Orgonomicon by Boris D. Schleinkofer

For one, the pregnancy had been hard on her and her body
wasn't the same: there had been a breach, which hadn't been caught
in time, and unusual tearing, and the cesarean. The surgeries had
left her an ugly mess, and she'd never lost the extra weight. And
she was about to have another kid. She wasn't the pretty young
thing she used to be and the only kind of man she could attract now
would be no better than what she was trying to leave behind. It was
amazing just how many shiftless men there were in the world.
    You had to look out for yourself.
    She hung up the telephone. Another client was
late paying his bill. The newspaper didn't just give away
advertising for free–how could they expect to give her nothing but
excuses and still expect to take up space in the pages? It was
typical, typical man behavior. They all wanted something for
nothing. Good Lord, it was dismal.
     
    Emmanuel took his fingers off the keyboard,
pushed away from his thrift-store desk and let out a long sigh.
This was his thirteenth screenplay but it was still no easier than
the first; in fact, it was harder. It seemed like the more effort
he put into yet another project that would go nowhere and bear no
fruit, the less he wanted to keep trying. And being ignored wasn't
the worst of it.
    He took a sip of his coffee; it was
bitter.
    So bitter.
    He'd tried and tried over the years. Good
lord, he'd tried, and found out the hard way that negative
attention was indeed not better than no attention at all. The fall
had cost him everything.
    His first movie script had been about a boy
and his seeing-eye dog, a plucky canine with psychic powers who
helped the boy at every turn but was never noticed for it, and
finally put down when he started to get old. The boy realized at
last how much the dog had done for him, but by then it was too late
and all he had left of his friend was an old whistle that could
summon the dog's ghost. It had been named 'Blowing for Bongo'—Bongo
was the dog's name—and Manny had felt sure that it was going to
knock down all the walls between him and great fortune, would open
the forbidden gates and buy him a new life. It was good.
    One by one, every last studio representative
to whom he'd submitted the thing returned it with a polite but
discouraging form-letter thanking him for sharing his work but it
wasn't right for their needs, and ended their letters with
variations on the theme of 'Please be aware that we receive lots of
material and some of it might even resemble your own, but trust us:
if we want anything of yours, we'll let you know.' They were all
pretty much the same; he didn't bother reading them anymore beyond
that 'Please be aware' part—he knew what was coming. And still he
remained hopeful, and sent out one solicitation after the next with
the only response being another letter like the last. There was
nothing else to do but try, and keep on trying; if at first you
didn't succeed…
    So he'd made his pitch to the world. Alone
with the workers in an all-night copy-shop, Manny inundated every
agent on every major agency's email roster, the street addresses of
every guild and union, every producer's fax-machine and the private
phones of reclusive directors, a long list of contacts culled from
trade magazines and underground websites. He saw himself as
ambitious, believed someone would find the quality in him and the
gambit admirable and would want to take him on as a client. He did
not at all foresee it backfiring on him.
    The onslaught of negative responses took him
completely by surprise. He'd received a pile of angry faxes,
messages screamed into his phone, a handful of emails that
smoldered with rage and more new and interesting spam than his
inbox could accommodate, and the universal invitation for him to
take their names off his mailing list and go fuck himself. After
that, his computer began acting funny, taking forever to boot up
and running sluggishly. The screen would occasionally flash a solid
black. He swore