I Read Stories: The Volunteer by Michael Canfield

 

The Volunteer by Michael Canfield in Kaleidotrope

At a summer writing program the program director notes our narrator as one for a special task. They are pleased with this, thinking this bodes well for the future – one they are sure will be bright, even if their handful of prose poems are just a beginning.

A special guest joins them, a Great Man known for his writing. And also for his privacy; he moves into an isolated cabin and no one sees him. He has but one meal a day, and it is our narrator’s task to deliver his lunch, precisely at noon.

The lunches get stranger and events get odder until one day our narrator will finally meet The Great Man.

Read This: The strange formality of the program transforms step by step into the horror of something outside normality
Don’t Read This: That The Great Man is a monster is not precisely a new idea