Lonely Writer

Howard finished another story. He put the period at the end of the sentence of the revised ending. He would read it through again, but he knew it was as good as it was going to get. He put the leather-bound notebook into his desk drawer. There were more in there. A notebook per story, sometimes half empty, but each story deserved its own notebook. It was the least he could do.

He got back to the letter he had started reading earlier that afternoon, it was from an editor who published one of Howard’s stories a few months ago. The editor was inquiring about any “longer piece of writing, perhaps more of that intricate prose of horror.” In his mind, Howard began formulating a letter that said he had nothing presently.

”What do you mean, nothing?” said the umbrella stand in the corner, “What about those notebooks that fill your desk drawers? What about the ones on the bookshelf, or the floor by the window, or the pile in corner?"

"Not ready,” said the writer.

He did feel a certain fondness for the umbrella stand. The stand was with him when he was a little boy, listening to stories told by his grandfather in the ancient study of their family estate. He took the stand when he moved to a smaller house with his mother, and then again when he moved to the various locations with his wife. (The marriage was short-lived. Much shorter than his relationships with a lot of the furniture he possessed, like the umbrella stand.) He later moved the stand into this small one-room apartment. There were no umbrellas in it anymore.

”Well, some of them are pretty good,” said the stand, “All you need to do is type them up and put them into envelopes. Let them colonize the world."

"Not good enough,” said Howard and put the letter on top of his to-do pile. Presently, he took up an edition of the daily newspaper to look through the job ads. He focused on a particularly dull clerk job.

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk