Pay and Pay

Chapter 1

"I AM my own worst critic," the writer said to himself as he sat back and re-read the paragraph he had just finished typing. Behind his gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes were smiling at that bit of self-indulgence, and he already knew that he would not go back to change a single word. He was at an age where a sedentary life was beginning to replace the slimness of youth with a thicker waist and his hair was starting to thin at the front. Whenever he looked at a person or a thing, his eyelids were lowered in the slightest degree and his head tilted back just a little. Whether this was taken as a physical manifestation of self-confidence or arrogance, it successfully disguised the strong strain of farmer blood that gave him a tendency to stockiness and a rather nondescript face, neither bad looking nor handsome. His name was Kevvin. He had deliberately added the extra letter in his late twenties in order to make an otherwise common name stand out.

At the same time, a twenty minute walk to the west, a young man named Mike closed his eyes and lifted his face up to the sun when it came out from behind the late afternoon clouds.

"How come the sun feels so hot when it's so friggin' cold out?" he wondered.

He opened his eyes again and lowered his gaze to the toes of his shoes. He was sitting with his back up against the wall of a building on a piece of cardboard to keep his backside dry. His legs were stretched out in front of him past the edge of the cardboard and the backs of his pant legs below the knees were wet from the slush. His outstretched legs were a minor inconvenience to the pedestrians, but then, that was the point.

Kevvin reached for the glass of wine beside his typewriter and took a sip while turning up the next index card in the pile on the other side of the machine. He was an artist and he knew that writing was not the simple mechanical process of putting thoughts and feelings down on paper. He therefore prided himself on his ability to craft a story very well. From a note jotted down in his leather-bound notebook, he would gradually organise his ideas and plot his stories until he had a stack of neatly typed cards from which to begin the actual writing. He would sometimes set them out, almost as if he were dealing a hand of solitaire, and shuffle them around in order to arrive at a better flow or to discover a way to heighten tension or sustain reader interest.

Kevvin settled back in his chair and read the information on the card. He stretched his legs out under the table holding the tools of his trade and took another sip of wine. He considered his costume appropriate to his work. Over slacks and a white shirt, he wore a short cotton housecoat in lieu of a proper smoking jacket, although he had his eye on a real one. He wore a silk scarf loosely knotted around his neck and tucked into the open collar of his shirt. He had given his look considerable thought, and in the end had settled on something that was the antithesis of the author photograph on the back cover of a Mickey Spillane novel he had read in his teens. A t-shirt, jeans and sneakers might be suitable for a writer of popular fiction, but it would convey the wrong impression of Kevvin as the author of serious and intelligent literature.

The story he was working on was his twenty-fourth. Although he esteemed all of his short stories, he was especially proud of the two that had been published. Both had appeared, two years apart, in a reputable literary magazine of limited circulation. He replaced the index card back on the others and picked up the glass again. There was no doubt in his mind that the short story he was now working on would certainly be their equal.

Kevvin had felt the same certainty about the calibre of the first story that had been published. As soon as that story had been finished, he knew that it had a quality to it that would demand publication. The story was rejected twice before it was accepted by a third magazine. Within the following twelve months, he submitted two more stories to the same magazine. One was newly written and intended as a thematic sequel to the published short story, and the second was one of his earlier stories, completed years before. Both were rejected, but his next submission, what he regarded as his first professional short story and written more than ten years before, was accepted and had required only what he had deemed to be minor editorial changes.