The House

There's nothing more to say, he thinks.  It's simply time to go. I think we need to go some place else, he mutters, turning to face her, but she's gone. He blinks stupidly for a second, trying to remember what happened, but as far as he can recall, she should be standing next to him.

He sighs, running his hand along the stubble on his chin. He turns and looks out over the field, the black earth studded with the torn stalks of corn and rutted with the tracks on the combines trails as they had sliced through the field weeks ago. Turkeys mingle along the timberline near the creek in the distance, eyeing him warily before disappearing into the brush.

He stumbles as he walks along the dirt track next to the field, patting his shirt pocket until he finds the pack of cigarettes. Shaking one out, he puts it between his lips as he digs in his pants pockets for his lighter. The sky is an even slate grey, darker at the horizon. Is there a storm coming. The air is cold, and bites into his lungs as he lights the cigarette and takes the smoke deep into his lungs.

What was he going to tell her? He looks down at his brown boots as he stumbles along the road. She should be here. Why is it so hard to remember what happened to her? She should be here. There are few other places that she could be.

The house should be around the corner, around the bend in the trees. How does he know this. He can see it, how it should look, small white frame house, rambling front porch, small shed out back. A single farm light should sit above the gravel track that leads up into the trees. A battered blue Ford pickup rests against the pole holding the light, but it never moves. It always remains.

He pauses, looking over the house, trying to remember the last time he was here. Why does it look so familiar? At one point there was a girl who lived here, simple and pure of spirit, and maybe he had done something wrong to her. He scratches his chin. That's entirely possible that something like that happened. The cigarette burns his fingers and he flicks it away into the wet brush. Rage rose through him and his body reacted before his mind could really think through what he was doing. Whisky was involved, wasn't it.

He stares at the front door of the house and starts shivering. Why was he here? What brought him back? He looks over his shoulder, back down the dirt track towards the field, but there is no one there. Where is she? She was right next to him just a moment ago. He looks down the gravel track as it disappears into the dark forest, but he can see no movement.

The air is getting dimmer. The sun must be setting, somewhere behind the clouds. The wind rustles around his feet, nuzzling against his ankles. This thin jacket won't keep him too warm once it gets dark. He looks at the front door of the house, and swallowing deeply, steps forward towards it.

The knob of the door turns easily, and door creaks as it opens. He steps in, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. The house is quiet and still. He calls out, but no one answers. He reaches over and flips the switch next to the front door, but nothing happens. He pauses, listening, and the house has the quiet feel of something dead and sleeping. The wind rattles the glass in the windows, but the house remains silent.

The boards in the floor creak under his feet as he makes his way into the dark house. The living room is around the corner, he thinks, and there should be a large blue hutch, and in the drawer of the hutch should be some candles and some matches. The stove in the kitchen was wood-fired. Hopefully there is still wood in the bin.

The furniture in the living room is draped in sheets, lumpy ghosts huddled around a ghost coffee table, facing a ghost television set. He pulls the sheet off the hutch and tosses it to the floor. He pulls open the drawer and fumbles around until he finds a candle. He rattles around in the drawer some more but cannot find any matches. He pulls his lighter from his pocket and lights the candle.

The warm glow of the candle light fills the room, and suddenly the house feels more alive. The candle casts herky jerky shadows as he makes his way from the living room into dining room. The large long table is shrouded in sheets as well. The chairs are leaning against it. The large armoir in the corner stands uncovered, threatening in its presence

The Sun

The sun cracks the horizon, causing the old man to frown around his pipe. He hitches up the collar of his coat, and keeps walking along the hedges. Over the gray smoke curling over the edge of the pipe, he looks out over the meadow, an empty expanse of green shimmering with dew.

The air is heavy with promise and anticipation. His leg cramps up, and he stops to rub his calf. Looking around to be sure that no one is around, he pushes open a gap in the hedge and slips into the meadow. Moving faster now, he crosses the short grass, the brown leather of his boots glistening.

In the center of the meadow sits a small pile white stones, jumbled like a pile of bones.

