by N.H. Van Der Haar.

“Despite what he had written in his letter, Noel’s separation from his family would always be geographical. He spent the remainder of his wealthy life dining alone”.

The back cover folded over the final page and turned the work into a solid, white brick. An item for production. A large wet stamp was stomped on the cover. The blue-black imprint left on the work, looked like a bruise under the fluorescent lights. It said: “Approved for Limited Publication: 1/12/2185. Department of Cultural Novelty”. The work had been awarded a limited printing by a Departmental Publisher Marilyn Cooper, employee Number. 9823-1-275. Her only edit was to remove the world “always” from the title. The work was printed in the state-approved color B13-93 ‘Dark Teal’. They were manufactured and collected in small pallets with the departmental label “Non-Essential Literature Batch Number: 1033378921. Ultimately, 75 copies of the work were produced by 4 factory workers. After signing off on the final published works, Marilyn Cooper called in sick for the remainder of the week. Because her nine-year old tabby Omelette, had been diagnosed with cat flu.

The work was delivered for sale by truck, driven by Judy Garland. The woman was functionally illiterate by choice, a decision made when she was only 11 years old. While on the phone with a stranger in his den her father, Horace described her as “my thick daughter Judy”. He had noticed Judy’s small, round face wedged in the door to his den and pretended not to see her, nodding at the muffled voice on the phone. After that night, Judy became determined to learn no more words other than those truly essential for everyday needs. Decades later, while drunk and finally truly alone Judy realised her father had meant “thick daughter” as in chubby rather than stupid. But it was too late to do anything about it. Her father was demented beyond recognition.

The work was sold in 4 pallets. 5 copies were somehow lost in transit. 20 sent to an allocations warehouse for local libraries. At the warehouse, the work was misfiled as ‘excessively pornographic’ because all the staff were distracted by a hawk that had flown through a broken second story window and attacked a warehouse foreman. State investigators discovered the foreman kept handfuls of ham and other various cold meats in his overall pockets and decided to label the incident as a tragic no-fault accident. The hawk was released into the wild. The 20 copies of the work originally destined for local libraries were shredded along with 9 copies of Swollen is thy Pink River and turned into mulched into bags of pet litter. A single copy of Swollen is thy Pink River had been quietly rescued from the shredder by a warehouse employee for reasons unexplained. These copies spent 2 months being used by a 4-year-old house-trained Golden Retriever named Pompidou.

20 were sold to venerable, well-funded universities. These copies of the work were sent to selected universities were sorted, labelled and stacked onto shelves in the bowels of their respective institutional libraries. Since their stacking only 4 of the 20 copies have been touched by human beings. 1 copy was briefly tilted upwards by a cleaner to better dust the shelf it sat on. The other 3 copies of the work were used as missiles, hurled at a Professor of Neo-Vorticist Studies by a Lecturer of Pre-Industrial Ornithology. The work shattered the eyeglasses of the Professor, who required stitches in his eyebrows. These copies now covered in a thin layer of blood and eyebrow hair, were deemed beyond repair and discarded by janitorial staff. Both members of staff would receive a formal admonishment. The reason for the fight was left unexplained.

30 copies were sold to a state-mandated distributor. The work sent to the distributor were added to a mail-order magazine of “new contemporary works”. After 9 months 13 had been sold, all at the same time. They were purchased by members of the Rainy-Day Bookworms Club because Harry Duchamp didn’t think he wanted to read Moby Dick again and Tobias Duchamp (his husband and leader of the club) thought letting Harry choose the next book would help relieve Harry’s brutal self-doubt. In the longer term, it would ultimately not. When gathered for its monthly meeting, the group discovered that only 1 of the 13 members had read the work to completion. Lucille and Barbara claimed they had started it but lost their shared copy on the bus. Howard claimed a massive, feral cat had attack him and stolen his copy. Nelson claimed he must have left his copy at home and rushed out to fetch it. He would never return to the club. Regardless all members still present rated the work a ‘solid 7 out of 10’.

In hopes the rest would sell quickly, the 10 copies of the work still in the distributor’s collection were added to the reliable reads section of the mail-order magazine. 3 of these copies were bought by the Maythorpes family in the hope that it would give their family something to talk about at dinner. Rather than discuss the content of the work, they spent weeks complaining about the difficulty it was to read “when you’ve got so much on” and instead decided to look for the audiobook online. It was never found. 5 copies were purchased a corporate lawyer who used them to finish a wall of decorative books in her luxurious study. The copies were removed after the lawyer’s death, a few years later. The lawyer’s daughter tore up pages of the work and used them to line the floor of a large, expensive but filthy bird cage. The cage held two Catalonian Parrots named Left and Right. The parrots would take turns nibbling and shredding the work when not screeching at strangers or each other.

The remaining 2 were sold to another private corporate distributor who on-sold the copies to a suburban bookshop. The bookshop was called Refined Knowledge and run by a divorced middle-aged woman named Genevieve but was called Crane by locals. This nickname was originally a private staff joke about Genevieve’s height and tendency to pucker her lips when she was thinking. After speaking to Neil, her tarot reader and psychic, Genevieve was determined to undermine or at least wear this nickname with some kind of stubborn pride, so she printed herself a badge and began wearing it at work. It reads: “Hello there! My nickname is CRANE.”

