Ink Raindrops

The notebook, its pages torn and crumpled in a pathetic display of frustration, came to rest with a sharp, fluttering crack against the stuccoed wall.  The writing inside was lost, smeared by the careless yet deliberate spillage of day-old coffee.  From across the room, Sam watched the notebook–the latest in her string of perceived failures–with an expression that wavered between despair and disgust.  Yet another night wasted, and not another word written; it was too much to bear.  Trembling with mixed emotions, she crossed her arms over her desk and lowered her head onto them, unable to tolerate the view any longer.  Writing, it seemed, was not her forte after all, despite the years she’d given to the craft.

It had been too long since her last time writing, and she knew it.  What began as a labor of love, the story she had to tell before it consumed her, had become little more than a waking nightmare.  The words that spilled forth from her pen had lost their luster, their command, over time.  She had been able to leave her audience hanging, shivering, begging, just a year ago; now, she was the one in need of more.  Her reasons for taking a break were varied and many, but the more she allowed them to echo in her mind, the more they began to sound like bitter excuses wrapped up in self-abhorration.  She knew that somewhere, deep within, lay the soul of a writer… but that soul seemed so very far away; a ghost at her fingertips, intangible and yet necessary to her survival.

Endings had never been her strong suit.  She always began with the best of intentions, the best of ideas, but somewhere in the middle, those ideas stuttered, ground to a halt.  That which had seemed in earnest began to feel stilted and painful; that which had seemed frivolous began to feel deadly serious, and perhaps became the sole reason for the story’s existence.  She had grown jaded, unable to trust herself with even the most simple of projects, lest her inability to push forward destroy everything she had worked so hard for.  In the process, she had forgotten how to write, or so she told herself.  It was a tale that was not difficult to believe, after she had listened to it more than once.

Tonight, she had failed for the final time to complete her novel.  She had battled the demons and devils and emerged without a scrap of imagination, originality, or hope for the restoration of either.  The story, she told herself, just could not be finished, and she was a damn fool–a jobless, aimless fool–for thinking she could touch the world with her pen.  It was time to go out and beg for absolution in the form of a respectable paid salary from the nearest fast food dive; a horror different, but not far from, the ones she explored in her writing.  Demons and devils would eat at places like that, she was certain.

Looking up from the protective circle of her own arms, Sam found the strength to sigh, shove back her chair and stand.  The room was dark; she always forgot to turn on the lights when she was going to write in the evenings, and by the time she noticed, there was no hope of finding the switch without at least one stubbed toe.  The only beacon in the room was her clock in the distance, spelling out numbers in tiny dashes of green light–the night had passed and made its way into the early hours of the morning instead.  Her concentration had been such that she had failed to feel exhaustion setting in; it did so in a rush.

Finding the corner of her desk by touch, Sam pressed herself against the wall of her apartment as an anchor, tripping only once over the helpless remains of her notebook.  She was accident-prone by birth, or so most said; her mother still insisted that she just hadn’t grown into herself yet.  At just shy of six feet in height, Sam didn’t want to think about growing any further than she already had.  As if to prove her clumsiness, something hard and immovable slammed into her shin, leaving her with tears in her eyes and several of the less polite words in her vocabulary on her lips.  How she could fail to remember the location of her own bed every night was beyond her ability to fathom.

As she began to make her way around the bed’s edge, a loud and angry howl split the darkness in two and sent shivers up her spine.  As a writer of horror fiction, sounds played a unique role in undermining her personal psyche, and this one was no exception.  Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart skipped a beat–this particular noise was not, as so many often were, confined to the inside of her mind.  Stopping her progress around the edge of the bed, she froze in place and waited, listening.  If there was one thing she had learned over the years, it was that silence could send messages that sound never could.

A rustle in the dark filled the pause, and Sam had only a moment to clench her fists in preparation for an attack, before something warm and hairy brushed past her ankle.  A scream died on her lips when she realized that only one demon would be anywhere near her own bed.

“Don’t do that, Poe. Not tonight.”

At last finding her bed, and the table lamp nearby, Sam flicked the switch, casting shadows across the floor and onto her own personal demon; a large black ball of fuzz that could only be called a cat if one knew where to look for ears and a tail.  She’d named him after Edgar Allen Poe, of course, not the least bit because of his blackness, and his ability to perch in strange places, giving off malevolent and eerie vibes–when he wasn’t winding his way around her ankles in search of food or companionship.  Tonight, she had stepped on his tail in her wanderings, judging by the indignant look on his feline face and the way his tail gingerly flipped away from her general direction.

