TALL TALES

Fan fiction by

Jeremy Gordon March


NOTE: This is a work of fan fiction, protected by the First Amendment and 
the Fair Use Doctrine. It has not been written or posted for profit. Nor 
has it been reviewed or approved by anyone connected with the film “The 
Mist” or the novella of the same name.

And any resemblance of any character in this story to any real person is 
purely coincidental. Really.




Rose Sullivan, lying on the couch, peacefully sleeping off the beers 
she’d had earlier that night, was awakened by the sound of typing. She 
opened her eyes, brushing away a slight crust of sleep, and followed the 
noise to the kitchen.



Mattie Lee Allen’s latest attempt at writing fiction wasn’t going very 
well. She just couldn’t get the main character to come out the way she 
wanted or that she’d planned. Rose, as she drew closer, could hear her 
friend muttering to herself in frustration as she tried to rewrite the 
first few paragraphs. Next to her was an untidy pile of notes – many of 
them taken on paper napkins and grocery receipts or whatever other paper 
happened to be at hand when inspiration struck – about the character.



“In the San Fernando Valley in California,” Mattie said it under her 
breath as she typed, “there was a strange – no, eccentric – young man, 
who was a lawyer, but who…” She paused and shook her head. “Young man? He 
just turned forty,” she reminded herself. “That ain’t so young, is it?” 
She paused for a few seconds, remembering the thrust of what she had been 
trying to say. “How about this…”



“In the hills above the San Fernando Valley in California, there lived a 
slightly eccentric lawyer, no longer young, and who was hung up on a film 
called ‘The Mist’ that had been made about the Arrowhead Project. And one 
thing intrigued him the most about the film. It wasn’t the event itself, 
which in real life had killed three hundred thousand people and left two 
states uninhabitable for a hundred years. It wasn’t any of the monsters 
that had come with the mist. It wasn’t even the discovery – which all of 
us had made the hard way – that there were other worlds right next door 
to ours. No, what held the man’s attention was the image of the young 
mother on the refugee truck, the young mother with the old-fashioned 
clothes and the two little children and the haunted look in her eyes. The 
picture of the woman had appeared below newspaper headlines and on the 
covers of magazines in the days after the Arrowhead Project. That picture 
– and the woman herself - had become the symbol of the victims of the 
mist.”



Mattie, now on a roll, prepared to tell her readers the main character’s 
name. The name had come to her the night before (while on a pleasant 
combination of pot and Vicodin, but she wasn’t about to tell that to her 
readers).



“The man’s name was-“



“You gotta be kidding!” Mattie jumped as she sensed Rose standing right 
behind her chair, leaning over her shoulder, looking at the words.



“What?” she asked a bit too sharply, angry for the surprise and the 
interruption and – as always – a bit defensive about her writing.



“’…there lived a slightly eccentric lawyer…’ ‘hung up on a film called 
‘The Mist’…” Rose was shaking her head slowly in disbelief as she smiled 
in gentle reproof. “’And what held his attention was the young mother on 
the refugee truck with the two children!?’ Oh my God!” She couldn’t help 
but laugh at that one, even though she knew she might be hurting Mattie’s 
feelings just a bit.



Mattie was hurt and wasn’t amused. “What in hell’s so funny?”



“I didn’t mean nothing, honey,” Rose said softly. One evening about six 
months ago, Mattie Lee had come home with a beat-up laptop computer and 
printer bought at a yard sale, plugged them in, and started writing short 
stories. The few stories she’d shown Rose were mostly about Southern or 
Irish history or about people they knew in town. She had never, however, 
written anything about the Arrowhead Project or the three days she and 
her little kids Wanda and Victor had spent trying to escape the mist and 
the monsters. Nor had Rose dared suggest to her that she write about it. 
Although the events were now twelve years in the past, Mattie and her 
kids still sometimes woke up from nightmares; and seeing a wasp’s nest or 
a spider could still cost Mattie a panic attack. Mattie had refused to 
see – or to allow her kids to see – Frank Darabont’s film “The Mist,” 
about the Arrowhead Project, when it had come out five years earlier. She 
herself had only seen it, on cable, a few weeks earlier. Rose, seated on 
the couch next to her, had been more focused on her friend than on the 
film, waiting for a sign that Mattie was about to cry or become angry. 



