FOUR PAGEVIEWS TODAY? You guys are a bunch of fucking vultures tearing me apart.
I love you guys. I really do.
The correspondence was on shaky ground since he accidentally let slip the tidbit about his plan for the eel farm. Americans don’t look at eels with the same mild intoxication that foreigners do, and she was his harshest critic.
Why do my ex girlfriends have to criticize my business ventures? Thought Peter, unloading vat upon vat of salt water into an oversized opaque tub. He lit a candle in the backwoods shack because the auxiliary lamp system had led to an overheat and a fire times before.
He couldn’t figure out how to begin his letter. “Dear Abigail,” It started, which was a fine enough start. He thought about whether or not to tell her of the foreclosure, his mothers sudden good luck in the stock trade, his brothers alchemy formula he had sold to a popular magazine. He didn’t trust the way she talked to his older brother, it was distinctly different than the way she talked to him. As a matter of fact, she treated everyone other than him the same way as each other, he stared with a furrowed brow through goggles at the contents of his still eelless tub.
The eel guy said this was a sure thing. If you can’t make money off of selling the eels as pets, an endeavor which sounded exceedingly implausible, you could fight them or race them at a local track. The man at the circus smiled widely at this proposition and said to Peter, “You get the eels, the tracks here for you.” The unfortunate part of this was that from the research Peter had done at the local wildlife reserve, eels aren’t particularly speedy or competetive creatures. Dangling shrimp in front of them on a miniature hippodrome would have to work, he thought, crossing his fingers that eels were like greyhounds.
The managers office attached to the shack looked like one of the fake lodges at a Six Flags or wild western themed photography studio. Peter had simply thrown everything away from the surfaces of the desk, filing cabinets, and end tables. He then repopulated the area with pictures of obscure family members he did not enjoy spending time with, to perpetuate the lie on the sign that this store was in fact a family run business.
The neon sign arrived in the next week. "Pete and Sons Eel Sanctuary and Sanctorium” Pete in a bright green and the word “eel” stretched out so that both Es looked like curvy lines with eyes on the top. The local entrepeneurs stopped by to give their condolences about having an eel store. “It’s a tough economy,” The congregation echoed. “I haven’t even opened yet,” Pete thought mostly to himself but also outloud. The knick knack store gave Pete a grab bag of scents and smells in bottles with white linen plugging the tops wrapped with straw bows, the grab bag itself being a basket lined with white linen with a decorative bow tied above the handle. The korean barbeque sent it’s chef, a jocular surly man named Singh who showed a transparent desire to buy Pete’s eels which were too old to race. Since none of the eels had started racing yet, his apparance was short and to the point; he dropped off a carry out menu and gave Pete a short grave speech about running a business.
“Running a business not easy,” Singh put a hand on Pete’s face. “You do not just wake up and run business. You have to run business before you go to bed, when you’re eating with your wife. Not easy.” He made his way back across the street in his long black rubber boots, trampling through the mud like a sumo wrestler.
It had been a week and Pete didn’t finish his letter to Abigail. She sent a few more in the interim. She was back in school, she had got an assistant job at a TV station. Pete remembred what Tina Fey said about people who worked at TV stations, something about them all being part of entertainment tonight style shows. How in recent years, in addition to a news, weather, and sports segment many regional stations had picked up entertainment parts to their shows. He couldn’t quite get his mind around what was wrong about working for local media, the superfluousness of the service didn’t elude him, but why was it that jobs were being created for this specific task above intellectual jobs like writing or literary criticism?
He’d catch himself in these cycles of negative thought which, when they erupted, prevented constructive or thoughtful jargon from transmitting itself out of his brain and onto the paper. Even his handwriting looked harsher than usual, his hand unbeknownest to himself gripping the pen a little harder, carving through the paper onto the desk like an epitaph on a gravestone.
He reread his most recent letter with anxiousness as he sipped his morning coffee:
“Dearest Abigail,
The business hasn’t picked up yet but it will in time. No one has done this kind of thing before. You wouldn’t understand what kind of work goes into being a pioneer. How’s it going at the station?”
That’s as far as he got. He rolled this one up in a ball and threw it into a recently emptied garbage receptacle. If it wasn’t for taking out the garbage in the morning, which consisted mostly of apple cores and balled up stationary bearing the embroidered Pete and Sons family crest, he would have had nothing to do most days.
The next day, when he had given up writing all together, he found himself at the Korean restaurant across the street watching the lobsters swim in a circle in a circular tank which was screwed into the bar. Singh was a different man when he was working, it appeared to Peter, picking up ordinaty white children and placing them on his shoulders, smiling over at Pete from the kitchen as he snapped the necks of chickens or brought a meat cleaver down with a thump into the body of an indiscernible lump of meat.
At the end of the bar sat a cowboy with a long grey braid under a cowboy hat, the hat sitting on top of his hair so that the shape of the top of his head was entirely viewable. On the stool next to him sat a blonde dressed similarly, except with cutoff denim shorts and a shirt covered in pink hearts tied in the middle rather than overalls. Each time Pete looked over, the cowboy would flash him an angry gaze and pivot a few degrees further in his direction.
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