Casey was born David Casey Way, the third in a line of David Ways that had worked at the Berming and Sons Bank since it opened in 1949. With his mother’s bright eyes, freckled cheeks and full mouth, wide whenever he smiled, Christine had felt that he wasn’t a David Way III, insisting her only son be given his own name. His father had agreed, and so he was simply Casey instead, after Christine’s great uncle Casey Barton of Charleston, South Carolina. Christine stayed home with her baby while David carved out a comfortable living as a housing loan officer as his father had been before him, affording them the quaint white house on 6621 Mooreland Street. Casey grew up there, behind manicured shrubs and pristine white shutters, two cars in the long driveway and a white picket fence.
That’s how Casey Way came into the world. You might remember him from the first chapter of my novel, Flesh Trap. I hope you do. You’re going to be hearing his name a lot from now on.
In my world he popped up fully-formed, long wrists and fingers, a resolute silhouette smoking a cigarette against dirty street-light. There was a box-cutter in his pocket and blood on his shirtsleeve. He could taste iron in his sinuses but he didn’t think about that, didn’t want to close his eyes at night to find a head filled with Venus Flytraps and empty skulls. I fell in love with him the moment I saw him. That was in April of 2010.
It’s January 31st, 2011. Since then Casey Way has filled up six notebooks and stretched himself across two separate drafts. One was pretty good; the other was thrown out months back, rewritten at least four times. I’ve chased him down through short stories and half-scribbled notes, along seven interconnected chapters in an upcoming serial and chapbook project. I’ve sat up at night and worried about him, banged my head against walls and fretted over every written line while he sat on the sofa, reading books or watching The History Channel. Maybe he smoked a few cigarettes or tended to the flytraps as I wondered where he might end up. If he might die or lose his way, or never wake up from the nightmares that have nipped at his heels since he was thirteen-years-old, and he began seeing his dead father’s face behind his eyes.
You might say I’ve spent a lot of time with Casey these last few months. Too much time. You’d probably be right.
Last night I wrote the last line of the second longhand draft. I closed the sixth notebook and felt I’d done something good. I felt relieved. I felt drained. I felt excited. Most of all, I felt like Casey could go to bed now, because he didn’t have to stay up watching me to make sure I got all the words right. It’s going to be several more months of typing and retyping, cutting and pasting, writing and rewriting before I have something truly polished and cohesive to show for myself. But I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m thrilled.
Flesh Trap is the first novel I have ever finished. I’ve started at least five in my life, and have written approximately 400 short stories of various lengths. You won’t see even the bulk of these. Most of them have disappeared into notebooks or hard-drive crashes, written under other names for different reasons, never to be brought up again. There were a few good ones, too, and those have been published. I see now that this was all practice.
This was a short story idea that turned into something bigger. Something uglier, something more painful and frightening than I had pictured it being when I scribbled out the first few lines. It’s turned into a story I really care about, tackling themes I really enjoy exploring, full of characters that I truly love. That doesn’t happen to me very often.
And now I’m going to work on it until it becomes something other people can care about, too.
