Short Stories

The Writer

His hand lingered over the pages, hesitant. The ideas weren't soaring through his head as they normally did. A cavern of magical lobsters? Where would that lead? An adventure through the land of the living dead? That was overused. A group of heroes saving the world from destruction? That's what authors turned to when they're dying in the gutter.

Harvey Seward leaned back in his chair and sighed. He passed a hand through his hair in that unconscious tick he had when he was stressed or nervous. His head had been a mess on the day of his wedding.

He tapped his foot on the floor and stared at the blank sheet of paper lying on his desk, seemingly taunting him with it's sheer emptiness.

His books always had been something special. When he was twelve, his written assignment about turtles had been published in the New Yorker. At fifteen, the amateur short story he'd written won first place in the youth's competition. At a mere twenty-one years old, his first novel, Terence, had become a Number 1 bestseller.

When his characters cheered, people would cheer with them. When his characters cried, tears were spilled for them. When his characters smiled, the air seemed oddly relaxed. It was like he had created a way to empathize with people that didn't exist on another level. All of his readers were unanimous, it was like his characters were old friends or lovers. All that his characters felt, they felt as well.

And he knew, in that instant, what he would do. He would write a tragedy. To what extent would his readers grieve when his main character, a girl named Ashley, would die after many hardships and losses. What would happen, were he to do that?

He returned to his paper and the first words appeared under his pen: It was to a misty morning that Ashley Denver awoke.

It began a little hesitantly, then, word after word, sentence after sentence, the ideas broke the dam and flooded the gate. He wrote and wrote and wrote, the words streaming endlessly one after the other. His heart was pounding and his hand moving faster than his mind could register, going into a kind of automated mode. The minutes turned into hours. When his wife called him for lunch, she was answered with silence. When she opened the door to check on him, she saw the piles of pages, a true saga, and felt a little light in the head.

"Wasn't the paper blank, this morning?" She asked.

"It was..." He mumbled distractedly, scrawling away and ignoring the ache that had been building in his hand for quite a bit, now.

She picked up the first page of his manuscript and read it intently.

"This is good!" She exclaimed, turning to him with a smile, "What's it about?"

"A girl goes through some hardships and ends up dying. It's a tragedy." He answered in an irritated voice, shaking his pen to muster the last of the ink.

"You're going to kill her?" The shock in his wife's voice made him pause, "She's going to die?"

"Well, yes," He frowned at her, noting the active distress in her face, "I wanted to try my hand at a tragedy."

"Well, I.... yes," She answered, composing herself, "I.... I suppose everyone needs to go, eventually."

As she left, reminding him of lunch, he thought he could hear an audible sniff from the door before it closed behind her.

He kept on writing the next few days, pausing only to eat every so often, his rush seemingly endless. When at last he had almost finished it, he presented his project to his agent, a slightly overweight, but altogether jolly man, with a moustache that reminded Harvey firmly of a walrus.

"This is impressive," He said, nodding in approval, "What did you say was going to happen to her, in the end?"

"Oh, well after her nights in the barn, she would wander a few more days until finally she dies before he finds her," He answered, beaming in delight at his agent's interest.

The man paled, he stared back at the manuscript, seeming fearful.

"I... I suppose I could take this back, then?" Harvey said hesitantly, reaching his hand over.

It was jerked away, as if on reflex, causing him to flinch.

"Is... is everything okay?" He asked, regarding the large man as if he might suddenly shriek a battle cry and pounce on him at any second.

His agent hesitated a moment, then handed it over as if he were giving away his newborn son, "I.... yes. I'm not sure what came over me. Maybe I ought to take a break from work for a few days."

After that slightly alarming incident, Harvey showed his story to a select few people. His mother, his close friend and his brother. When he told them how it would end, each of them had the same reaction; breaking out in cold sweat and gripping the story to their chests as if they had to protect it from something.

At last, came the final part. The grand finale. It was perfect. The setup, the adventure, the despair of the end, knowing she had no chance of getting away. It was, very honestly, the painful end. He began to write, relishing in how utterly perfect his story had turned out. It was just the way he wanted it.

He was about to add the last line, her final breath, when his hand stopped, it trembled in mid-air, he tried to move it, but it simply trembled over the last part of the page left blank.

He tried to bring it forward, his hand refused to move. He heard something hit the page, looked down, and realized drops had smudged out the ink. It was ridiculous, he had never cried over his own stories. Tragic things had happened in them before, yet he'd never felt like this.

His hand trembled, he trembled with it. The tears leaking from his eyes were clear to him. He didn't want her to die, he wanted Ashley to live, get a job, get married and have fourteen goddamn kids and to live happily ever after. But no, he couldn't do that, what a boring, ordinary ending that would be. He had to bring style, panache and originality to the world of literature. But right now, was that really what he wanted?

He stared at the pages, the last few words one more time, then he began to write. And this time, his hand moved with a kind of relief.

She looked up to see a silhouette of a man, the man she had known for so long. The one she had wanted to see...

And, as the strokes of his pen grew faster, he smiled.

***

It was two weeks after the story had been published. It had been a glorious sale. Copies had been flying off the shelves as fans all over the world proclaimed that he would be the next William Shakespeare, the next Victor Hugo. The one who would take the pedestal as The King of Literature. The story had been acclaimed as "an emotional roller coaster with a somewhat bland, but satisfying ending".

Fan letters had been overflowing in his mailbox, each of them asking the same thing: was Ashley going to die?

Every time, his answer was the same: Read on

When he'd made the change to his story known to his wife, she'd wept happy tears and leapt into his arms, much to the wrath of their newborn Colin, who wailed for his milk.

His agent had seemed apprehensive when he'd seen him enter his office, but seemed to relax when he told him about the updated version and was downright jolly the rest of the day.

"So, do you have any plans for your next novel?" He asked, after offering him a bottle of gin.

"Yes, actually." Harvey answered leaning back with a glass in hand. "I know exactly what I want to do."

"Oh really? And what's it going to be about this time around, mister Seward?" His Agent inquired, leaning forward intently.

The author stared back at him for a moment. "A horror novel." He answered with a grin. His Agent seemed to pale slightly. "Now how will this one go, I wonder?"

Yet through all that confidence and joy, he ruffled his hair.