He looked me up and down and said, “You look sweet.”

We went outside to play catch and I had to stop a few times to admire my outfit. I look sweet! I felt that awesome four-year-old freedom that comes with looking like a four-year-old. I sort of have a modified version of this wardrobe anyway, but full-on color madness gave me a jolt. Or else it’s the German in me coming out, because Germans don’t get how to match colors.

Waloon Walker published “Reflections” to little acclaim, no advance, and sold approximately 1,700 copies of the work, which was published by a now-defunct “indie” press, Seventh Jackal Books. Over time, however, the literary value of the work brought it into such demand among panelists at literary conferences that a second indie press, Nine Horned Beast Words (now also defunct), scraped together enough support for a second press run of 150 printed by hand with letterpress.

“Reflections” enjoyed modest name recognition among a handful of name-tag checkers at regional literary conferences, and might have faded into the comfortable obscurity of the indie has-beens if it hadn’t been for the industrious blogger, Snarfling Lorax. Lorax, a bedridden consumptive with an axe to grind against the literati employed as first-year composition teachers with 4-4 teaching loads at community colleges, combed through the manuscript and announced on his blog yesterday that “Reflections” was indeed an utter fabrication.

“The walks in the woods? A lie. The hazy metaphors connecting the cycle of life to the color of the birch leaves? This guy has never been more than seven feet from either a car or a pool table,” wrote Lorax on the blog post. Lorax cited the key discovery of “Reflections” as a hoax: a reference to Schwartz/Waloon Walker visiting Walden Pond on Long Island. “Jesus Christ,” wrote Lorax. Literary fans of “Reflections” had assumed the gaffe was a knowing and subtle commentary on American relationship to its literary history.

“I just wanted some respect,” said Shazaam Waloon Walker in a phone interview. “Every girl I met, it was always about the scars on my face, the questions about the decades I spent as a drug mule, and the knife throwing–especially the knife throwing. I love the alphabet…but who would have thought me capable of stringing a metaphor?”

“I wasn’t in it for the money, obviously. I can rustle that up anytime I want. I didn’t want to write about my low points and devour my own life for the sake of a huge advance…What do you think I am, some sort of corpse-eating zombie? I wanted what no money can buy. I wanted the quiet and unremunerated satisfaction of somebody who’s just into the alphabet. I guess love affair with a good story was my downfall. I’ll never be anything but a knife-throwing sword-swallowing former drug mule.”

(A little short story, a joke and a lie. The Onion wouldn’t publish it because it wasn’t funny enough. No, that’s a lie, I never submitted it to The Onion.)