In the final months before his death, the editor, long after his publishing career had reached its disgraceful, well-publicized end and who, afterward, worked briefly as a solicitor of advertisements for the city phone book before relocating nine hundred and ninety one miles west to become a night manager at a twenty-four hour bookshop outside Hammond, Indiana that sold, exclusively, used technical manuals on circuitry and electronic device repair before that business, too, became insolvent, and he, after seven lost years in which no discernible trace of his activities has been discovered – during which time his first wife, Edie, legally changed her name back to Dalrymple and the last of his remaining relatives passed away in their sleep – reemerged quietly as a part-time assembly line worker in Paw Paw, Wyoming, fabricating inspirational refrigerator magnets from the busted apart, gray-yellowed keys of obsolete keyboards, where, on his lunch breaks and after work, at home, at the table, in his Caligari-ceilinged apartment above Jane’s Luck-O Laundromat, began composing, in notebooks and across scraps of loose-leaf paper bound together with wire, an uninterrupted, unpaginated, unindented “We Regret These Errors” -style article in which, it appears, the editor, whose influence had once loomed so largely over the publishing world and who, during what many now refer to as the Golden Age of Ink, famously declared, “When print dies, so does this, so do we, so do I,” produced approximately six thousand and fifty six separate entries worth of corrections.
Addendums are still being discovered. At the time of this pressing, pages have been found taped behind drawers, beneath the belly of a radiator, stuffed inside mugs like packing material and folded neatly into V shapes, upturned and arranged as rows of paper teeth across the smudged glass shelves of a locked medicine cabinet.
Unsurprisingly, the corrective article refers to the editor’s own periodical, Zum. The issue in question, called the “August Issue,” would have been his one-hundredth publication had he and his publishing imprint not collapsed so completely in the months leading up to its release.
Each entry follows an identical format, the number to each line changing, seemingly at random, though, so far, never repeating: “In line [x] of our August Issue, the Editor failed to adjust the following error”
And, so far, each entry apologizes for the same misspelling: “Yefterday’s fish.”
M Thompson was born in northern Michigan and now lives in Seattle. His work has previously appeared in places like Unsaid, Everyday Genius, Monkeybicycle, and Spork, among others. He is concerned primarily with fiction writing and running long distances.www.m-thompson.net
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