“Alright,” Melanie said, pulling out a chair and swinging it around to sit on it backward. It wasn’t the only thing she stole from her ex. “So you’re all stuck in your novels, but none of you are going to give up. Is that about the size of it?”

The three novelists, Matthew, Luke, and John, sat around the big church door table opposite Melanie, each with their faces down like they were the three kittens being scolded for losing their mittens.

“Yeah, that’s probably the size of it,” Matthew broke the silence meekly. “I’d say the word ‘stuck’ pretty much captures it for me.”

“Me too,” said Luke. “Second that.”

John took in a big breath and held it in his cheeks as he looked over at Melanie and widened his eyes huge while nodding at her.

“You know you’re a bunch of idiots don’t you,” Melanie looked around at each one in turn.

Matthew again spoke up first. “Yeah, I’d say we know that,” he kept his chin up. “The reality of that kind of crept up on me over the last couple of decades or so.” He looked over at Luke.

“Yeah, kind of jumped up at me all of a sudden over the last ten or twenty years,” agreed Luke.

John only nodded at her, again silently and still with his cheeks bulging but this time with his eyes shut, even clenched as though he was in a bit of pain.

Melanie caught that, and it was in that moment when she completely understood how twenty-four years of being stuck in a stupid novel-writing contest could pass by like that. Once you’re two months into it, how could you bail on that investment in the third, and once three months are behind you, how could you betray that commitment in the fourth, and so on up to a year, then two years, then a decade, and so on. Before you know it, you’ve spent twenty-four years cooped up in a crooked crazy house with two other idiots and nothing to show for it.

The longer it goes, the greater the investment and the steeper the cost of bailing. Wars and relationships drag out just as long by the same laws of physics but with less hope of ever being salvaged and with less reason to be sustained than the three novels conceived by the three novelists seated around her at the table. At least with these three, she thought to herself, there was the possibility of at least one, and maybe more novels, being completed. Where does twenty-four years of being stuck in a rudderless relationship end up besides at the doorway to 24 more years of the same, or the death of one or the other? Where does endless war end up but at a great big heap of blood and destruction and only more war in the offing?

“Why don’t we try this,” Melanie spoke like someone for the first time in her life taking charge. “Who do you discuss your ideas with? Who do you show your draft work to?”

Melanie brought back that fake cheer to her face and voice she so masterfully developed back at home.

John spoke up this time. “Discuss?” he asked. “Show?” He looked at her with horror spreading across his face. “We don’t talk even to each other about our books. About anything.”

Matthew and Luke both nodded quickly in agreement. The mere suggestion of discussing their novels seemed at once both titillating and taboo.

“Imagine!” Luke chuckled a bit. “’Uh, discussing,’” he said in a mock English accent, “uh the novel with uh people outside.” He turned his glass of milk around twice.

“Somehow I don’t think so,” he deadpanned.

“It’s not as easy as you make it sound,” Matthew added. “You don’t just go and discuss your work, you don’t just go and show it. You’re not a novelist.”

John just looked over at Melanie and raised his eyebrows at her as if to say to her, “I alone know what you’re thinking right now, and I think like you.” But Melanie had no idea what John was thinking.

“You think you just go out there and grab somebody and say, ‘listen to my novel,’” Matthew shook an imaginary person by the collar. “People call you crazy when you start doing that.”

“What about at work?” she asked John.

“The taxi-cab?” John was indignant. “Oh yeah, I spend a lot of time fraternizing with the co-workers there.”

Melanie got his point. “And you?” she looked at Matthew. “I work with fewer people than he does,” he replied. “I guard a truck yard on Annicis Island all night long from a 16-square-foot shack.”

She could see a pattern developing here.

“What about you?” she looked at Luke.

“They’re living it up in Toon-town compared to me,” he snorted.

“Where do you work?” she asked seriously. “A funeral home or something?”

They all laughed. “A bookstore,” Luke replied.

“Well that sounds promising,” Melanie sat up. “You must meet a lot of people there.”

They all laughed again. “If it weren’t for these two,” he motioned his head at his two housemates, “there’d be days without any customers at all.”

“And we don’t talk to him,” John threw in.

Wow, it was the first time they smiled comradely at each other, she noticed.

“It can’t be that bad!” Melanie knew she was being kidded with.

“It’s not that bad,” Luke agreed. “But everybody comes in to tell me their own novel idea. Everybody thinks they’re a writer. I’m stuck there, I can’t leave. But when I come back with my own, they turn and leave. They’re not stuck there like I am. I’ve learned some Korean, enough to say ‘I can’t speak English,’ but it doesn’t seem to matter, it doesn’t stop anyone from unloading all their crap on me.”

“So none of you talk with anyone about what you’re working on here?” Melanie was incredulous.

They all three of them shook their heads no.

“Not even with each other?”

They kept shaking no.

“I’ve asked you sometimes,” Matthew said to John. “You only ever tried to tell me about yours,” John replied. “That was just to try to get you to open up,” Matthew offered.

John didn’t bother to reply. He looked back at Melanie. “We never talk to anyone, not about anything, not even with each other, beyond who’s getting what food and whether to turn the heat on or not.”

“Hasn’t been on in something like ten years,” Luke said. “It’s good, it’s really good,” Matthew spoke convincingly, “it keeps you focused and working when it’s cold like that.”

“It’s not good,” John shook his head at Melanie. “We burn firewood all night in a place like this.” Melanie looked around: every foot of wall space was covered with bookshelves, every surface was draped in paper, in places three feet thick. It would go up like a roman candle with one stray ember.

“Do you want to stop?” she asked.

“Yes!” they all at once replied. “God, yes,” Luke elaborated.

“But you can’t stop, can you,” she said, not asking them, because she knew.

The three novelists didn’t even bother replying or even shaking their heads. They knew she knew. They were as moribund as the three astronauts in space ship Apollo 13 would have been if they didn’t get the broken vessel to hit the planet on their emergency return to Earth. Imagine if there were food and oxygen enough to carry them through the vast expanse of space for twenty-four years. Could they stop? No, and no less could the three novelists stop in that busted up Apollo 13 of a house that they looked out the frosted windows of so forlornly.

Melanie wondered if they ever thought of killing each other. “Do you ever . . . “

John swung a harsh gaze around at her and stopped her in her tracks with his pursed mouth. Perhaps he did know everything she was thinking.

“Alright, so you can’t go back, you can’t stop.” Melanie gripped the back of her chair where it framed her torso. “You go forward.”

“Forward!” repeated Matthew.

“You simply pick up where you left off and you schedule every day and set yourself a quota and make sure you meet it, a set number of words every day,” she spoke with that authority again that she had just moments earlier discovered.

“Every day!” repeated Matthew.

“It’s not as hard as you think,” she tried again.

“Think!” shouted Matthew. But the third time he did that was one time too many, and while his earlier repetitions of Melanie’s words were gaining adherents to his mockery, he pushed it too far and now “Melanie’s Solution” was being seriously considered by at least two of the novelists. Move forward every day with a quota. It just might work.

“I’ll be the coxswain in the front of the boat setting your pace and keeping you to it,” Melanie warmed to her theme. “You’ll work for me,” she started getting carried away. But still the three novelists didn’t balk. They so desperately wanted something to work, they each privately thought, what could be so bad, what could go wrong? Maybe this was the missing ingredient, maybe she would be the catalyst that crystallizes the super-saturate that filled the house.

“Why don’t we start,” new boss Melanie suggested, “with each of you telling me what your novels are about.”

Oh boy.