The Dire Reader by James Roderick Burns

IT WAS THE latest action in his familial war of attrition: a compact, hilarious, and attractively priced point-of-sale tempter for the festive market.  Too busy to read a novel, but too bored to endure ten minutes on the throne?  Why, Cousin Jeffery, we have the answer right here!  Just $2.99, less than one of your fancy Seattle coffees, and poised to knock that supercilious grin off your chops.

At last, Jimmy held it in his hands.  Ten years’ blood, sweat, tears, and scheming, not to mention a long line of hand-to-mouth jobs.  A book!  His book.  Well, a printer’s proof, anyway.  Jeffery wouldn’t know the difference.  It was radiant; a professional knuckle sandwich.  Jimmy was meeting his cousin in an hour to serve it up nice and hot.

‘Just so ya know,’ said the printer, ‘that’s it.  We ain’t makin’ no more.  Don’t be bringin’ it back fulla gremlins.’

Jimmy didn’t care.

On the way out of the offices his stomach rumbled, so he hurried back to the bathroom.  It was huge, sparkling.  He picked a stall at the far end for privacy.

Jimmy turned the jewel about in his hands while he did his business.  Just the ticket for the harried modern consumer, he thought.  Eggtown Books agreed: fat with laughs, toilet gags, little historical nuggets to perfume the trash with virtue.  Taxpayers – study your own interests!  Flush nothing broader than your palm, or thicker than the news.  That kind of thing.  It even had Benjamin Franklin on the cover, reading it in the thunderbox.  Nothing dire about it, except perhaps gift-buying moms helping sonny (Jimmy, too) out of a tight spot.

Somewhere a series of doors slammed and the bathroom lights flickered, then dropped to half-power.  Jimmy looked up.  Shit-for-brains, he was going to miss Cousin Jeffery!  He wedged the treasure in the crotch of his white jeans – preserved from the restroom floor by deft tucks into his New Balance – and reached for the drum.  His fingers found nothing.  Puzzled, he groped for the paper, but struck an empty roll.  It clunked and spun around.  Jimmy blanched.  He craned his neck, but there was no spare on the shelf.

With a whimper, he unlocked the door and clutching high his jeans, like a Victorian child skirting an outhouse puddle (page 72), crabbed in and out of the other four stalls: nothing.  He slunk back to the first.

‘So, Jimmy-Bob, my man, what’s so important I gotta drag myself out to Hipsterville?’

He could hear Jeffery saying it, see his fat pinkie-ring, the crisp stockbroker’s shirt holding up nicely in the humidity.  Jimmy looked at his jeans, aglow in the gloom, and whimpered again.  They wouldn’t make it to 9th Street.  He took up the proof, eyes moving between its sweet absorbent pages and his pristine crotch, and let loose another hot squirt of fear.  With shaking hands, he folded Ben over – no need for him to see this – and started on the endpapers.

James Roderick Burns’ work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, La Piccioletta Barca, and Yorkshire Journal. His story ‘Trapper’ (Funicular) was nominated for Pushcart 2020, and his short story collection, Beastly Transparencies, is due from Eyewear later in 2021. He is Deputy Registrar General for Scotland.