The publisher’s office—that of a one Mr. Myers Brian, a tetchy oldster who wore slack plaid pants and pique cotton polo shirts even on his days off—was located on the penultimate business floor of the Erie Lakeview Tower in downtown proper. Another gusty day in the city; litter of the burnable sort sputtered in small spirals across mostly empty parking lots. Mr. Brian had expected the arrival of a young writer, Jonah Rooney, for an important meeting that was to begin almost an hour ago, but with no sign of Rooney, the publisher could only recline in his brown leather executive chair, swirl the deliquescent ice bulbs floating about his scotch, stare out the window over the swampish-green lake, its divide with the city, and try his hardest not to lose temper over the tardiness of some limp-lily twenty-something who’s repeatedly mixed up the verbs ‘lay’ and ‘lie’ in his writings as if they were twins at a nursery.

In the downstairs unit of a rather run-down duplex across town, Jonah Rooney rocked back and forth on a couch’s pull-out mattress, still sound asleep. He dreamt of bumping into an ex-girlfriend at a house party. She kept asking him why on earth he’d show up to a house party in his underwear and thought that the whole thing was like so totally creepy that he should rethink his whole life if this was his idea of appropriate party attire and all. It was at this point that Jonah jolted out of bed in one of those gelid sweats that accompany ill dreams and anxiety attacks and futzed around for his alarm clock.—Isn’t it funny how we all feel that loathsome lump at the bottom of our stomachs when we’ve just woken up and realize we’re late for something important?—The classic err: Clutching the clock found on his bedside table beside his glasses, some empty plastic water bottles, Jonah saw he had set his alarm for PM instead of AM.

Back at the publisher’s office, Mr. Myers Brian was quite nonplussed as he had to push back other meetings to pencil in this meeting with the writer Rooney. The focus of the meeting was not only to review young Rooney’s new collection of fictional short stories up for potential publication but also to retrospectively analyze some of the writer’s past works in a more formal manner. This was standard practice for most in the field whose works were up for publication of course. But to be behindhand for this type of crucial review-type meeting with your potential publisher of all people wasn’t just an awfully execrable omen but rather a downright insult, worse yet, an insult that about spreads its wings around town per se, takes off and flies to all the other publishers to tell them just what went down (or rather what didn’t go down) meeting-wise.

Fake repairs to broken utilities seem commonplace around these run-down city rentables. Like for example, in Jonah’s apartment the gas radiator didn’t work, so but rather than actually fix it—or better yet, call someone who knows what they’re doing to fix it—, his landlord has come in time and again to crank some verdigrised pipes with a wrench, wrap parts of the radiator in flame-retardant aluminum tape, and claim success, yet after he’s left, Jonah’s always uncovered how the repairs made were otiose and largely cosmetic. This is all to set stage for this morning when Jonah heard a clanging sound coming from within his bedroom wall soon after he’d risen from bed. Sounded as though some metal beam popped out of its socket—and there was something very structural about the sound, very unnerving as well. Well if Jonah wasn’t roused before he sure was now. Worrying not only about his absenteeism from the consequential meeting but now also about if his apartment was about to collapse, he threw on his cleanest collared shirt—this epicene whitish-green striped silk-blend short-sleeve golf shirt with an ornate lemon tree pattern covering the entire garment (Jonah’s never golfed before, mind you, but the shirt was a dollar at the local thrift)—poured a cup of stodgy leftover coffee in a plastic cup for the road, jolted out his apartment to the car, and only when he was halfway down his street did he realize he’d forgotten his writings, his big binder where all his work was three hole punched and kept, that he then had to circle back, futz with his keys to reenter his place, grab the binder, and finally set out for downtown, his meeting with the publisher, a one Mr. Myers Brian.

Meanwhile, a big-ticket black car pulled up to Erie Lakeview Tower but not one belonging to the writer, Jonah Rooney—who was stuck in downtown traffic—, rather this was the publisher’s daughter, Ms. Maya Brian. She was an aquiline woman with an acicular nose who wore loose pleated slacks and a navy-blue suit coat. The city hardly bustled, but the few passerby who stopped to notice her saw how she bore a sable leather briefcase, not knowing it contained nothing but a single turkey club sandwich wrapped tightly in tinfoil. The sole child of the Mr. Myers Brian, Maya had always been expected to take over her father’s publishing business, however, the rate at which she was attempting to oust, to usurp the proverbial publishing throne, was somewhat unexpected—Maya made no attempt to conceal her desires and would often remark along the lines of ‘Might be time to hang the old towel, Dad’ whenever Mr. Brian would be at fault for even the slightest business related error. One poignant anecdote followed as such: The publisher had forgotten the name of this one client who wrote bantam magazine articles on like Hummel figurines and Furby dolls during a meeting where Maya was present just for the experience of how real meetings went down and but rather than letting this mistake fizzle, she completely laid into the old man, so much so that he was practically diluting his scotch with salty tears by the end of it. Her high heels clacked across Erie Lakeview Tower’s main lobby. She took the business express elevator to the penultimate business floor, greeted the office secretary, stopped to steep hot tea in the publisher’s office’s break room, and headed back to her father’s personal post.

