If you’ve hung in here, bless you. Thank you.
Last part of Tales Told Out Of School Chapter 65 so, what happened? The school-year is ending. The book is ending. A threat by his boss leads O’Shea to snap on social media, cause some actual destruction, his post goes viral, and he collapses at school and **“experiences an emergency.”**
Cows are coming home. The Come to Jesus Talk, inspiring kids to take arms against a sea of troubles (e.g., the district mandate that renders them helpless victims instead of young disabled warriors) — all that mojo, has run out of gas.
What comes next before the book wraps up? Cantrell comes back a true hero, Fred goes away, Jaycee walks the damn stage.
** Ha-ha, don’t you hate that expression? It’s “everything true we’re scared to say.” Last night, a ten o’clock newscaster said a girl’s “legs don’t work at the moment,” rather than say she is paralyzed, after a moose basically went right through her car on the highway. Ah, safetyism. Also, no word on the moose’s status. If you know me, I prefer to say the girl is paralyzed, the moose is toast, and the car is totaled.
Again, I am so grateful and blessed that you have followed this book’s phased release. Thank you for being here!
And you know, these were fiction chapters first written under duress, sixty pages of them handed around a school board meeting for strangers to wave around with lots of hollering. They are stories that ended my career. They are here on Substack because in America, I’m assuming still, we don’t publish the work of light-skinned men, whether they marched with BLM as I did, or not. I sit on the tippy-top of the intersectional pyramid of privilege, just up here, wagging around my scimitar of hate. If you sense that this prohibitive publishing juggernaut has cracked, please let me know. I’d be all about submitting stories to whatever literary fiction house is still wheezing along in tough times for paper books.
Your faithful guy,
Hotspvrre
O’Shea goes on leave 3/3