the Introduction from
'The Complete Short
 Works of Daniel Pagoda

In the end, Professor Mark convinced me to accept the scholarship money I had rightfully won. Like I said, I’ve never been any good at standing my ground.

I sent a cluster of my other works to the woman at the university who had called, along with a lengthy letter of explanation. They sent me back a very polite rejection. These things happen.

The school plastered my name across all sorts of obnoxious posters and hallway advertisements for the new issue of The Lynch Mob, touting my story as “award-winning.” I didn’t get drunk off of my confidence this time.

Mike Harper sent me a very nice letter after the annual was published. A lot of people had complimented “Swindled,” he said. I sent him a very polite thank you and buried his letter in a box in my room.

Friends and other classmates who saw the posters at school made a point to ask about the story. Some of them wanted to know what it was about. Most wanted to know if I thought it was good enough for them to drop cash on the whole annual.

“It’s an honor to be published,” I told them all. “But I don’t expect you to spend all kinds of money because you only want to read one story. I can send you a copy of it if you like. It’s one of my favorites. It’s called ‘The Face.’”

I ran into Mike Harper the other day. Some years after my first novels had performed reasonably well for the critics, Mike was put in charge of submissions at a well-known New York-based literary magazine. I’m led to understand he got the job with the claim of being the first to publish my work. He hadn’t technically discovered me, which might have won him one of the better jobs on staff, but in that position, he got as much credit as most people gave the Vikings for landing on the Canadian seaboard.

Earlier that week, the magazine asked me to sum up my life, my work, and my views in about six or so paragraphs. When I called the submissions editor, his receptionist diverted my call to a lowly subordinate. It was Mike who answered my call. To the best of my understanding, Mike’s bosses had grown irritable with his frequent selections of avant-garde submissions for the magazine. I suppose these things happen.

There are other stories in this volume that I could have done without seeing again. It seems like those stories will keep coming back to me, no matter how deep in the earth I bury them or how big a boulder I shove on top of their graves. They always seem to find me, like tortured souls of people accidentally murdered in the ignorance of my youth, returning to exact their revenge for the injustices of sloppy narrative and poor grammar.

It also appears that I’ll never find those long lost stories of my youth, or the map to the Island either. But I will not cry into the night because I have lost childhood treasures, or because I have literary skeletons nesting in my wardrobe. Part of living in this world is learning that sometimes your hands are too slippery to hold onto things you loved forever, and sometimes you just can’t get rid of the things that break your heart. Sometimes it is your own stupidity, or inexperience, shining through, and sometimes it is Fate stepping in. Regardless, those things are bound to happen.