Don't get meta

Petra pulled down the shade on the bedroom window, shutting out the street below, lit by the plaintive street lamp. She turned and walked across the room to the bed and sat on the edge, fretting the edge of her shirt with her fingers. Her eyes glanced nervously at the clock, but it hadn't changed since the last time she'd checked it.

"Time and time again," she muttered, cracking her knuckles. Her stomach growled. She sighed.

Getting up from the bed, she crossed the room and opened the door. She went down the dark hallway to the kitchen, and flicked on the light. The old cat put its ears back but didn't even bother to open his eyes to look up at her. She opened the refrigerator, and after rummaging for a while, pulled out a package of ham, a jar of mustard, and a jar of mayonnaise.

She set these things on the counter next to the refrigerator. She found herself humming to herself as she reached over to get the loaf of bread from were it sat next to the toaster. Setting the bread down, she reached up and pushed the 8-track tape into the player sitting on top of the refrigerator. With a squawk, 70s funk filled the tiny kitchen.

The old cat opened his eyes at the music, looked up at her balefully as she began assembling her sandwich. His whiskers twitched when she opened the package of ham, and he stood. He stretched out long, yawning, his tongue curling up in his mouth, then crossed the room to rub his back against her bare legs.

"You had your chance," she growls at him, "You chose to be your own cat tonight, remember?"

He continues to rub against her legs, purring loudly as she spreads mayonnaise and mustard on the bread and then layer the slices of ham. She replaces the lids on the jars, reseals the ham, and then pushing him out of the way with her foot, opens the refrigerator to return the sandwich fixings.

The cat meowls up her, but she just frowns and shakes her head. "No, I know I shifted tenses. I didn't mean to, it just happened, ok?"

The cat sighs. "Could we have just one scene that doesn't get meta?"

She takes a bite of the sandwich. "Hey, this is hard enough. Don't get surly."

"At least you get ham."

"At least you get to speak."

"Only until he decides to rein this in."

She takes the sandwich on a plate into the living room, shutting off the light in the kitchen behind her. She sits on the couch, curling her long legs underneath her, taking another bite of the sandwich. She doesn't bother to turn on the light, but sits there in the near dark, looking out the window at the trees lining the street outside, and the plaintive streetlight that flickers as the wind blows the branches, shaking the leaves and causing the light to shimmer and dance. She hasn't heard from him since that night he decided he needed to drive out and save her. She glances over at the clock on the VCR.

Still no time has passed.

Work

"Come on," she said. "Let's go for a walk. It'll clear your head."

"I guess I need help getting my bearings."

"You need a lot of help, buster." She smiled. "That's what I'm here for."

She stood outside in the cold sunshine, her hands in the pockets of her coat as she waited for him to lock the door to his house. He joined her on the sidewalk.

"Where to?" he asked.

"See," she grinned. "That's your problem. It doesn't matter. Look at where you're standing." She gestured up and down the sidewalk. "You can either go right or left. Pick a direction, and start walking."

He smiled slightly. "It's just that simple?"

She poked him in the shoulder. "Pick a direction."

He turned to the right and started walking. She fell into step on his right hand side, and the two of them walked down to the corner.

"Now," she said, as they waited for the traffic to clear before they crossed the street, "I think the problem is that you're starting too generally."

"Really," he muttered, his hands in his pockets as they crossed the street.

"Yes, really." She looked over a squirrel running up a tree. "You have a man and a woman, maybe. It's hard to tell from what you've put down so far. They don't even have names. It's hard to tell what their relationship is." She looked up at him. "I think you need to give them names, and you need to make them as real as possible."

"But I don't know them."

She shakes her head. "That doesn't matter. You will know them, because you are creating them. Just make them, put them on the page, and then let them figure out where they need to go, and what they need to do. The sooner you put them down and let them run, the sooner you'll be out of this morass that's captured you."

He sighs. His shoe catches on a crack in the sidewalk and he stumbles. "I don't think it has anything to do with the writing." He looks up at her, frowning. "I wish it did. I think it's just happening again, the way that it always does."

