The Fits of an Amateur Writer

Marianne awoke groggily from a vivid dream, the colors slipping through her fingers even as she opened her eyes.

“Good morning,” a voice said idly. “It’s nine-thirty right now and continental breakfast ended an hour ago. I got you some bread and whatnot, but it’s most likely cold. If you’re going to take a shower I’ll just go on a walk.” As he finished, the curtains were flung open, and midmorning light flooded the room.

“God, it’s late,” she sighed. “How long have you been up?”

“A while,” he replied.

“Since what, six?”

“Since three, actually.” As she rubbed her eyes she noticed he was sitting at the desk, browsing on her computer.

“Jesus.”

“That I am.”

“Sure.” She paused. “Can I ask you to leave?”

He jumped to his feet and pulled up his hood. “Be back in half an hour. I’ll knock before entering. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a walk with you afterwards.”

“Fine.”

The sky outside was the impressionable white of a soft bed sheets, indicative of a light shower, maybe some lightning. Marianne slipped out of bed with a feeling that a storm was coming.

The first time she’d seen the enigmatic Antony Smith had been at the local juvenile detention center, a looming, ugly building that had taken an hour’s drive to reach. In a burst of motherly feeling towards misguided children as well as the over-hopefulness of a fresh graduate, she’d decided she wanted to become an author of young adult novels. It came to her in the form of, well, young adults. The cast-asides, the have-nots, the lost and abandoned. And yet, at the gates, she’d almost lost her nerve, her heart hammering as entered to face the receptionist. In the end, she had conducted the interview in a ratty common room area. It had been cramped, awkward, and steeped in unceremonious silence.

The clock read 10:08.

“Shit.” She sighed. “Great.” She opened the door with the intention of stepping outside for fresh air, but found him sprawled on the carpet with a book of crosswords.

“I found them in the trash,” he said over his shoulder, then leapt to his feet. “So are you done? Can I talk to you yet?”

“I’m good,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The outside air was crisp against her cheek, and stirred her heart with nostalgia. It was the winter wind blowing through the draperies of summer that always made her fingers move, like clockwork, on the keyboard. She had the most vivid dreams then, and the best stories.

“Sea foam,” he said. She looked at him and realized he was inside his own mind.

“Antony,” she said.

“That’s a pungent color,” he said, averting his eyes from the green copper statues. “And tea is good for hangovers.”

“Agreed,” Marianne said.

“What?”

“Exactly.”

“I can’t hear you over my personal demons is all.”

“Really…”

“Never liked the whole lot of them.”

“Your conscience?”

“No, pigeons. What are they doing on the fountain anyway?” He kicked a stone across the walk.

“Taking a dump?”

“Guess so. Awfully inconvenient. Especially when I’m being good.”

“You’ve been good before?”

“Maybe, I can’t remember… That’s funny, is the sun changing colors?”

“No?”

“I’m glad you can’t hear them; you would think I’m a lot crazier than you already do. Did you know 19th century asylums were just brutal?”

“Yes, I’ve read a few books about that…”

“The mad hatter didn’t go mad in one day… Do you have the faintest idea what we’re talking about, Marianne?”

“I thought you knew,” she admitted. “I wouldn’t mind an explanation right now.”

He smoothed his bangs and pulled his hood up. “I couldn’t tell you. Were you going to tell me something, or should I start?”

Marianne stopped and observed him, her hands in the pockets of her coat. Her breath escaped in small clouds. “I think you need to go home, Antony.”

He glanced around at her over his shoulder, his posture carefully casual. “Why?”

“I’m not your mom or anything, and you can’t just go on like this. Have you even spoken to your parents since juvie?”

“I haven’t spoken to them ever,” he replied lightly, continuing along the path with his feet lined on a cobblestone tightrope.

“Maybe if you did, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Or maybe I tried and I nearly went crazy; we’re open to options, right?”

She closed her eyes as he drew farther and farther away. “You’ve spoken to me.”

“There’s salvation in a stranger,” he called, walking backwards now. “And peril in a friend.”

“What about family?”

“What about them?”

“They matter, too; what are they?”

“The cruelest of all,” he replied. “Most despicable fiends.”

“You don’t think that’s a bit unfair?”

“You don’t think you’re a bit unfair?”

“What are you - “

“I’m losing it.”

Marianne walked around the edge of the building, through sun-stained trees and streaked park benches. It was so beautiful, it could have been a wedding aisle. It was perfect, in a wrong sort of way.

“Listen.”

“I can’t - I can barely hear you.”

“Just be quiet a moment. Listen to the sounds around you.”

“But - “

“What else have you got?”

“Plenty, if you’d let me use it.”

“Shush.” She breathed in deeply. “Try to calm down a bit.”

“I can’t go home, Marianne,” he said, coming back to her. His hair was disheveled by the breeze and hung over his face unevenly. “There’s nowhere for me to go home to.”