It’s really no surprise how most older men who still run their own businesses do so with firm conviction and gut instinct—such the case with Mr. Myers Brian. His belief that the writer Jonah Rooney’s work simply wasn’t ready to be published in a major literary magazine, nonetheless a hip little indie pamphlet one could find on like coffee shop checkout counters. And now especially that Rooney was unpunctual, Mr. Brian was fully primed to stomp the foot down, draw the line and wish the writer best of luck in his future endeavors. This was now firmly the publisher’s view, however his daughter saw things differently. Maya was familiar with only Jonah’s most recent stories yet had actually grown a soft spot for the writer’s cheeky narrative style—needless to say, said style didn’t exactly thrill her father. When she walked into her father’s office she delivered her routine hug, asked how he was doing, and did her best to generally keep things cordial before ensuing a spat over whether to go ahead with Rooney’s writings or not.—Unbeknownst to the publisher, Maya saw a potential spat as a real springboard usurpation-wise; the idea being that if she were to back Rooney’s writings and have her old man on record bashing the idea and the author were to either be published here or elsewhere to some success, it would be seen as some seriously most-telling proof of how she should run the company and not him. (Of course this scenario lacked the nuance of the real world, but Maya believed the general gist was comparable and envisioned the prescient potential events in her head with a mirthful grin.)

Everywhere Jonah Rooney went he thought of possible stories. He sat in downtown traffic pondering about a story where a woman who lived in one of these downtown high-rise luxury apartments would come to believe that the building’s window washer was stalking her. At first the woman, who worked from home at a desk in her kitchen, would pay no mind to the window washer—a seemingly innocuous albeit lanky man who wore backwards sports caps and knockoff aviator shades—, but so gradually his washing would become more frequent, and she’d see him washing about her window multiple times a month, sometimes even twice in a single week. It wasn’t that the window washer would partake in the usual stalker rituals such as staring longingly at her from outside her windows, but instead that he would leave secret messages imprinted on her windows that the woman would notice long after he’d leave at dusk when the sun had set behind an amber horizon. The secret messages would always be the same too, the simple phrase: lover; lover, lover, lover, all over, written uniformly as if he’d employed a stamp. She’d become so startled by these messages that she’d almost called the police, but would instead decide to open her window the next time the window washer was washing windows and confront him directly. So but it wouldn’t be until next week when he’d return to wash the woman’s windows. She’d notice him right away and would feel sick and scared but swallow her fears and open the window right as the washer would begin scrubbing. She’d stare right at him, gaze into his knockoff aviator shades guarding his eyes. This would be a tense moment—for a while neither of them would say anything. It wouldn’t be until the window washer breaks the silence and asks if there was an issue to which the woman would look down at his chest and notice a sewn in nametag bearing his surname. His nametag would read Glover—the faded G explaining how the phrase lover would appear after he’d reach up to wash the high corners and inadvertently press his body and nametag into the windows leaving behind the phrase. Taken back by this revelation, the woman would blush and become embarrassed by the entire situation. And at this exact moment that the window washer would say ‘I love you’ and the story would conclude. Jonah, picturing the whole story playing out in his head, opened his eyes to a green light and drivers behind him both honking their car horns and showing him middle fingers.

Bobbing a buoyant tea bag in her brown paper cup, Maya made an indirect remark about her father’s attire that he didn’t take too kindly. The phrase in itself wasn’t malicious but its implications could be seen as insulting. She’d said something like, ‘Say, how’d golfing go?’ in reference to the Mr. Myers Brian’s slack plaid pants and pique cotton polo shirt. Completely nonplussed by this comment—knowing darn well himself that she knew he didn’t golf and instead spent his spare time at estate sales scouring for unfutzed-with stamp collections and Hummel figurines—, the publisher proceeded to prattle about how he wouldn’t stand idly by and tolerate his daughter thinking she can prance up to his office just to insult him and his wardrobe decisions. Maya countered that not one client would take him seriously in that outfit and suggested as kindly as she could that he pour more scotch. The whole snafu stunk of pent-up rage. From the office window one could see how the city’s lake gently gushed. Waves crashing on top of each other.

Once the publisher and his daughter simmered and settled into their seats, they each agreed it would be an appropriate time to review a few of the most recent stories of the tardy writer Jonah Rooney. Mr. Brian handed Maya a copy of a story Rooney wrote about a carnival where everyone was so unthinkably sad, so sad that people at the event pretended to fall over and sob profusely in Carnival game lines just to fit in. The story followed a first person narrative of someone who was so unthinkably happy that they planned to attend the carnival of sadness just out of curiosity. Besides some solid descriptive language, the Mr. Myers Brian believed that the story merely had nothing going for it. In fact the great poignant irony, Mr. Myers Brian pointed out that yes, while the contents of the story were literally sad, the story itself, as in the piece Rooney had written, was actually the saddest part. Maya disagreed, making a show of tapping on the manuscript with onyx acrylic nails. While the story certainly lacked the substance of others she’d read, something about it spoke to her. ‘Baseless—spoke to you? It’s a story not a haruspex, for gosh sake.’ The Mr. Brian chided. Agree to disagree—consent to dissent.