She nods. "It always does. And you always get better." She reaches out to take his hand. She gives it a slight squeeze. "It will get better. Just ride it out."

Daddy

He came to with a kid poking him with a stick.
"You ok, mister?"
"Stop it."
He pushed himself up on his elbows, blinking at the sunlight. "What's going on?"
The kid turned and pointed. "That your car?"
He followed the kid's arm, wincing at the pain as he turned his neck. "Yeah, that's my car."
"You crashed. You crashed hard." The kid's eyes narrowed. "You crashed into Daddy's fence. Daddy's not going to like that."

Flush it Out

"No, no, no," his editor shakes her head. "There's not even a smidgen of narrative in this. What are you doing, vomiting on the page?"
"There's the scene in the bar."
"Don't even start. It's just weak. Come on, you can do better than this."
He nods, "Normally. I think I'm getting a little depressed right now."
"Well, snap out of it. Start writing. Don't you think that'll free you up a bit?"
"Free me up?"
"Yeah, break your writer's block. Just start writing, just get words down on the page."
"What do think I have been doing? What did you think you were just reading?"
"I think I just read you flushing out your brain. Now that you're clear, get to work."


P e t e r B i r k

$600 Mistake

It just gets harder every year to keep it together. I don't know if I can keep going. It's harder and harder and my brain feels like mush and keep reaching into a deep dark pit and pulling at the morass that surrounds me and I wish I could just keep the words on the page and out of my heart and I don't know why this is so hard this time, but I really don't think this one counts.
Maybe I should just start over. Sometimes I wish I could just pull the paper out of the typewriter crumple it up and throw it in the corner, but I write on an iPhone now and I don't want to make a $600 mistake because I can't get my head in the game.

Bone Tired

Bone tired. So cold and tired that the words don't even seem to make an impression, they just slip off the glass and slide down to the floor. I need to make you understand, so I'm trying as hard as I can. There doesn't seem to be much fiction here, and you used to be so good at it. Now, there's nothing, just words on a page and you sitting here frustrated, trying to figure out what's going on.

But at least there are words on the page. That's important. If anything is making you put words on the page, then that's good, even if you're going nowhere. I mean, you've been plugging away at this for two days and you've got nothing to show for it. It's really not moving at all. You've spent two days revving your engines, but you haven't even left the garage yet.

Too soon. It's always too soon, isn't it. You always want more, and there's never more in the jar. The knife scrapes the sides, and that's that. At least you'll get some nice tweets out of it. Remember who you were, once, and what you once did. Trim your finger nails and try again. You've got the whole month. Keep trying.

The Ghosts are Hungry Tonight

Every year it's the same, he thinks, drumming his fingers on the surface of the bar, looking down at the near empty tumbler in front of him, the ice slowly melting into the rest of the Scotch. Do you always capitalize Scotch, he wonders, or is that just something that I do?

He looks up at the bar in front of him, the rows of bottles under lights on neatly organized shelves. Really, he thinks, there's a strong need to get more specific, less general. He pulls the notebook from his pocket, starts thumbing through the pages. The devil is always in the details and we are always looking for the devil.

Her picture slides out from where it was trapped between a few scribbled sheets and slides down to the bar surface. He frowns involuntarily, then reaches down to pick it up. He holds it up so that he can study it in the dim light of the bar. She's leaning against the doorframe, the archway between the kitchen and dining room in her parent's house. Behind her, he can see the clutter of dishes from the meal still on the dining room table. Her cousin had come back from the war, the entire clan was over, neices, nephews, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Somehow he had managed to catch her alone, in this doorway. She is leaning against the frame with her hands in the front pockets of her jeans. She has tilted her head forward slightly to let her dark brown hair fall across part of her face, and she's looking at him with a mixture of amusement and annoyance. A look he's seen from her all too often.

He shakes the pciture between his fingers slightly, making the stiff paper crack a little. This was two years ago? Three? War never ending. He sighs, sliding the picture back into the notebook.