“How can you say that?”

“I think I know better than you.”

She waited in the morning air with filling lungs, but he said nothing more.

“What do you want, then?”

“There’s only one thing I want, and I can’t tell you what it is.” He dipped down to retrieve a fallen maple seed. “But… I can’t go back.”

“Would you tell me why if I asked?”

“I don’t know if I could.”

Marianne watched the brisk flight of a chickadee overhead, and shoved her hands as deep into her pockets as they could go, but her fingers were already numb to begin with. Somehow she had never thought of it this way, but she couldn’t say she was averse to it either.

“Do you really hate the idea so much?”

“I can’t stand it.”

“Fine, then,” she said, and saw his head snap up warily out of the corner of her eye. “You’ll just have to stay with me until you decide to go home.”

“What if I run away again?”

“I found you this time, didn’t I?”

He fiddled with the hem of his jacket. “I suppose.”

“So it’s settled, right?” she asked. “You help me get a goddamn novel published and I’ll take you everywhere without forcing you to do anything?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Anything?”

“Don’t look so hopeful about it. I’m going to keep an eye on you. You are not falling into decrepitude again.”

Visible bristling. “Decrepitude?”

She sighed, and on an impulse, ruffled his hair. “I can’t argue with you; I’d lose. So how about we just stick together until something better presents itself.”

Suspicion clouded his features, but slowly, as he lifted his eyes and peered at her from under his hood, he nodded.

“Yes. I think that’s fine.”

(Source: cacaococoa)

Antony Smith was a dropout, a delinquent, and a disgrace. Anyone who knew him would shake their heads sadly and cluck, “My, that was a lovely boy gone bad.” Within the next few minutes he would be completely gone from their mind, replaced with a sort of self-celebratory, indulgent derision. “Thankfully I don’t have a child like that,” is probably what they thought.

The trouble started when he was a very small child. He had the odd habit of not sleeping at all, but observing the room with utmost fastidiousness, his small body rigid. The doctors said there was nothing wrong.

By age ten, he had read every book in the house twice over and could recite entire pages at a time. He was called precocious and gifted, even genius. However, everyone agreed there was a pervasive disquiet about him, as if he was bound by the limited exploration he was allowed.

By age twelve, he was discovered sneaking his father’s alcohol. There was hardly any missing from the bottle, but he lowered his eyes all the same when asked how long this had continued. His parents decided to keep it a secret, on the condition that he never drink again. He promised.

By age thirteen, it didn’t matter what he had been called in his younger years. He was flunking out of school. Dinner was punctuated with stern admonitions and tearful entreaties, as phone calls flooded in from the truancy officials. Despite the constant family strain, he refused to attend his classes. Investigations of his whereabouts during the school-day resulted in even greater confusion, and eventually the matter was dropped.

By age fourteen, he was well submerged in the second subculture of suburbia. He kept company with the most notorious petty criminals of the city, teaching them ingenious ways of evading the law, and in turn they taught him the trade. Near his fifteenth birthday, he was found out by his parents and severely censured; his punishment was still impending: would it be jail? or no?

On his fifteenth birthday, he threw what few possessions he owned into a duffel bag and left. His parents never found the note he had left for them, as it had been accidentally brushed off the table and under the refrigerator by a careless elbow. Hidden beneath bills and junk mail, it hadn’t even been noticed. The police made an ostensibly half-hearted effort to find him, but shrugged their shoulders and gave him up for another goner addict.

Eight months later, he met a woman, an aspiring writer. “Hey, I could use a genius,” she said.

                                    *** 

Antony Smith awoke in a more comfortable place than he had in a long time. He was deliciously warm under the sweet-smelling covers, and his body didn’t ache quite so much after a night in an actual bed. Yet a deeply cleaved disparity settled in his mind.

At first he couldn’t find any fault with the scene. Then, a vague seasickness grew deep inside, and a dreadful panic. Suddenly, a half-baked and terrifying dream overtook him, and he scrambled blindly for the bathroom.

Spiderwebs of purple and gold danced around the room, spinning a fascinatingly morbid portrait with disembodied eyes gaping at him from every direction. They sprouted thick, white limbs that grasped at him, tugged his hairs like a grotesque marionette. The space between him and the bathroom was in the same instant a light-year long and a centimeter, and he was lost in between, between wild dancing chimeras and copulating snakes. Every step brought spikes through his foot, into his mind. Mealworms made their homes under his skin, burrowing their fleshy bodies into his blood until he thought he would rather tear himself apart than endure the sensation. Every thought was a twisted fantasy, uncontrolled, chaotic. Flotsam and jetsam of memories drifted through the mess, urging him on.

He was sick to his stomach for several minutes; it was only after he rested his head weakly on the toilet bowl for a  moment that he realized tears were streaming down his face. The nightmarish vision was still lingering around the corner, so he washed himself as quietly as he could and tried to think about the coming day. Yet the feeling would not pass.

