the writer

I can build a story out of anything and everything.

A girl said that to me once. Her hair was long and dark. Dark like a clear summer night sky and the stars I think I imagined. The darkness faded into the dull steamy lights behind without any definite edge. Maybe that was because I was a little bit drunk.

She was, too. I’d seen her do away with five. And judging by the number of empty glasses in front of her, she’d been there for a long long time.

She said she’d been telling stories all her life. She had two kids waiting at home to hear them before they fell asleep, a guy waiting at home who’d heard them all his life. And she was sick of it. Everytime she finished a drink she’d smile and say she’d never tell another story. Then she’d break down and ask for another one.

I remember telling her I wrote stories too. That’s all I remember saying.

“Yeah. But not like me. No one does them like me. Not every goddamned day of your goddamned life.”

If I met her again, I’d tell her how wrong she was.

When I walk down the street, my feet falling in turns between the tiny cracks on the sidewalk that no one else can see, I build up my own story. Brick by brick, crack by crack, till the brilliant red-gold monsters that step out suddenly from behind the parking meters and scare me almost into putting my feet right on the cracks blend into the everyday grey-blue of the city and everything – the strange reptilian flying live machine wearing pince-nez, the old lady staring at vacation posters of “YOU GO TOO – TO PERU!!”, the vanilla ice cream dancing with a mad impish toothy grin on the child’s chin by the ice-cream van – swirls into one crazy mesh of abstract forgotten meanings that are so random that I can’t put them together.

By the time I reach my apartment, all that is one screaming chaotic mess of whimsical nonsense in a corner of my brain.

I heave my type writer over to the table by the window – it grinds against the uneven unpolished grains on the wooden surface – nails on a blackboard? I see Mrs. Eckle the preschool English teacher leering at me from behind her thick distorted lenses and I know that she’s really a black witch from the north who plays with black magic and satanic rites, often managing to summon a giant smoky THING that enters your dreams and stays there. Then she, too, joins the screaming chaos in my brain.

I sit in front of the black shiny machine , roll a sheet of empty inviting paper into it and place my hands on the keys, the tips of my fingers fitting satisfyingly into the depressions in them where the letters are painted in bold white.

And I wait.
And I wait.
And I wait.

Like I’ve never tried before. Willing it all to come through. It’s not a long way. Not really. Just out from the corner into the front, down through my neck, my shoulder, into my arms and out…OUT… through my fingertips. Like I’ve imagined and pushed and pushed and pushed so many times.

The ghost in the broom cupboard peeps out a head and stares at me with those horrible sympathetic circled eyes.

The winged gargoyle hunches up to fit into the small window frame and grins, its tail waving at me from behind its stone back.

The little wisps of fire-creatures – tiny little things that breathe and feed fire leap out like forgotten embers in the dead empty fireplace.

Oh, I can too. Make up stories out of everything and anything. But I wish sometimes I could tell them. For real. Not just that fading dull scream tucked somewhere into the back of my brain. They only come alive for me. Only for me.

So I close my eyes and imagine my editor’s fingers drumming incessantly on his polished mahogany desk. Like horse hoofs. And I think of people. Men, women and drinks. Lots and lots of drinks – making them happy, sad, angry or just bored.

Their hair is usually almost always black and their eyes almost always dull brown – like they were fake cartoons drawn by the illustrator of the evening weekly – no life. But my editor never notices that. He never will.

This time I have no problem moving my fingers over the keys.