Sam Gorenstein

Talia’s in her booth at the con, bugging the bunny phone, but her father doesn’t pick up. She cradles her own phone close to her cheekbones, sweating on the metal in one hand and using the other to click refresh on the taskbar on the browser on her laptop. He’s on a list, she wants to tell him. He’s on one of those copypasta lists goose-steppers grow on Stormfront and /POL/ until the thorny burs are ready to fruit and spread to the undersides of YouTube videos and Facebook groups. The laptop fan whines inside the plastic casing as Talia tries to balance the machine on her jeans. She’s sure the screen is going to fritz out from the heat if she doesn’t first.	

The answering machine clicks for the fifth time, and for the fifth time the 2nd movement of Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse plays in the tinny speakers of Talia’s phone. “Eh, Doc’s not here right now,” says a pre-recorded cartoon rabbit over the bum bum bum of the orchestra, “but you can leave a message.” The machine beeps. This time Talia does leave a message, but only asking her father to call her back. She doesn’t tell him his name is on DeviantArt, under some PG-13 fan art of her 

characters, sandwiched between Rubins and Rosens and Weinsteins and Cohens.

Talia clicks X on a fic and two wiki tabs, shutters a subreddit, and sidebars a blog. She closes a page of balloon fetish fan art where Ghost Principal Lamar is hypnotizing the nameless mummy English teacher into sucking down a canister of helium. She leaves up only the window with her father’s name. In the drawing above, Coach Scotts, the werewolf gym teacher, lifts the shirt off of Mr. Stanley, the werebear math substitute. In the comments below, users praise the quality but mock the pairing as unrealistic. The comment with the list sits unconnected to any other string of conversation.

Beyond Talia’s laptop, unsold books stack into a makeshift embankment, steering rivers of costumed traffic away from the booth so she can hide in the valley below. She doesn’t see the woman with ice blue fingernails fingering her “Commissions Welcome” sandwich board until the woman is already peering over the terrain at Talia’s crouched body. She is dressed like Wendy Wiggins from 

in a striped ascot and a hoop skirt. She smells like a non-real smell, like what the Yankee Candle store might unhelpfully label “Seasons Greetings,” or “Yuletide Cheer.” She brushes against the chalkboard and Talia worries the outfit will wipe away the price list.

“It’s a hundred for a headshot,” says Talia, pulling up from the laptop screen. “One fifty for full body, three hundred if you want more than one character in a scene.” 

“Hey, I know who you are!” the woman says.

The woman pauses for a moment. She looks back at the board.

“So, did you get screwed out of royalties or something?” she asks.

“What do you mean?” asks Talia. She digs her elbows into her knees, tenting her fingers under her chin.

marathon on Nickelodeon twice a week, at minimum. Why are you busking in upstate New York?”

Talia tilts her head. She holds her eyes closed for longer than a blink and pokes a thumb out to scratch the right corner of her lips. 

Middle*Ghoul! (based on characters by Talia Roth) 

is an Annie Award-winning series under the control of SaberThoughts Animation. Talia has nothing to do with the direction of the show nor the production team, which adapted a three-year archive of her plotlines and finished all of them by the end of the first season. They’re on season four now. When people at the con ask her for spoilers on the show, she half-jokes she’s become a fan artist for her own creation. If they persist, she repeats it without joking at all.	

“You know, some people like taking commissions.” she says. “Some artists, even financially secure ones, enjoy the process of taking requests and getting paid for it.”	

“No, they screwed me completely,” she says.

Light covers the woman from two directions: above are the frost-white industrial

halogens of the T.U. Arena — lights more attuned to scouring shadows from college basketball tournaments and local hockey games than creating a comfortable color temperature for a digital artists’ convention — and behind her blinks a string of unseasonal Christmas LEDs draped across the booth across from Talia’s. The combined impression of the lights and the perfume in a sweltering mid-July afternoon in Albany leaves Talia’s stomach feeling a click displaced, temporally.	

She checks the clock on her laptop, then the display on her phone, then the schedule leaflet on the floor. It’s two hours until her panel for DRAW-LEC-TRICITY 2014. Her name sits on a list with five others under the heading 

Talia knows she is not the boss. Sales are the boss, which is why she’s going on the panel. Up until twenty minutes ago, she was collecting fandom field samples with the zeal of an academic and dumping them into a .doc file on her hard drive. Distractions are amassing.

Talia waits for the woman to say something else, but she doesn’t. Talia waits for her to leave, but she sticks in place, like a dead pixel on a television screen. Her nails look dangerously close to scratching the book covers.		

“So, do you want to help me up above the poverty line this month?” asks Talia, “Or is

there something else I can do for you?”		

“Do you do special pricing for adult content?” Talia grimaces.		

“I usually don’t take requests like that at conventions,” she says.

“I’m all for sex-positive art, this just isn’t the right environment for me.”

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Sure. I can get that.” She bobs her head. “I’ll give you three thousand

“That’s...” Talia closes her eyes. She exhales. “That’s a lot,” she says.

“Can you maybe give me a sense of what you had in mind?”		

“I have a few notes,” the woman says.

