Revisionary Storytelling: The Advent of Boof

Kyle Burkett


I bet I caught some of you completely off-guard with Boof in the last story. Well, don’t feel bad. I didn’t really know what was going on myself. Anyway, I’ve talked extensively with Dr. Railsback on the subject of Boof, and the following information is the result of our interviews.

Boof was born in the early 1970s, but his parents never called him that. They named him Jamal Williams. Jamal grew up in a fairly normal Afro-American household in Atlanta. He wasn’t very popular with the other kids, so he read a lot. He discovered Walt Whitman, Anne Bradstreet, and T. S. Eliot in high school, and immediately became a poet. A very bad poet. He considered his style to be a mixture of modernism and romanticism, but there was actually a heavy influence of Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss). He tried to get his poems published, but they were generally returned with coffee rings and cigarette ashes all over them. Some publishers didn’t even bother including a letter of rejection, though the letters he did get generally mocked his pen name, Boof. Things were looking pretty grim for his literary career, but he was not to be sidetracked. After hearing the story of Emily Dickinson, he copied all of his poetry onto Post-it notes and envelopes and hid it in his room. Then he wrote a letter naming his parents as his literary executors and killed himself to boost his career. It didn’t work. His parents found his work, read it through, scratched their heads, and threw it all away. That was almost the end of Boof’s literary attempts.

He created quite a dilemma for God and Satan. They met to discuss Boof’s case, but came to an impasse. Neither would claim him. God wouldn’t take him because he was a suicide, which by definition makes him a murderer. Satan wouldn’t take him because he thought anyone who got rid of Boof would be doing the world such a favor that he tried to get Boof canonized. However, Boof never performed any actual miracles, so that proposition got shot down by the Vatican.

So Boof was stuck in Limbo for a while, until Shorty came breezing through on his way down to Hell. Boof presented his case to Shorty, who foolishly agreed to take Boof back to earth should he (Shorty) ever become resurrected. So when we revived Shorty, Boof came up with him, kind of like the way your breakfast comes up when your lunch makes you sick. Boof was the one who pushed me out of my body back in Story Five, and he was also the reason everyone chucked my body onto the elevator. They were trying to get rid of him, not me. Dr. Railsback then went on a fact-finding mission to determine the possible threat Boof could pose to us, especially as creative writers. As an entity escaped from Limbo, he would have to be (meta)physically dragged back to some form of afterlife. Since our elevator only goes down, Hell seemed the obvious choice. Unfortunately, we could only tell where he was when he possessed someone. So Dr. Railsback rushed back to make sure that hadn’t already happened (it hadn’t), and bided his time until it did. Then he directed me to take care of the problem. (That’s the real secret to being Department Head—know how to delegate.) Since Hell had already thrown me back once, he felt assured they would do so again. The rest of the story you’ve already heard.

As a kind of afterword, I guess I should let you know that Kristi has completely recovered from her encounter with Boof. There appear to be no detrimental effects to her writing, though she will start talking in couplets from time to time. Meanwhile, being able to see the spiritual phenomena can be quite distracting. I don’t see Azrael that much, but his friends are all over the place. There are demons everywhere too. I once saw them playing a football game on the lawn in front of the student center, but I didn’t stick around to see who won. I’m not really interested in sporting events.

back to the darkness