Skip to main content

"Writer's Block"

     I sat in the back of the car, my parents singing together in the front seat to some weird song on the radio. It was something I'd never heard of, so you know it was old.
    Sitting on my lap was my computer. I had a story I needed to write, but I was drawing a blank. The only phrase that kept entering my mind was, 'The bedroom was cold.' Now, this was something of a good starting point for me normally. Usually I could come up with some good lines to follow it with and trail the rabbit hole that the story led me down. But for some reason, that phrase left me stumped.
    In frustration, I turned my head to the window, watching the world pass us by in a blur. We were all alone of this deserted road, out in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but grass and trees and powerlines for miles. On one hand it was incredibly boring. On the other, it gave me this strange perspective of how vast the world is and how small we were compared to it.
    My attention shifted back to my laptop. Surely I could come up with something clever, I thought. Maybe the story takes place in the middle of winter? I typed out a new line, talking about the harshness of the world outside and the comfort they felt as they wrapped themselves tightly in their blankets.
    I was getting strangely bored of what I was writing and decided to backspace the entire thing and start over. I mean, the writing was good and all, but the trail lead nowhere interesting. What, someone laying in bed? How's that supposed to be scary?
    Was it horror that I was even trying to write?
    I was unsure.
    All I knew was I needed to have a story written. One that I felt excited to write. Something twisted. Something I could feel proud of. Something that peeked through the dark abyss of my imagination.
    And as we drove on, I noticed something rather peculiar. The sun was nowhere to be seen. I mean, it was the afternoon. The sun would normally be over head, leaving my parents to put down a visor to shield themselves from being blinded. But it wasn't there. There weren't even any shadows around us. Just light. This was uncanny as hell.
    My parents paid no mind. They were still up front, singing along to an old song on the radio. A song that I had tuned out a long time ago. A song that was becoming more familiar the more I started really listening to it. This was the same song they'd been singing along to this entire trip, I realized. It's like its playing in a loop.
    I gazed down at my computer and saw that the cursor was blinking, the phrase still lingering on the screen, 'The bedroom was cold.'
    Didn't I erase that? I had to have, right? I mean, I erased everything else that was on the page. The world I'd created within this story vanishing from existence with just the few taps of a backspace key.
    An entire world erased. Fading. Elements disappearing. The world folding in upon itself until there was nothing.
    Until all that was left...
    Were the words on the page...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"The Light"

  My day off from work was supposed to be a day for me to relax and unwind and rest. The past few days had been incredibly stressful, from hateful customers to managers that expected everyone to do their jobs for them, and everything in between. It was nice to finally have that down time to spend away from all that. I'd decided to spend my time, not to get things done around the house, but to play a new game I'd been hooked on lately. It was this puzzle game where every room is seemingly randomly generated, each with clean and clever puzzles. After booting up the game, I was presented a room with white padded tiles all over the walls. There were a few green, red, and blue squares. I guess my job was to manipulate those tiles somehow to get me from where I was no, up to the top of the level. I looked around the room and could barely make out an opening. I pressed a single button to get myself started when the light in my bedroom burnt out, leaving me shrouded in darkness...

"Fading Memories"

W ith old age comes problems that are as old as time itself. Your mind begins to crumble. Your body begins to fall apart. You are eventually unable to do things on your own. It's enough to make anyone lose their mind. And sometimes this can result in the worst kinds of situations. Living with my grandson is so irritating. All he wants to do is sit in his room and play video games all the time. He doesn't want anything to do with me. In fact, it feels like nobody in my family want anything to do with me. All I have is my television and my knitting needles. I had been working on this blanket for a while. Winter was on its way, so what better time to make something like this. Knitting is something I enjoy doing to waste time until eventually something might enter my life and give it some kind of new meaning. This was a reason why I chose to let him live with me. He seemed like an interesting person to be around from the beginning. I don't know what drove him away from me...

"Baby Talk"

C ommunication is one of the strongest bonds we have as people. We use it to get our feelings across, whether they be disagreements or compliments, or even to complain about our days. But what happens when even the most talkative person won't even mutter a word? At one point in time, if you told me that our baby would grow up just like any normal one would, I would have absolutely believed you. But why is it that now our child has the ability to speak long before any normal kid should be able to? The one painful thing that comes from her being able to talk is that she doesn't really want to stop. It was cute when it first started, she'd make all these silly noises and attempt to make words out of them. Now she has learned speech so well that we're surprised she can't read yet. We wanted to send her off to a school for gifted kids so that she could learn with people nearly as smart as she is. As much as I'd enjoy this idea, however, the wife and I would a...