My new short story collection, “A Shoebox Full of Money”, is out and my Zoom readings have begun. In the Q&A part of my evenings, I am asked “where do the stories come from?”

And my answer is: “From the voices in my head. I take dictation for the voices in my head.”

It’s not that I WANT to write these stories. It’s that I HAVE to write them. The voices within grow insistent, until I am forced to open a new MS Word document and begin. Only then does the pressure subside. Only then are the voices quieted.

For awhile.

And then, once the story is written, the cacophony begins anew. It builds, the cross-talk, the internal arguing — “NO, that’s not how it was!” or “NO, you can’t say THAT in public!” — the psychic pain.

I am my own neurosurgeon, drilling little holes in my head, to let the steam out. So much tension, so much anger, fuels my stories. I want others to know hurt, betrayal, fear, like I do. Why suffer alone?

Increasingly, my stories slant towards aging and death and, perhaps, this is how it should be in this Age of ‘Rona. My dreams are swirls of sadness, mixed in with poison, a toxic Ben & Jerry’s cocktail of doom: “Manic Marty Madness”. The death tallies mount every day, in my stories, as in real life, as we are told that the count from Covid might reach 450,000…500,000…600,000. It’s like a Cheyenne livestock auction: “do I hear A MILLION? A MILLION FIVE!”

The story I am working on now is about a couple dealing with Covid. This afternoon, I will see four Zoom one-act plays about Covid. The front page is filled with Covid. A response I wrote minutes ago to a NYT article about airline travel during the pandemic, and unruly passengers, just got 50 likes in the blink of an eye. Now, it’s up to 110.

It stalks us. It hunts us. It infiltrates our waking hours and our dreams. There is no escape. It is war. A medical war. We are all untrained soldiers, fighting an unseen foe with pitchforks, baseball bats, and slipping facemasks.

The voices in my head scream in deadly earnest. WRITE THIS DOWN! BEAR WITNESS TO THIS TRAGEDY!

I don’t want to write it. But I have to write it. The voices are far to loud to ignore.

Even though I want them, really want them, to shut the hell up. Even though I want, really want, to just let it go.

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