1 copy was bought by James Albert Buchanan, an American tourist who would return to New York and give it as a gift to his male lover, the untalented actor Douglas Loudon. Loudon would read the first three chapters of the work and then use it to hold open his dressing room window while he performed in the 4-year run of the musical The Witch of Capri. After the closure of this musical, the work remained to hold open the window through a 2-month run of the play Adjustments for the Milk Train, a 1-year run of the musical Murdering Men: The Musical and a 9-month run of the musical Goodbye Nightingales! until it was removed on account of a winter draft. The work fell into the street where it was eaten by a sewer rats.

1 copy was bought from Refined Knowledge by Patti Seymour, who was trying to act like a tourist. She was in-fact in the process of fleeing her famous and fanatically religious family, the Seymours. The family earned both money and fanaticism in only two generations. ‘Old’ Zebulon Seymour was a traveling preacher and lawyer operating known for: “preaching in the courthouse and chapel with equal shrewdness and honesty”. Zebulon purchased useless and abandoned land at rock bottom prices from his stupid congregants. International companies would then snatch up the land for highways, timber and mines from the Seymours. Old Zebulon passed on his fortune to his son Gideon, who married a wealthy monster and together they produced a single, frail child they named Patience ‘Patti’ Seymour. Patti was slowly travelling as far away as possible from her family because they worshipped God and money; more than poetry which was the naive passion of Patience.

10 copies of the work were sold to a renovated downstairs apartment turned bookshop – The Smaller Necropolis. The owner, a Mister Klaus Pasnauer had hoped that by including the word ‘smaller’ in the shop sign would generate more customer interest. In his mind the nervous but moneyed tourists would waddle down his concrete stairs and ask about the ‘bigger’ Necropolis with a stupid grin on their face. Klaus Pasnauer had carefully thought out his response to his inquiry. He would gaze up from a book he was studying and say something clever and dramatic like: “The bigger one sells graves, not books” or “The bigger one ensconces bodies, we ensconce knowledge”. Instead, the Smaller Necropolis was so poorly located it was only actually frequented by locals buying gifts for close friends and distant relatives. Klaus Pasnauer instead strove to customise his bookstore to the whims of his regular locals. A hatstand installed for the wide hats of Mrs. Petiffer’s, athlete biographies ordered for the young Lyle Lemke and a comfortable chair for Mr. Troedel who suffered from a terminally sore back. Klaus knew every single regular by name, face and literary preference. Then the downstairs bookshop flooded and consumed the store. 8 copies of the work were hastily used by Klaus as an emergency flood guard. This managed to destroy both the works and 900 dollars’ worth of literature. There were attempts to raise money to reopen the Smaller Necropolis. Only 233 in cash was raised to cover the 4000 dollars of damage done to the business. The small basement bookstore was permanently closed and was sold by Pasnauer to a group of investors who wanted to turn the location into a community theatre, gallery space, and acting school. However funding fell through, and the building was repossessed by the city, who demolished the basement and corresponding apartment building to make way for a new, taller apartment.

            The last 2 copies, sold to The Smaller Necropolis, were abandoned in the store by Klaus Pasnauer. He decided to flee his beloved bookstore and the city of his birth to make a new life in a new city.  As he merged onto the highway a massive, feral cat leapt out in from of his overloaded car. Klaus swerved to avoid the beast and was hit by a truck with such force that it broke Klaus’s Sedan almost in half, killing him instantly.

            Those last 2 copies were left in a cardboard box labelled ‘trash’. For 3 months, rain and wind blew rendered the two copies beyond identification. They were however, found one night by an elderly man known only as Peterborough, who enjoyed sneaking into abandoned buildings late at night alone and furiously pleasured himself. This wasn’t done out of shame. He simply enjoyed this activity, and it had become a perverse kind of ritual. Just before the act was completed one rainy night, Peterborough heard a loud bang and panicked. His left foot slipped on both copies of the work, rising them briefly into the air, and shattering his head on the wet floor. The following morning, he was found naked from the waist down in a pool of rainwater, blood, and pages.

The work had been listed by the Department of Cultural Novelty as: “likely for later re-publication”. This had been based on sales, which were by all accounts good but slow, and Department rules from that period prioritised ‘efficiency and security over sales’ as the large banner in the Department Canteen declared. The word ‘security’ was a misprinted as: ’sexurity’, it had not been noticed by department managers, who ate in a private restaurant which had capitalistic artwork on the walls. In an internal memo Marilyn Cooper described it as: “reliably quaint. Potential for long-term sales. Should republished if fit in current budget.”. This memo was mistakenly delivered to the manufacturing and publications sub-department instead of senior management, and because of a labour dispute between the two, no accidentally sent mail was being exchanged. While typically these disputes ended cordially, in this circumstance several employees on both sides were made redundant. These employees conducted a brief campaign of sabotage until forcibly removed from their offices. What began with the flooding of the disabled toilets climaxed in the destruction of all return-to-sender mail using a paper shredder. Cooper was uninformed her mail had been destroyed and assumed that no response simply meant ‘no’. In addition to this, she was also outside of the office for several weeks. On the cracked, concrete balcony of her grey apartment, Marilyn’s Omelette had been found dead. It was attacked by a hawk, the kind brought in by the city to kill pigeons and rats.