“Maybe you should look out for me, huh, Poe? You’re the one that can see in the dark, you know.”  Sam couldn’t help but chuckle as she sat on the edge of the bed.  The cat, as much as he often provided more trials than actual companionship, was her best friend, and her only confidant in life.  It was easier to talk to a cat than to people, she’d found.  People asked such awful questions, questions that made her feel like a foolish child by comparison.  They always wanted to know where she worked, what she did for a “real” job, who she was dating, how her family was.  Life was complicated enough without people and questions in it.

Poe leapt up next to Sam, purring as if his pride had never been injured.  When he failed to attract her undivided attention, he leapt back down from the bed and made his way over to the fallen notebook against the wall.  She watched, only half seeing him, as he stretched out a paw toward it.  It wasn’t long before he was wrapped around her failure, his teeth lodged firmly in the spine and his back feet kicking without mercy at the fluttering pages.  It was a fitting punishment, she thought with a wry grin.

“I don’t suppose you have any ideas, then? I’ve chewed on that stuff for days and it didn’t do me any good.”

Poe looked at her, his feet, his head and the notebook all pointing in opposing directions.  It was the answer he always gave to complicated questions.

“Fine, don’t tell me.  It’s too late now, anyway.”  Sam removed her glasses and set them next to her lamp.  The room appeared even darker and blurrier with her glasses off, which only encouraged her to close her eyes and rest.  It wasn’t long before she found a comfortable spot beneath her blankets–one of the only places she felt safe and relaxed.  “I’m never writing again, you know.  That’ll be good for you, huh? You’ll have lots more time to push your high and mighty self into my lap.”

Poe’s response involved the experimental destruction of a notebook page, removing the torn segment and carrying it around in his mouth for further contemplation.  While good for comic relief, Poe never managed to solve any of her problems, real or imagined.  He never understood her fear of people, and always rushed to the door when the doorbell rang, or pounced on the phone when it cut into her thoughts.  He didn’t understand why she waited until the footsteps were gone before opening the door to see if anything remained.  He didn’t understand the way her heart pounded at the slightest suggestion of human companionship.  He didn’t understand the panic attacks that gripped her when she returned from the grocery store or the pharmacy, on those rare times that she ventured out of the apartment.  All he knew was that she stayed home a lot and wrote, and that was just fine by him.

As a child, her parents had done their best to cure her of her “shyness,” sending her to this summer camp or that church function, but it had never subsided in any way over the years.  She had never fit in with the kids, never belonged, and she never would, if they had anything to say about it–they always did.  Their taunts and jeers still echoed in her mind, a constant reminder of why she would never trust them or anyone like them ever again.  She had forced herself into college for the promise of education and knowledge; in the end, her bachelor’s degree in psychology had not taught her a thing about how to deal with the people she so despised.  Left with no further options, she had turned to her then-diary, imagining all the terrible things that she would do to them, if given the chance.  These fantasies, combined with years of watching others in an attempt to understand them, led to the brain-child she had nurtured for the past three years–and that now lay helpless on the floor.

Though her fear of people would not permit her to remain long in their company, she had always wanted to tell her story to the world; to expose the weaknesses that lay in every human, not just herself, and make them just as vulnerable as she was.  It was a point of pride, to write things that left the giggling cheerleaders breathless and the football players in the arms of their mothers.  It was a way of trying to reach out to those in her place as well; a promise that those who lived in fear of others were not alone, and could still make something of their lives.
However, without an end to her story, none of that would ever happen, and her faith in her own ability to become more than just her own fears was starting to wane.  The weight of her failure lay heavy on her heart and mind, and try though she might to console herself, the darkness was impossible to banish.  Even the blackness of Poe’s fur could not compare to the blackness in her soul.  The only thing worse than an empty page, to Sam’s mind, was a stack of hundreds of pages of promise with an irredeemable flaw lurking just at the end.

Snapping off the light again, Sam took a deep breath.  It would be a bad night for sleeping, as confused and angry as her mind was, but without sleep, she would be even less inclined to go out and search for a job in the morning.  It wasn’t long before Poe joined her, settling down in the middle of her blanket-covered chest; his usual place.  However, something paper-like and wet around the edges landed squarely on her face, distracting her from sleep more than anything else had that evening.

“What is it this time, Poe?”

She snapped the light back on and removed Poe’s gift with suspicious care.  As she had expected, Poe had delivered the scrap of paper that he had dissected from her notebook.  Just as her hand was about to close around it, forming it into a tight wad, she froze in place.  The words on the scrap were still legible, despite her attempts to destroy it and Poe’s violence toward paper in general.

In the sloppy cursive scrawl that indicated her own note-taking, the scrap read:

“sleep and die”

“Very funny, Poe.” Sam’s hand closed at last, and she tossed the scrap of wadded paper into the nearby trash can, already full of similar helpless wads of paper, the kind that Poe best liked to chase.  “If only I could give up on all of this, I would.”

It was not a happy thought to fall asleep on, but then, most of Sam’s thoughts were anything but happy.