This past January I decided to re-visit my local library while on break from school. As with all my library runs, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Knowing I’m a sucker for fiction, I headed down the aisles when a brilliant blue spine stood out to me. After a quick skim of the introduction and summary, I checked it out and brought it home. Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine by Kevin Wilson is a collection of short stories with strong themes of estranged or difficult relationships. The entire book amazed me with it’s incredible storytelling, however one tale in particular stood out to me as being one of the best pieces of speculative fiction I’ve read in a long time.
“Wildfire Johnny” is the story of a boy named Trey who finds a mysterious razor that, when sliced across the throat, allows the user to travel exactly 24 hours back in time. Being skeptical of its magical traits (and not wanting to, you know, slice his throat open for nothing), he refrains from using the razor for the entirety of high school and even college. After getting a great job writing for a men’s magazine straight out of school, he begins to think he would never have to use it. Life was good. That is until he gets behind the wheel after a night of drinking and kills a young child in a car accident. He uses the razor and (luckily) wakes up 24 hours earlier. Knowing that the razor works, he begins to use it more liberally. When he wrote a racially insensitive article at work, he uses the razor to avoid being suspended and scrutinized by the public. When he eventually falls in love with a woman he works with, he uses it whenever she mentions their relationship isn’t working.
This story is an example of man’s immaturity when faced with little to no consequences. When Trey is faced with a problem of his own creation, he simply cuts his throat to begin anew. He avoids the problem altogether but doesn’t seem to actually learn from them. For example, after writing his racially insensitive article, he doesn’t travel back in time out of a sense of remorse for those he offended. He only does so to escape chastisement from work and to repair his image in the media. We see this immaturity again when his girlfriend continually asserts that their relationship isn’t working because he’s failing to understand her life experience as a Black woman. Instead of trying to educate himself on issues that affect the Black community (like police brutality, which has directly affected her and her family), he believes he can save the relationship by evading those tough conversations altogether. When this inevitably doesn’t work and the razor’s ability begins to glitch, he decides that completely starting over is better than breaking up. The story ends with Trey continuously slashing his throat day after day until he finally reaches the date he first met her.
This story, despite its wildly fictional plot, highlights the very real privilege that cis white men, like Trey, are given in society. Even before he ever uses the razor, Trey was able to attend a good college despite receiving terrible grades in high school. He was also able to get an internship through his dad’s connections. Additionally, he was hired right out of college because the magazine company simply liked the jokes he wrote in his college’s newspaper. From high school to his mid-twenties, Trey never really faced any real obstacles or consequences. Contrast this with his girlfriend who, for the most part, landed the exact same job as him despite being far more qualified for the position. Suffice it to say, Trey was practically given everything on a silver platter, and even when things went wrong, he always had an easy escape plan tucked away in his pocket. Even with all this, he still didn’t end his story the way he wanted to. His immaturity and lack of awareness led him to making the same mistakes over and over again until, eventually, he ran out of time go back and fix them all.
The reason I love this piece isn’t just because it’s an entertaining story (which it certainly is). I love this piece because of how impressively simple it is. On the surface, it’s a story about a man who finds a razor that allows him to go back in time to fix his mistakes. But there’s far more to the story than that. It is a flawless illustration of man’s ignorance when given a get-out-of-jail-free card, and its all packed into a quirky little story about a magic razor. That is, in my opinion, the perfect story.
TeedleBear Stories 