“Despite what he had written in his letter, Noel’s separation from his family would always be geographical. He spent the remainder of his wealthy life dining alone.”

The back cover folded over the final page and turned the work into a solid, white brick. An item for production. A large wet stamp was stomped on the cover. The blue-black imprint left on the work looked like a bruise under the fluorescent lights. It read: “Approved for Limited Publication: 1/12/2185. Department of Cultural Novelty.” The work had been awarded a limited printing by Departmental Publisher Marilyn Cooper, employee number 9823-1-275. Her only edit was to remove the word “Always” from the title. The work was printed in the state-approved colour B13-93 (Dark Teal). They were manufactured and collected in small pallets with the departmental label “Non-Essential Literature Batch Number: 1033378921.” Ultimately, seventy-five copies of the work were produced by four factory workers. After signing off on the final published works, Marilyn Cooper called in sick for the remainder of the week because her nine-year-old tabby, Omelette, had been diagnosed with cat flu.

The work was delivered for sale by truck, driven by Judy Garland. The woman was functionally illiterate by choice, a decision made when she was only eleven years old. While on the phone with a stranger in his den, her father, Horace, described her as “my thick daughter Judy.” He had noticed Judy’s small, round face wedged in the door to his den and pretended not to see her, nodding at the muffled voice on the phone. After that night, Judy became determined to learn no more words other than those truly essential for everyday needs. Decades later, while drunk and finally truly alone, Judy realised her father had meant “thick daughter” as in chubby, rather than stupid. But it was too late to do anything about it. Her father was demented beyond recognition.

The work was sold in four pallets. Five copies were somehow lost in transit. Twenty sent to an allocations warehouse for local libraries. At the warehouse, the work was misfiled as “excessively pornographic” because all the staff were distracted by a hawk that had flown through a broken second storey window and attacked a warehouse foreman. State investigators discovered the foreman kept handfuls of ham and other various cold meats in his overall pockets and decided to label the incident as a tragic no-fault accident. The hawk was released into the wild. The twenty copies of the work originally destined for local libraries were shredded, along with nine copies of Swollen is Thy Pink River and turned into mulched bags of pet litter. A single copy of Swollen is Thy Pink River had been quietly rescued from the shredder by a warehouse employee for reasons unexplained. These copies spent two months being used by a four-year-old house-trained golden retriever named Pompidou.

Twenty were sold to venerable, well-funded universities. These copies of the work sent to selected universities were sorted, labelled, and stacked onto shelves in the bowels of their respective institutional libraries. Since their stacking, only four of the twenty university copies have been touched by human beings. One copy was briefly tilted upwards by a cleaner to better dust the shelf it sat on. The other three copies of the work were used as missiles, hurled at a professor of Neo-Vorticist Studies by a lecturer of Pre-Industrial Ornithology. The work shattered the eyeglasses of the professor, who required stitches in his eyebrows. These copies, now covered in a thin layer of blood and eyebrow hair, were deemed beyond repair and discarded by janitorial staff. Both members of staff would receive a formal admonishment. The reason for the fight was left unexplained.

Thirty copies were sold to a state-mandated distributor. The work sent to the distributor were added to a mail-order magazine of “New Contemporary Works.” After nine months, thirteen had been sold, all at the same time. They were purchased by members of the Rainy-Day Bookworms Club because Harry Duchamp didn’t think he wanted to read Moby-Dick again, and Tobias Duchamp (his husband and leader of the club) thought letting Harry choose the next book would help relieve Harry’s brutal self-doubt. In the longer term, it would ultimately not. When gathered for its monthly meeting, the group discovered that only one of the thirteen members had read the work to completion. Lucille and Barbara claimed they had started it but lost their shared copy on the bus. Howard claimed a massive, feral cat had attacked him and stolen his copy. Nelson claimed he must have left his copy at home and rushed out to fetch it. He would never return to the club. Regardless, all members still present rated the work a “solid seven out of ten.”

In hopes the rest would sell quickly, the ten copies of the work still in the distributor’s collection were added to the “Reliable Reads” section of the mail-order magazine. Three of these copies were bought by the Maythorpe family in the hope that it would give their family something to talk about at dinner. Rather than discuss the content of the work, they spent weeks complaining about the difficulty it was to read “when you’ve got so much on” and instead decided to look for the audiobook online. It was never found. Five copies were purchased by a corporate lawyer who used them to finish a wall of decorative books in her luxurious study. The copies were removed after the lawyer’s death, a few years later. The lawyer’s daughter tore up pages of the work and used them to line the floor of a large, expensive, but filthy bird cage. The cage held two Catalonian parrots named Left and Right. The parrots would take turns nibbling and shredding the work when not screeching at strangers or each other.

The remaining two were sold to another private corporate distributor who on-sold the copies to a suburban bookshop. The bookshop was called Refined Knowledge and run by a divorced middle-aged woman named Genevieve but was called Crane by locals. This nickname was originally a private staff joke about Genevieve’s height and tendency to pucker her lips when she was thinking. After speaking to Neil, her tarot reader and psychic, Genevieve was determined to wear this nickname with a kind of stubborn pride, so she printed herself a badge and began wearing it at work. It read: “Hello there! My nickname is CRANE.”

