This piece is a response narrative for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call.  It was inspired by this Autofictional seed. For this call, we asked people to write a response to another author’s autofictional submission, based on the original piece and this bit of cryptic world lore.

This, and other Worldbuilding pieces are being published to a Wiki, which will allow contributors to edit, link, and otherwise annotate their work and that of their peers.

JOSIE

The last time I drank red wine a telephone pole jumped in front of my car. No one believed me that the telephone pole moved. Everyone thought I had drunkenly crashed my Subaru. I was on a trip when this happened. I don’t go on trips anymore. I sit in silence. I have a theory about silence. It makes everything better.

I’m not into books because reading too much is what made my mom lose her mind. She was obsessed with Victorian era England. It started with Austen and went to Bronte and went to Dickens and ended up in the history of women’s rights and the suffragette movement of the 20s. I’m named after Josephine Butler. No one knows who Josephine Butler is. I go by Josie, because that’s what my dad called me when I was a kid, a tender kid, a shy thinker. Shy thinkers get infantilized by having -ie put on the back end of their names.

Josie backfired in 2001 when I was 8 years old. The movie Josie and the Pussycats was released and I heard nonsense references whenever my name was said. It stopped for a while in the 2010s. But was back in full force in the 2020s, when it seemed that nostalgia was all that the people of my generation had.

For a while I speed dated. But now I only slow date. I send a prospective lover one word a day for as long as it lasts. They either ignore me. Or all of the words add up. Into a sentence. And then a paragraph. And then a direct address love letter. And we agree to meet at the top of a mountain, each taking a different route. Our tongues meet and our spit is warm and burns like hell. I’ll know it’s right, that the slow dating has worked, when we both decide to take the same hike back, all the way down to the bottom.