Across the street, Jonah Rooney was driving in circles around blocks of the city trying to find an open parking spot where he wouldn’t get ticketed or towed. The great problem of parking in cities. Seems always that when you’re strolling around downtown you notice many open parking spots, but then once you’re driving they all appear to be taken. Jonah wasn’t as stressed about his lateness as he probably should be, yet a toiling anxious feeling still swirled somewhere behind the third last button on his lemon tree patterned short-sleeve golf shirt, somewhere in the pit of his stomach.

Mr. Myers Brian handed his daughter a copy of the next Rooney story they’d review. It was a lengthier story about a girl whose sister laced her aunt’s tea with lysergic acid and mentally messed up the unlucky relative. Another story the publisher found abhorrent and unoriginal. Several grammar mistakes had been found as well as frequent use of the passive voice, both of which constituted colossal red flags in the professional writing world and almost sent Mr. Brian spiraling backwards through the mini bar in literary repulsion. However, once more could Maya overlook these errors and forgive the young writer. She rebutted her father’s rebukes and said she found the story enjoyable. She liked it. When asked to show her work she scanned her manuscript for several sentences she’d underlined and sent the packet across the table to her father who waved his hand in frustration at being asked to reread any more of the story that so fervently repulsed him. But then in waving his hand, Mr. Myers Brian spilled some scotch onto his pique cotton polo shirt and descended into a deeper fury. Maya couldn’t help but laugh at her father and his half-drunken rage. He babbled inaudible expletives and patted the stain with a cocktail napkin. Only days later would Mr. Brian realize—while spraying the shirt with spot remover—that the shape of the stain was identical to that of Scotland and its surrounding islets.

On the street below, Jonah Rooney opted to park in front of a fire hydrant. Knowing this was against the rules—and to ensure he’d not get ticketed—he lifted a nearby neon-orange traffic drum and covered the hydrant with it as inconspicuously as he could. Turned out the traffic barrel thing was a lot heavier than he’d thought and the whole debacle became rather involved and cumbersome. One boy home from school with the flu and peering out a nearby apartment’s jalousie window watched the entire event unfold and would sketch the scene in art class the following week—the writer Jonah Rooney as a stick figure with a ‘really silly shirt’, the kid’s art teacher would note. Again funny how on his one minute walk to Erie Lakeview Tower Jonah saw three open parking spots, but late as he was, he didn’t bother to walk back to his car and try and snag one (knowing darn well the moment he’d drive up they’d most likely be taken).

At first, security for Erie Lakeview Tower denied Jonah access to the express elevator that’d take him to the publisher’s office on the penultimate business floor, but after some convincing and a call to the office’s secretary, he was allowed access and angrily strut past with this strange gait he never normally did where it kind of looked as though he were like walking through viscid mud at high speed or something. When Jonah entered the express elevator the only other person present was this younger woman with what looked like a tennis bag—although Jonah couldn’t be sure this was what it was. She smiled faintly at the writer then went back to staring at the elevator buttons. Before Jonah could even think about what was about to come out of his mouth, it hit him that he hadn’t showered or put on deodorant. He said, ‘So you come here often?’ the very moment his own stench hit his nostrils. The woman ignored him—and probably for the best—; the rest of the ride was awkward and seemed to last forever.

When Jonah Rooney finally reached the penultimate business floor where the publishing office was located, of course he neither bid the woman farewell nor waved goodbye, instead he darted straight towards the glass doors that designated the publisher’s office. The writer checked in with the office’s secretary who pointed him towards the back office where Mr. Myers Brian and Maya were expecting him. His arrival felt almost in slow motion—beads of sweat dripped ploddingly down his forehead—; and there was no graceful alacrity to how presented himself once he finally met his expectants. The scene embodied this comicality in lieu of the meeting’s gravitas. The instant the publisher and his daughter saw the writer Rooney, they couldn’t help one bit but guffaw into haughty laughter. Though this wasn’t just any laughter—this laughter was major-league, boisterous, over the top; the kind of laughter you remember long down the line when recalling the funniest moments you’d ever been part of. Jonah froze and quivered. Could it be his striped short-sleeve collared shirt with the lemon tree pattern all across it? He wondered. Echoes of the howling hysterics careened off the publisher’s office’s windows and walls. For the writer, this all felt extremely twisted. Time began to take the shape of a really cold needle slowly sticking into Jonah… he tried to scream, but when he opened his mouth no noise came out. Laughter like nails on a chalkboard—this excruciatingly icy sensation creeping upward from his toes. Jonah’s legs started to go numb. He gazed down and saw his naked feet—his heart sank to the bottom of some vast ocean in his chest. The writer stood in his underwear, then struck the godly pose of someone reaching for a falling star.