After the film was over, her friend did seem a bit shaken up. She told 
Rose she wasn’t sure they should even make films about what happened back 
then. “Rosie, maybe there’s some things shouldn’t be seen.” But Mattie 
later said that she had to admit that she enjoyed the film. And they had 
both gotten a bit laugh out of Frank Darabont’s casting choice for a 
character based on Mattie. The young woman who left her children at home, 
journeyed through the mist to save them, and appeared at the end of the 
film on the refugee truck had been played by Laurie Holden, a tanned, 
athletic, buxom Los Angeles blonde who looked nothing like Mattie Lee and 
whose California accent was worlds apart from Mattie’s own Southern 
drawl. (“What in Hell were they thinking?” both of them had burst out at 
once.)



Perhaps, reflected Rose, her friend was finding ways to come to terms 
with what had happened to her and three hundred thousand others in New 
England. Seeing the film, now writing a story about it, might be good for 
her. Just as she’d heard of a few of the soldiers in her old units in 
Afghanistan and Iraq learning to live with their combat experiences by 
writing about them.



“So,” Rose began again, more respectfully, the irony gone from her voice. 
“Tell me about this story.”



“What do you want to know?



“Well…that character. The lawyer. What’s his name?”



“Jeremiah. Jeremiah Gordon March. But he goes by Jeremy.”



“So: Jeremy Gordon March…” Rose muttered as she shook her head in 
disapproval. “Where’d you dig up a name like that?”



“Jeremy is a nice Southern gentleman’s name,” explained Mattie. 



“You said he was a Yankee.”



Mattie raised her hands in a gesture of surrender, but she continued to 
justify the name. “Okay, okay. But it just seems to fit him. Kind of old-
fashioned, named after a Biblical prophet – in my story, he’s supposed to 
be Jewish.”



“And ‘Gordon’?”



“Well, I say in the story he was born with some other middle name. His 
grandfather’s name. But he didn’t like it. He changed it when he was 
nineteen. He got ‘Gordon’ from one of the adults on Sesame Street, his 
favorite program when he was five years old.” Both the girls got a good 
laugh out of that.



“And ‘March’? What the hell kind of last name is that?”



“You should actually read the story,” Mattie began patiently. “Jeremy’s 
dad was a refugee from Europe – from Hitler, actually – and he came to 
the U.S. when he was sixteen. Two years later, when America entered the 
war, Jeremy’s dad joined the Marines. His original last name was- hold 
on…” She shuffled through the pile of notes until she found the East 
European name which had seemed to alien to her. “-Mirovich. His sergeant 
thought it sounded too foreign, and told him to pick another name. So 
Jeremy’s dad thought about it, and asked himself, ‘what do I do all day 
long? I march!’ And that’s where he got the name.”



“I gotta say, Mattie Lee, you’ve really got this all figured out.”



Mattie shook her head, but she was grinning as she did so. “Rosie, I 
haven’t begun to figure this guy out. His backstory, his whole family, 
how he got to be the person he is in my stories.” She’d have to figure 
out what it could be. Writing a person’s backstory, she realized, could 
take five or six other stories. That meant more nights and weekends at 
the laptop – and assuredly more ridicule from Rose - but she was up for 
it.



“Okay, honey, enough for Jeremy for one night. You’ve got to get up for 
work at seven. If you don’t go to sleep right now, you’ll be cranky. 
Snapping at everyone in the library.” She paused. “And besides, you say 
Jeremy works in a law office-?”



“In a court.”



“Same difference. But if he works there, he’s gotta go to bed too.”



“But I’ve got to write this all down now,” protested Mattie, “while the 
words are still in my head. Just another half-hour, I promise.”



“Right now, soldier!” Rose said in her most authoritarian voice, the one 
she’d used as a staff sergeant in charge of the men and women searching 
vehicles at the Baghdad International Airport.



Mattie said something under her breath.



“What was that?” Rose continued in the voice.



“I said, ‘yes.’”



“You mean ‘yes, ma’am.”



“Yes, ma’am.” Mattie, realizing she was beaten, tossed Rose a salute, 
saved the file she’d been working on, and switched off her computer. Rose 
was right; as things were she’d only get six hours or so of sleep, barely 
enough to function tomorrow.



Tomorrow after work, she promised herself, if she wasn’t too drowsy or 
crabby from lack of sleep, she would work some more on the story. It was 
so much fun creating imaginary people who could never exist in real life!