confided in a sullen tone, shifting gears. Carrot Top was Charlie’s nickname for the writing instructor. “She can’t stand the notion that a black janitor could hold his own in a creative writing workshop.”

“She’s not very bright.” I stared at Charlie’s truck, an older model pock marked with rust, a myriad of dents and blown muffler. “It would certainly help if you submitted your own writing for class consideration.”

“Yeah, well…” He never bothered finishing the remark.

“Even Rex Axelrod let us critique a few paragraphs last week.” Rex Axelrod was a twenty-something, baby-faced youth with a plethora of studs in both earlobes and blond hair down to his shoulders. At the first meeting Rex announced that he was working on a full-length novel with a futuristic, sci-fi plot that was expanding into a trilogy. He displayed numerous pages in outline form, depicting the various chapters, characters, vignettes and scenarios. One page was covered in ornate curlicues, squiggly arrows and other fictitious ephemera. It was all rather confusing with hardly any prose to suggest that he had actually begun writing his seminal masterpiece.

“Three volumes” I noted. “You said Anthony Adverse was three books long.”

Charlie fished about for his keys and cracked open the truck door. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“What’s the plot?”

“It’s a classic bildungsroman, coming-of-age novel.”

“About the length of Moby Dick?”

“More like War and Peace,” the black man corrected. He paused and, crooking his head to one side, his mind ricocheted elsewhere. “Tolstoy… he should have left the epilogue out. The masterpiece was finished with the end of the Russian war; the last hundred pages weren’t really necessary.”

* * * * *

Janet Goodwin opened the next session of the writing group with a short lecture, discussing. H. H. Munro, an English novelist who wrote under the pen name of Saki in the late eighteen hundreds. “Saki’s most famous story, The Open Window, was also his shortest. It ran a grand total of twelve hundred and fourteen words. In that meager space Saki created well-formed characters, ample dialogue, humor, pathos… everything required to tell a first-rate story.”

I glanced across the room where Charlie Raffles, the class contrarian, was sitting slouched at a crooked angle drumming a gnarled index finger on the desktop. His head was bobbing up and down enthusiastically, an agreeable grin spreading across his face.

“At twelve hundred and fourteen words The Open Window was one of the first examples of flash fiction.” Janet scanned the room. “What exactly is flash fiction?”

Rex Axelrod glanced up from his endless collection of outlines, sticky notes and chapter revisions. “Short stories only a few hundred words long.”

“Excellent description!” Janet nodded her vigorous approval. “Flash fiction,” she continued, “can run upwards of fifteen hundred words maximum but, no matter how short, these stories always contain the main elements of a plot with a beginning, middle, and end.”

Janet explained that they were going to open the session with a ten-minute flash fiction writing exercise. At the end of that time they would critique the impromptu results.

“No decent short story runs a paltry few hundred words,” Charlie suddenly blurted, “because there’s hardly enough dialogue and no expository prose to flesh out the characters.”

“Saki did it.” Janet’s voice assumed an officious timbre.

“Saki was the exception that makes the rule,” Charlie shot back. “He was a meticulously good writer. Most of the flash fiction you read today is full of one-dimensional stick figures… talking heads and piecemeal plots.”

“Speaking of fictional characters and plots, when exactly did you plan to submit a sample of your own writing for evaluation?” Janet Goodwin deftly parried the remark.

“Next week… I’ll have something pulled together by then,” Charlie blustered.

“One week… seven days from now?” The instructor’s pinkish lips contorted in an acrid, malevolent smile.

Charlie held his right hand up with the fingers stiffly fixed in a solemn pledge. “Scout’s honor!”

“So now we can get back to the business at hand.” She scanned the room authoritatively. “Let’s get some black on white! Jot down a few paragraphs describing an unexpected visit from a long-lost relative. You can introduce humor, pathos, drama… whatever suits your purpose. Ten minutes writing time. Five, four, three, two, one. Begin now!”

* * * * *

Sunday after dinner my wife entered the living room where I was watching a golf tournament on television. “A woman on the phone needs to speak with you.”

“What woman?”

“She didn’t mention a name.” My wife left the room.

“It’s about the writing class.” It was Adalia Gomez, the only Hispanic member of our group.

“It can’t wait until Tuesday?”

“No, not really.” The woman sounded distressed.

I paused to collect my wits. “Are you familiar with the recreation park off Webster Street?”

“I live a half mile away,” Adalia replied.

“Meet me there in half an hour,” I said and hung up the phone.


The spacious park on Webster was a multi-purpose facility with walking trails, a huge soccer field and several baseball diamonds that hosted local as well as little league teams from neighboring communities. When I arrived a game was already half over – a complete rout where the local Diamondbacks in their crimson jerseys were demolishing the opposition.

Adalia, a middle-aged woman of Mexican descent, did not keep me waiting long. In her mid-forties she was a pretty woman with a maternal, soft-spoken manner. Devoutly Roman Catholic, she wore a gold cross on a thick braided chain. Having left Veracruz shortly after high school, Adalia spoke English as a second language. Participating in the creative writing class was Adalia’s way of improving her English language skills. She had also begun jotting down a collage of visual and emotional first impressions as a Latina living north of the Rio Grande.

“As the writers’ group was breaking up last week, I overheard something that wasn’t intended for my ears.” Adalia sat down on the bench. She wore a dark blue dress, a hardwood comb securing a mass of ebony hair in a tight bun.

As Adalia explain it, Janet Woodson and Darrel Haney were hunkered together near the water cooler in the foyer of the library discussing what to do with their personal nemesis, Charlie Raffles. “Darrel insisted that, if Charlie didn’t produce any written material this week, he should not be allowed to continue.”

“They’re throwing Charlie out of the class?”

The metal crucifix dangling from the braided chain dipped and rose confirming my worst fears. “But Charlie promised to bring a sample of his writings to the next workshop.”

“What he’ll bring,” Adalia countered with a bleak grimace, “is more of the same, which is nothing whatsoever!”

“Maybe he thinks his writing is too good.”

“Or perhaps creative fiction is nothing more than an empty pipedream and he hasn’t written a solitary word.”

A deafening roar went up on the baseball field. The Diamondback’s batter had just clobbered a grand slam homerun and his teammates were deliriously exultant. On the opposing bench the team huddled together in a stuporous daze. They had not played the full number of innings but the game was over when the visiting team threw in the towel, forfeited their time at bat because there was no discernible reason to continue the degrading spectacle.

* * * * *

“What did the Mexican woman want?” my wife asked when I returned home. I recounted what Adalia told me. “So what are you planning to do?”

“In a sense Charlie created the mess by not following rules and there’s nothing much Adalia or I can do.”

“How sad!”

“If Carrot Top banishes Charlie Raffles from the writers’ group, the two of us will resign.”

“But then you’ll have nowhere to discuss your writings.”

I flashed my wife a sardonic grin. “We’ll start our own group. I’m sure Rex, the high school kid, will defect along with Freda Hurst.”

“You never mentioned Freda.”

“She’s an elderly woman with an abusive husband who’s writes vignettes loaded with existential angst.” “Freda was having panic attacks every time Darrel Haney read one of his misogynistic poems, so she would be only too happy to jump ship.”
* * * * *
Wednesday evening I pulled into the library parking lot fifteen minutes early in order to prepare myself for the inevitable. Charlie’s rust bucket was already parked alongside the outdoor book bin, its occupant nowhere to be found.

“Holy shit!”

In the main reading room Charlie, dressed in his janitor’s uniform and work boots was moving swiftly about the room laying inch-thick stacks of paper on the table in front of a half dozen empty chairs.

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