My Lost First Novel

 When I was in tenth grade, I completed a novel. It was a science-fiction novel, almost 100,000 words. As an avid fan of Famous Monsters Magazine, I knew that its editor, Forrest J. Ackerman, was also a literary agent for sci-fi writers. So I packed it up, calculated the outgoing and return postage and was ready to send my first work into the world.

But I did not have the postage money. I had enough money in my pocket to have a couple of after-school five cent sodas at the drug store soda fountain. That's it.

So I carefully and patiently explained to my mother how to mail the package, and that I wanted postage inside the box so that Mr. Ackerman would not have to pay for returning my ms. if he hated it. She promised to take it to the post office and mail it. I assured her that I was soon to be a famous science-fiction writer.

She told me she had mailed the package. She wouldn't say how much it cost.

Weeks passed. Two months passed. Three months passed. Finally, I mailed a letter to Mr. Ackerman asking if he had received my novel. He replied tersely that no such package had come to him.

I despaired. It was lost forever. I had a dim carbon copy, and the original had gone astray.

I didn't try again. I wrote more short stories. I wrote two plays. And then I moved on to poetry.

More than a year later, I was at the kitchen sink and leaned forward when I dropped a knife. I saw something oblong, wrapped in cardboard.

I reached down. There was the manuscript for my novel, lodged between the sink and the wall behind it.

It had never been mailed, and my mother lied to me.

I said nothing. I just carried it like a dead weight on my soul.

I even repressed the memory of this, as of other inexplicable acts of negation, but then it came back to me, crystal clear.