He raises a finger, and the bartender comes over, and silently, he pushes his glass forward. The bartender nods and takes it, and comes back with another Scotch on the rocks that he sets on the bar in front of him. The ghosts are hungry tonight. They are gnawing on the edges of my heart. He takes a long sip of the Scotch, lets it burn down his throat. If only we knew. Instead, we are born blind and we grope our way towards each other. I have no patience for my fellow man today, because the ghosts are filling my heart.

He's Always the One

The lightning cracks like a whip through the sky, offering a glimpse of the road in front of him. Rain rattles against the windshield like a handful of pebbles hurled by an impatient lover at your bedroom door. He tightens his grip on the steering wheel, determined to keep the little car on the slick pavement. He clenches the cigarette between his teeth, the smoke filling his mouth as he tries to navigate through the darkness.

He tries to remember how he came to this point, and all he can think about is the fact that he has to find her. She's lost, she's alone out here in the rain and the darkness, and he has to be the one to rescue her. He's always the one who rescues her, even when she's not aware that she needs saving.

She's aware tonight. Repeated calls on his phone, text messages that get increasingly cryptic and terse, she's in trouble and she's trying to find her way out. He jumped in his car and raced off into the night, determined to be the one to bring her to safety.

He barely catches a glimpse of the rabbit before it is running through his headlights. His foot stabs the brake, and he feels the car skid, the rear end coming around to his right, frantically he tries to recall if you turn into or away from a skid, and as the rabbit reverses course and leaps for safety, the car slides off the road into the ditch.

The violence of the impact throws him against the steering wheel.

The Work Will Remain

The weight of the chair shifts awkwardly underneath you as you settle into it. These things shouldn't be so bothersome, shouldn't occupy so much of your thoughts, but they always do, always create creep that prey upon your mind and makes it more difficult to actually accomplish anything within this given span. The moon shines bright on the sidewalk out front, almost eerie in its glow and you wonder how long it will be this bright, how long night will seem like day, how many more hours until dawn begins to change the light outside your window. These are not trivial concerns. You only have so many hours to attempt to work, and you need to get some sleep at some point. Why fight it? Why pretend that something might happen tonight, when you know it won't, it can't, there's nothing that will be done tonight and you know it, but your hope flickers like the light in the second story window of that house across the street, as you wrap your fingers around the warm mug you think that maybe this time, maybe now, maybe right this moment you'll set down the mug and touch the keyboard, your fingers dancing across the keys the way they used to, the way they do in your dreams still at night, the same way you dream about cigarettes and whiskey, the phantom tastes dancing about the tip of your tongue when you wake. These things have all been left behind, they've been castaway like countless other bad habits, shed along the trail of your life, the worn track that follows behind you as you make your way from one morning to the next, struggling to see what the gain has been and what the gain might be.

The sigh that escapes your lips startles yourself, breaking the silence in the room, overriding even the sound of the cooling fan. You set the mug down on the desk next to the keyboard and tentatively start flexing your fingers. Tonight shouldn't pass without some blood being shed, it's a struggle and you need to fight through it, and you need to take a step forward, even if it's a faltering, unsure step that causes you to wobble and lean against the wall as you make your way. The work will remain, the work will always remain and you need to make your way into it, resolutely.

Nothing Continues to Happen

You make the coffee, stirring the milk in slowly, the sound of the spoon rhythmically striking the side of the mug, a dull mechanical repetition. They said it was a problem with the wiring, that it all came down to chemistry, an improper balance of salts in a natural battery. A sip of the coffee and quick glance around the kitchen, the cluttered counters, the dishes in the sink, the darkness lurking outside the window, and then it's back upstairs, to the chair, the computer, and the work.

Your bones feel old as you climb the stairs, one hand on the bannister, one hand holding the warm coffee mug, the yawn creeping through your face as you reach the top of the stairs. There are things you've always been confused by, it seems. These things. How to make them fit? How did everything end up at this point, and why now, at this point?

