Writer's Block

Greetings all. Here is another scrap of writing that I recently put through the editing process and ended up with a short story. I am enjoying this compression of plot, even if it costs me pages of description. It's easier to stay on task and finish a thought with such condensing afoot. Enjoy!

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Standing at the front door, Myron fidgeted in the waking day’s groggy wakening. Writer’s block, he frowned as the thought danced through his mind as it had danced for the past 48 sleepless hours of his crestfallen life. Myron had been on a writer’s spree up until this point, THE point, actually. He couldn’t close this novel, not on his own as it was no longer his own.

Arnold was a childhood friend by trade, but in Myron’s case, Arnold was his publishing agent. Their relationship soured in the weeks surrounding Myron’s first accomplished publication, which through shrewd tactics and ventriloquism throughout the chain of unknowingly participating companies, found its way into Myron’s damp basement by the crate-load. The novel was a flop, and in turn Myron was a flop, and both of them were forever branded by the publication world as unsavory and dishonest fellows.

If it weren’t for that bastard Arnold, Myron wouldn’t be here right now, toiling over the most irrelevant of minutia. Myron needed to finish his redeeming novel; he needed to make everything right. Myron fidgeted again as the sun peeked through the low hanging trees in front of Arnold’s sleeping home. Turning the knob quietly, he watched as a sliver of golden light expanded on the foyer floor. Myron needed to end this novel. He needed to right his wrongs, and as he tightened his grip on his raised sledgehammer: he knew exactly what changes were in store.

Only Darkness Remained

This was written for an exercise, I took about ten minutes writing and editing this piece and then did some finer/minor tuning when I transferred it to digital. This short short is a self contained tale, I meant it to be something of a commentary on attitudinal difference between my generation and its parent generation as well as some other old world themes. As always, I am open to any commentary or criticism. Enjoy!

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The crowd hissed and swayed, a chorus of ten thousand locusts. They paid for blood, from the lowly, wracked gambler to the naïve infantile, who knows something momentous is occurring and yet can not comprehend its vessel. ‘DEATH,’ they jeered, screeched, and volleyed. The dim arena below, a macabre theater of abject gore, beheld two nameless figures too sorry to have escaped such a fate. One stands bent albeit proud, a gray and withering old man. On the arena floor, drowning in both blood and bile lies the other, a helpless adolescent hardly able to wield the sword issued to him at the start of the duel. The surging masses in the stands mouths frothed with ravenous bloodlust, eager for the axe’s inevitable and terminal descent. The grizzled victor to-be towers over his young challenger. Shaking and haggard, he knows he will not see the New Year’s dawn but reassures himself that his life is worth this one last effort. Anything to ensure his own survival, he reassures himself, as he raises his bloodied and worn axe.

“I am sorry, my son, for I have not the courage to face my own mortality. And so I must perpetuate this season of death so that I, not you, may inherit this defunct world to which I have you brought you in to. One last day, for myself.” And then only darkness remained.