One copy was bought by James Albert Buchanan, an American tourist who would return to New York and give it as a gift to his male lover, the untalented actor Douglas Loudon. Loudon would read the first three chapters of the work and then use it to hold open his dressing room window while he performed in the four-year run of the musical The Witch of Capri. After the closure of this musical, the work remained to hold open the window through a 2-month run of the play Adjustments for the Milk Train, a one-year run of the musical Murdering Men: The Musical, and a nine-month run of the musical Goodbye Nightingales!, until it was removed on account of a winter draft. The work fell into the street where it was eaten by sewer rats.

One copy was bought from Refined Knowledge by Patti Seymour, who was trying to act like a tourist. She was, in fact, in the process of fleeing her famous and fanatically religious family, the Seymours. The family earned both money and fanaticism in only two generations. “Old” Zebulon Seymour was a traveling preacher and lawyer known for: “preaching in the courthouse and chapel with equal shrewdness and honesty.” Zebulon purchased useless and abandoned land at rock bottom prices from his stupid congregants. International companies would then snatch up the land for highways, timber, and mines from the Seymours. Old Zebulon passed on his fortune to his son Gideon, who married a wealthy monster and together they produced a single, frail child they named Patience “Patti” Seymour. Patti was slowly travelling as far away as possible from her family because they worshipped God and money; more than poetry, which was the naive passion of Patience.

Ten copies of the work were sold to a bookshop called The Smaller Necropolis, which was called such because it was in a gutted downstairs apartment. The owner, a mister Klaus Pasnauer, had hoped that the inclusion of the word “smaller” in the shop sign would generate more customer interest. In his mind, the nervous but moneyed tourists would waddle down his concrete stairs and ask about the “bigger” Necropolis with stupid grins on their faces. Klaus Pasnauer had carefully thought out his response to this inquiry. He would gaze up from a book he was studying and say something clever or dramatic like: “The bigger one sells graves, not books,” or “The bigger one ensconces bodies, we ensconce knowledge!” Instead, The Smaller Necropolis was so poorly located that it was only popular with locals buying gifts for friends and relatives. Klaus Pasnauer strove to customise his bookstore to the whims of its regular customers: a hat-stand installed for Mrs. Petiffer with her wide hats; athlete biographies ordered for Lyle Lemke who wore ill-fitting sport clothes; and a comfortable chair for Mr. Troedel, who had a terminally sore back and grew a patchy beard in autumn months. Klaus knew them all by name and face. Then the downstairs bookshop flooded and almost consumed the store. Eight copies of the work were hastily used by Klaus as an emergency flood guard. This managed to destroy both the works and nine hundred dollars’ worth of literature. There were attempts to raise money to reopen the Smaller Necropolis. Only $233 were raised to cover the four thousand dollars of damage done to the business. The small basement bookstore was permanently closed and sold by Pasnauer to a group of investors who wanted to turn the location into a community theatre, gallery space, and acting school. However, funding fell through, and the building was repossessed by the city, who demolished the basement and corresponding apartment building to make way for a new, taller apartment.

The last two copies, sold to The Smaller Necropolis, were abandoned in the store by Klaus Pasnauer. He attempted to make a new life in a new city after the destruction of his beloved bookstore. However, as he merged onto the highway, a massive, feral cat leapt out in front of the car, in hunt of a terrified bird. Klaus swerved to avoid the beast and hit a truck with such force that it broke Klaus’s sedan almost in half, killing him instantly.

Those last two copies that outlived their owner were left in a cardboard box labelled “Trash.” For three months, rain and wind blew through shattered windows and the broken front door, ruining the two copies beyond identification. They were, however, found one night by an elderly man known only as Peterborough, who enjoyed sneaking into abandoned buildings late at night alone and furiously masturbating. This wasn’t done out of shame or because he was hiding from someone. Peterborough was a loner who had inherited his small flat from his mother. He simply enjoyed this activity and its lasting sensations. Just before the act was completed one rainy night, Peterborough heard a loud bang and panicked. He slipped on both copies of the work, rising briefly into the air, and shattering his head open on the wet floor. The following morning, he was found by the upstairs neighbour, naked from the waist down in a pool of rainwater, blood, and pages.

The work was listed after first publication as likely for later republication by the Department of Culture. This likelihood was based on sales, which were good but slow, and Department rules from that period prioritized “Efficiency and Security Over Sales,” as the large banner in the Department Canteen declared. The word “Security” was a misprint, spelling “Sexurity,” but it was never noticed by department managers, who ate in a private restaurant that had patriotic artwork on the walls. Marilyn Cooper campaigned lazily for re-publication of the work. In an internal memo, she described it as: “Reliably quaint. Potential for long-term sales. Should republish if fits in current budget.” This memo was mistakenly delivered to the manufacturing and publications department instead of senior management, and because of a labour dispute between the two, no accidentally sent mail was being exchanged. While typically these disputes ended cordially, in this circumstance, several employees on both sides were made redundant. These employees conducted a brief campaign of sabotage until forcibly removed from their offices. What began with the flooding of the disabled toilets climaxed in the destruction of all return-to-sender mail using a paper shredder. Cooper was uninformed her mail had been destroyed and assumed that no response simply meant “no.” In addition to this, she was also outside of the office for several weeks. On the cracked, concrete balcony of her grey apartment, Marilyn’s Omelette had been found dead. It was attacked by a hawk, the kind brought in by the city to kill pigeons and rats.

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N.H. Van Der Haar is a quietly queer and autistic writer. Previous work can be read at The Victorian Reader, Antithesis Magazine and Farrago Magazine. He enjoys brisk walks and bird watching. He can be reached on Instagram: @nic_noc_nac.