Make Me Believe It

Make Me Believe It

Sandy resented how much Janice Curtain intimidated him. Not only was he bringing her coffee for their meeting, but he was worried she would find it too weak even though it was the office coffee and he had not been responsible for making it. He was a writer, not a secretary. A writer at the very bottom of the totem pole, true, but still.

In her office, she held the white cup in both hands, sipped, and gave him an accusatory look that made his guts twitch.

This time next month the tables'd be turned. She'd have read his screenplay and would recognize his talent, he thought. No more slaving away on silly scripts for television no one watched. Television no one should be watching.

"So, you, uh, asked for this meeting, kid. You've got three minutes, what've you got?"

"It's that script? That one I gave you before the Christmas party? You know?"

"It rings a distant bell."

"We talked about it last night at the Easter party?"

He crossed his feet under his chair and pressed on his left big toe with his right heel. He needed to sound more forceful if he wanted to impress his boss.

"Yeah, I remember talking to you about it, but I have no idea where I put it."

"I printed you a new copy?"

The heel dug in deeper and he thought: You are making statements not asking questions. Be a man you jackass!

He stood up and handed her the binder with his script in it, a slick hand print apparent on the plastic cover where he had been holding it.

"Thanks, kid. I'll get to it as soon as I can. I'll get back to you."

Sandy didn't have an office, he had a desk surrounded by carpeted cubicle walls the color of mind-numbing boredom and a bulky Mac desktop he thought might have been state of the art in the nineties.

He sat at his desk unable to focus on the script he was supposed to be editing.

He turned on his computer and opened a file in his email inbox that contained the script he had just delivered to his boss. He began reading it for what must have been the hundredth time. After about half an hour he closed the file and called his mother, Lucy.

"She's going to hate it," he said as soon as she answered.

"You turned in the story? No she won't, she'll love it."

"Aliens though, mom? What was I thinking? So trite. So overdone, so stupid."

"Not the way you wrote it. I was riveted."

"You're only saying that because you feel like you have to."

It had been Lucy who'd encouraged him to tell Nadia's story in the first place.

It was a tale that had come to him in a dream, something that had never happened to him before, and he hoped that it meant the story was special, that this was the one that would change his career.

The story's hero, Nadia, had appeared like a flash flood, and had filled him with a combination of fear and fascination when he first saw her in his mind's eye. She was the queen of a large and powerful nation, Halar, which was on a planet distant from earth, called Cqeoul. She had ruled peacefully for more than a century, but her country was overtaken by her longtime rival, Prince Czsabot of the neighboring nation of Hara.