The chair creaks underneath you as you settle back in, holding the warm mug in front of your face. The monitor sits in front of you, the room filled with the hum of the cooling fan on the computer from under the desk. It shouldn't take this long, should it? It should have been done by now. Paul will know something is up. The emails will start in the morning, constant status update requests, until ducking and dodging the questions will take more time than actually not doing the work. You take a sip of the coffee, savoring the taste as it rolls to the back of the throat. Across the street, the light continues to flicker in the room on the second floor of the empty house. Nothing continues to happen.

Madness is relative

The light flickers on and off in the window on the second floor of the old house down on the corner of Walnut and Elm. Either the circuit has a short, or someone's playing with the light switch. Probably nobody lives there, because if they did, the light would drive them crazy, but if nobody lives there then why is there a light on.

The light is always either on or off. It's never not on, and it's never not off. You've noticed it from your office window, as you sit at your desk in front of your computer screen, not working, the way you've found yourself not working more and more these days. The work is there, just begging you to do it, but still you find your eyes drawn out the window to the street, to the trees stripped of leaves and shivering in the brisk wind, the yellowed leaves plastered to the pavement by the cold rain that passed through three nights ago, to the parked cars up and down the street, you always notice the new cars and watch them intently to see who their owners are and from what house they come. The house on the corner, not the old house, the one across from it, seems to attract new people all the time, at all hours, like Paul's house when he was still dealing.

Your computer sits silently waiting, the work patiently on the screen, whenever you're ready, it'll be right here. It's time for more coffee, anyway, you've been sitting in this chair for at least an hour and it's time to take a break. You grab your mug and take a sip and wince at the cold coffee, swallowing quickly to keep from tasting it. There's always tomorrow. The deadline is months away. There will be tomorrows and tomorrows to come.

You take the coffee mug downstairs to the kitchen, walking quietly through the darkened house. You don't want to wake anyone, and you hiss at the cat as it chirps at you as you walk by. You keep your hands warm under your arm pits as you pace around the dim kitchen, waiting for the water in the kettle to boil, the coffee filter sitting on top of your mug. There's so much work to do, where to start, what to hit first, what do you need to tackle this part. It's so quiet in the office, it's easy to lose yourself in your thoughts. You tried playing music for a while, and got so wrapped up in correcting and editing the ID tags on your MP3s that you lost an entire week. But there are tomorrows and tomorrows to come.

It is easier to work at night. The quiet suits the night. The world contracts until it is just the office, the desk, the computer screen. Some nights your fingers slip onto the keys and start working, and next thing you know it's almost dawn. It's happened, but it has been happening less often than before. Dawn keeps creeping up sooner and sooner than you anticipate. And once the morning comes, the whole cycle will start all over again. You will get bounced back further and further, until the work seems like a distant memory as you slog your way through the quotidian minutia of your day. It doesn't really matter what you had for lunch, or if you had lunch at all. You're only partly there, listening to the conversation and chiming in opportune moments. Your mind is on the work. Your body is at lunch and is having a pleasant time with it, your friends and family are smiling at you as they speak with you, but you catch their eyes and you know what they are thinking, what they are wondering, what they believe is happening.

Madness is relative, you told a friend once. He didn't believe you, but that wasn't the point. The declaration was more for yourself than for anyone who could hear it. Live with madness long enough and it becomes like a nicely worn pair of denim pants, really fit only for their owner. It becomes a constant in a world of randoms. People worry about when the depression hits, but the depression is somewhat comforting in its way. The depression is a known quantity, an old and overly familiar friend who invites his way into your house then proceeds to stay for six weeks. The depression has been happening for so long that you can't even remember what it was like before it started showing up at your door, looking in people's eyes for too long and making awkward conversation at theatre opening nights.

Now, it's the normal that's strange, the unknown, the terrifying. You pull yourself out of the darkness by convincing yourself that the awful things your brain keeps whispering about you into your ears at night is not true. People do like you. You are interesting. You can carry on a conversation. You are not odd. But then you are out there, taking a walk in the wide, wide world and suddenly this is put to the test. Are you wierd? Are you awkward? This interaction with this clerk at the grocery store will put this to the test, and it all depends on how strong your ribs are that day, that you can take the blows that are coming at you without faltering and falling to your knees, once again to the comforting darkness.