Wendy Wiggins holds up a three-ring binder. Talia is sure the woman didn’t have it

before. The frontside plastic shines unmarked and unlabeled. Translucent dividers stick out from the side in a repeating tri-color pattern: red, yellow, blue, red, yellow, blue. Sheaves of paper fatten the spine and force the front and back covers out at an obtuse angle.

Wiggins zips through the pages, stopping three-quarters in. She reaches over Talia’s book fort and dangles the open binder by a thumb and a middle finger meeting in an ‘okay’ sign through the upper ring. Talia scans the swaying text. Everything is handwritten. Some terms are highlighted. ‘Deep throat,’ ‘strap-on,’ ‘fully engorged,’ ‘coital synthesis,’ and ‘unblinking portrait of the death of the American dream in a macro-economic context.’ On the next page, there are rough diagrams.

“This is all a bit intricate,” says Talia.		

“I’d like to see it with Ghost Principal Lamar and the hypnotherapist, if possible.”

“The guidance counselor? Debbie Dee?”

The woman pulls out a checkbook and swoops a sparkling pen across the “amount” line. Her knuckles form a series of sharp peaks across the back of her hand. She rips the paper off and hands it to Talia.

“I’ll be back in an hour and a half,” says Wendy Wiggins, “Whether or not I sign the check is up to you.”		

The woman slips into the crowd before Talia can object to the payment plan. Talia looks at the check. She folds it and buries it in a drawstring bag on her chair. She takes a pillar of books off the desk to make room for her laptop and lifts the lid, opening Facebook in a new window, searching for her father in the chat sidebar. He’s not online. She sends him a message anyway, again asking for a phone call, and copy-pastes the message to his work email.	The other tab still sits at the top of her browser. Talia flicks back over to the list and hovers over the report button. She doesn’t press it. She taps the casing with the flat tips of her fingers, and toggles the brightness buttons on her keyboard, dimming and illuminating the display quick enough to make the screen shimmer. She clicks the username, which brings her to the account’s profile. It’s blank: no drawings, no favorites, no preferences. The page says the account is two years old, but the list appears to be its only post.

Copy-pasting the list into Google leads Talia to a wiki page with a grinning Shylock in the upper right corner. Talia’s seen the smaller lists, twenty names, maybe thirty. CEOs, Presidents, Producers, and other major figures. Moonves. Spielberg. Sometimes Barbara Walters. Sometimes Mike Wallace, even though he’s been dead for years. This crowdsourced version bursts with less famous names, names of talent agents, associate producers, assignment editors, casting directors, book sales associates, accountants, marketing directors, bank tellers, make-up artists.	

It calls Isaac Roth a ‘Hollywood Agent.’ That’s not accurate. Talia’s dad lives in Schenectady and writes public relation copy for a lobbying firm focused on tax credits for New York State film productions. There’s no vast entertainment conspiracy to that. The closest Talia ever got to meeting a Hollywood celebrity was seeing Steve Buscemi for thirty seconds at a D.P. Dough when she was sixteen.		

Sometimes Isaac’s name shows up in the contact info of press releases. Sometimes press releases get pasted on the firm’s website. Sometimes having your name show up in the wrong place is all it takes to become the subject of someone else’s conspiracy theories.

Talia jumps to the edit page of the wiki and erases her father from the list. Then she shrinks the window, unsheathes a drawing tablet from her bag, plugs in the USB, and begins sketching.

[REMINDER: DARWINIRC GOING DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE 12 JUL - 14 JUL 2014]

TRALFAMADORIAN_GRAY has entered #DRAMABOMB		

I_AM_NOT_DIANE_KEATON has entered #DRAMABOMB

 My friends, can’t we, just once, grant OP a break from the ridicule?

No. Also I just logged on, who are we mocking?

We’re not mocking, we’re helping. We’re immortalizing.

 Our community offers transcendence to petty online fights.

OP is a recurring myth we pass down. A folk legend. An hero.

Like tales of an archetypal trickster god, but not as smart.

I thought it was just an acronym for Original Poster.

 This genius: reddit.com/r/DreamThe90s/comments/5l1vd9/

 Guy claims to know the voice actors for the original Magic School Bus.

 Someone asks for proof and he posts a pic of an autographed script.

Then one of the actual voice actors appears out of nowhere,

Says he’s never met the guy, and that’s not his signature.

OP insists it’s real. They’re fighting it out in the comments.

FEZZWICK has kicked ELEVATOROPERATOR from #DRAMABOMB

I know what “an heroing” is code for. None of that here.

I doubt he was actually suggesting we goad someone into suicide.

Nobody says “an hero” anymore. That meme is a decade old.

Oh my god. That entire Magic School Bus thread is great.

“Prove you’re really Danny Tamberelli.”

FEZZWICK thinks you want us to troll someone into an early grave.

WatWarSoc still tells people the guy from last year was our fault.

My guess is FEZZWICK doesn’t want to give them more ammo.

Also, WatWarSoc’s userbase got way more involved than us.

They’re just better at spinning the narrative.

Sam Gorenstein

Sam Gorenstein

Fiction

Fall 2018

Fan Fiction