kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"TheWritersStory"

words

I can remember everything now. It has happened, will happen, is happening. It is. I can not take this life much longer, I feel as if I have had it for eternity. I have seen eternity, both ends, and it is longer than you think. I do not know whether this be gift or curse, my vision does not grant me wisdom. Merely sight of all. Anyway, I have a promise to keep.

She was a crone when I first met her. I now see her in all her guises, all her lives, and I can not understand how she survives. She delights in this cacophony of knowledge. She was a crone when I first met her, and I but a boy. I was so young then. Fourty years old I was, pushing seventeen in my heart. I was so naiive. She offered me the world, her world, and I in my pain accepted.

I was a writer then. A novelist, a journalist, a script writer, a playwright. The world had dimmed, I had lost my ideas and my understanding. Human nature either bored me, disgusted me, or eluded my every attempt to put it once again to paper. I had resorted to rewriting others' stories, signing my name to ideas as old as man. I would take a children's book, add sex, and sell it as adult. I would take a science fiction book, change the metaphors to fantasy, add romance, and sell it as a juvenile thriller. I was a hack.

One day I woke up and realised. I was worthless. I was scum. I had become everything I despised. I spent the entire day getting drunk, praying fervently to my Guiness idols for a vision my own. Something new. Something that came from me, my poisons, and not my plagiaristic tendencies.

The bar closed that night, three in the morning, and the bouncers had to carry my corpse to the door. I lay there in the rain for an hour before I gained the strength of heart and of mind to raise my flesh and the twelve pitchers I had poured into it, give or take three trips to the bathroom. I had not had a vision.

The city was dark and bleak in the rain, and there were only rats scurrying about to share my misery. "Guns" proclaimed a sign in a window, and all I could do was stare longingly at the pure and final ending locked behind iron screen. I made a vow then, in abject annihilation, that if I could not write a thing by dawn, I would buy a gun and kill myself. It seemed so simple then. Life was so simple, then. Death was so simple, then.

At home, I sat in front of my electic typewriter, stoic and stolid in the candlelight. I sat four hours, mind blank, forcing myself not to use an idea that I had already read. Nothing came but the sun.

Dreary, still cold and wet, I walked down to the gun store. That was when I remembered about the seven day waiting period. I figured a promise was a promise, and this was one I would keep. Smiling the fake smile of so many jacket covers, I signed away my life, let him look over my ID and my credit, and walked out with an accomplished feeling in my gut. I would not die today, but I was already dead.

The days passed to my mind in the plodding manner that days pass to mortals, one by one by one, and slowly it came to be the night before I was to gain my final glory. I had not once sat in front of my typewriter. Not once paused for want of an idea. I had gone to the carnival, walked in the park, made a bookshelf. I busied myself with pointless plotless activities. But on the night before, my nerve began to fail me. I sat in front of my typewriter listlessly. I typed a few keys, randomly, testing sarcastically for divine intervention. No title appeared.

I walked, then, back down to the bar. Back to where I had drowned my sorrows so well that day. I peered in at all the stories that were happening, all happening, without anyone to write or be written. It was so simple. I walked, then, back to the gun shop. I peered in at all the stories that were happening, all happening, without anyone to write or be written. Except I. For I was to end my book on the morrow. I had conviction, purpose, surety.

On a whim, that night, I met the crone. I wanted to amuse myself, staring death in the face, and see what a reader of palms could tell me, with my knowledge sure in my mind of my imminent demise. I would hide it from my face, I said, and see what she would say. We were much alike, after all, a fortune teller and myself. We both told the same story over and over again. I was sure of it.

I paid her twenty dollars, a crooked grin on her face as she looked into my eyes. She took my hand, looked it over, poured some tea. She rubbed her crystal ball, and said that she had been expecting me. It didn't surprise me all that much. One of the standard beginning lines. Perhaps she'd seen it in her future, eh? I was sure she could feel the sarcasm in my eyes, because she laughed then, a joyous laugh full of life. I don't understand how she could do it, ever.... how she could laugh.

And then she sobered. She told me my story. I was a failed writer looking for one last kick, one last story before I left. She told me about the gun that was waiting for me, and she told me how I would hold it to my temple and pull the trigger, let the hammer fall, and end myself. That was when I sobered as well, fully, every part of me intensely aware of every atom in existance. Metaphorically speaking, at least then. She asked me the question, then. She asked me how badly I wanted a last story. Of course she knew the answer, she didn't have to know the future anymore, she could see the desparate and hungry look in my eyes.

I told her I would do anything for one last story.

That was when she opened my eyes.

I could not see her after that, I could not see anything. My eyes were open to all four dimensions and my senses were flooding. My time dependant psychological barriers were crumbling beneath the onslought. I was everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing. I am everywhere and nowhere. I am everything and nothing. And so I hold desparately to one stream to gently record these memoirs, this last story. And even it is not my own. For it is truth, I can not claim it as a fantasy, a mystery, or even a murder. Though in some sense it is all those.

This story is not mine for it is me, I write, and writing, I move on. It has been written and will be written infinitely across the aeons. This story is real, for it has happened and is happening. But then, what isn't? I have seen myself die a thousand times, and felt it, but only now with this done do I slowly and gently, like a lost lover timid but crying tears of joy, lower myself into my death. I'm already kneeling, in some dark alley, with the gun to my temple. And I'm pulling the trigger.