Offline Stardom

Written By: Luca Zani

Years after the fact, he couldn't quite remember the order of events as he recounted that special day to his friend on the porch.

'The doorbell rang, or maybe the telephone? Or… no, there was a knock at the door. I remember it clearly now. Yes, a knock at the door and I got up to go see who it was.'

In truth, he didn't remember this day any more clearly than he had five minutes ago. The details of this bygone adventure had long since vanished from memory, but he could smell the boredom, the stifled yawns and the glances at the wristwatch. He couldn't let this go on, compound, or else the man would leave, and if the man left, he'd have to return to Indoors, embarrassed, defeated, despairing.

Indoors called out to him, heckled his lengthy narration, beckoned him back into custom. He was determined to escape, to soar brilliantly above the normalcy of life at home, life as a nobody. He felt sure that he too should be a movie star, a rock idol, a beloved figure. In fact, he'd been cheated out of this life, the stardom he was promised from birth.

His great insight, his precautionary prophecy, was that the era of the celebrity was dying. The mainstream beast, the familiar, parasocial faces of TV and Hollywood, were being disposed of in favour of a new God — the internet personality. He tried to shake this grasping urge, tried desperately to be contented with his place among the bees, tried to find purpose in the mundanity, but he knew in his heart he was destined to rule others. Only Indoors managed to quell his desires; Indoors kept him docile, consumptive, inert. Indoors stripped him of his dreams of grandiosity, of cars and houses and adoring fans.

So Indoors became his enemy, and like many of his great idols he retreated to the outdoors. In the cloisters of his ranch in the badlands, the distant plot with no internet, he would perform. Monologues, mostly. He would stand at the edge of the property where the dust met the scrub and deliver his material to the open air — speeches, soliloquies, acceptance addresses for awards not yet given. He thanked people by name. He paused for laughter. He waited for the clamour to die down before continuing. The cattle on the neighbouring property regarded him without feeling.

He had made it. He was well on his way to the stardom and celebrity that he was owed, had been owed for so long. He had waited his turn, and now it was his chance to step forwards, into the light.

On the porch, his friend checked his watch.

A postcard from his daughter fluttered in through the letterbox. The letterbox clattered, the unmistakeable sound of metal hitting metal. He got up to go see who it was.

Luca Zani is a writer based in Reading, UK. He has had work accepted into The Hooghly Review, Clockwise Cat, Academy of Heart and Mind, and Down in The Dirt. His fiction has been published in an anthology by Querencia Press. He is interested in semiotics, the philosophy of language, and the effects of the social internet. You can find him at lucazani.xyz.