Flakes of daylight drifted through the crack in the curtains. He watched the nighttime lighten sideways, his head pressed against scratchy carpet. He closed his eyes, allowing the seeping, sweet feeling of shame wash over his weary lids. He craved the bite of the needle once again, and the sea of blissful numbness. At least then he could subdue his mind, and enjoy the soft caresses of Hope and Joy.

His idiotic smart-mouth would never admit it, but he was sorry for every person he had ever encountered. His parents, what few friends he’d had, his “clients,” even his fellow addicts. Mostly, Marianne.

It was the second time she had rescued him from a prolonged self-destruction, although he was not nearly so lucky this time around. The dependence, rather mild before, was beginning to assert itself. He avoided mirrors whenever possible so he wouldn’t have to see the walking shell he had become.

Beaming… incandescence. Torched through irate gates… of fire and brimstone.

The words came reluctantly.

Growing silver impatience, and failed duty.

I’m losing my mind.

As the first stinging rays of sun peeked through, Antony Smith cried by himself in a small hotel in the middle of nowhere, out of pitiful desire and utter, abandoned loss.

(Source: a-nthophobia, via rklara)

Marianne watched him disappear into the bathroom, then opened her laptop, resting her chin on her hand.

Though he’d tried to keep it hidden, she couldn’t help noticing the bags under his eyes, the ugly sores around his mouth. His face had been the ashen white of bygone carcasses, long disintegrated into dust.

“It’s not my fault!”

She sighed. She couldn’t concentrate on her work. She closed her laptop, instead pacing about the room and running a hand through her hair. When she opened the curtains, a wonderland of nighttime city extravagance greeted her. Lights glimmered on all sides, some in the distance and some impossibly close. Artificial stars, there for the taking. Even the drab, creamy textures of the hotel furniture seemed to brighten in the context of such lavishness.

Marianne scrubbed her face with her hands, willing herself to find inspiration in the night.

“I shut my lids and all the world drops dead,” she recited. “I lift my lids and all is born again.” 

“I think I made you up inside my head.”

She turned, one hand still resting on the glass. “Hey. Didn’t hear the door open.”

A slim boy stood in the doorway of the bathroom, shivering in stiff new clothes and dripping hair. His arms crossed involuntarily as he shuffled across the carpet.

“The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, and arbitrary blackness gallops in. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.”

“Antony, come here.”

He flashed her the signature wary, sullen look of teenagers, but complied.

“You needn’t worry,” he said dully. “I wasn’t drinking vodka in the bathroom.”

“I hope not,” Marianne replied. “I’ll skin your sorry hide if you were.”

“Right,” he said. “That’s why you saved me from overdosing in a coven of potheads and alcoholics with not even a rat to give a damn about me.”

Even though she should have been used to his manner of speaking, the bluntness left a bruise. “Here, take off your shirt.”

His eyes darted to hers stonily. “Why?”

“Just do it.”

“It’s freezing in here; if you think I’m going to - “

“What are you trying to hide?”

Slowly, he uncrossed his arms and pulled off his shirt. His eyes downcast and angry, he kept his fists clenched at his sides.

Marianne took one of his fists in her hands, and traced the length of his arm with her eyes. There was a large, discolored bruise in the crook of his arm, and several smaller ones all over his torso.

Without meeting her eye, he turned around. There were angry red spots on his back, some scabbed from scratching, some just beginning to form. More bruises dotted his shoulders close to his neck, as well as long gashes where he had clawed at the sores.

“What’s the matter?” he asked casually. “Never seen a real life druggie before? Would you like an autograph?”

“Don’t joke about it,” Marianne snapped. She shoved his shirt at him and rubbed her temples. “Jesus. You’re seriously fucked up.”

“You don’t say.” He inspected his own ghostly arms, then flopped backwards onto the bed, spreading his fingers on the swirling coverlet. “In all fairness… I do have my reasons.”

“For being fucked up?”

He closed his eyes and suddenly looked so vulnerable that Marianne was sorry for what she said. It was difficult, sometimes, when he spoke with the jaded arrogance of an adult, to remember that he was eight years her junior.

“No,” he said. “For using depressants.”

She sat on the bed next to his and faced him. “Kid, you’re depressed if I ever - “

“That’s not what I mean.” He tapped his head. “Up here.”

“Tony…”

“Don’t call me that.” He folded back the sheets and crawled inside, pulling over his head. “Should be time to sleep, shouldn’t it? Good night, Marianne. Thanks for everything.”

She flicked the light off. “You can’t keep hiding, Antony.”

“Who’s hiding?” he murmured, his eyelids creating sharp purple shadows in the dusky gloom.

Marianne plugged her laptop in and sat between the curtains and the window, tapping out a story. She watched the wide expanse of neon scenery and wrote without inspiration until the ocean of dawn began to swallow the stars.

“Who’s hiding?”

I guess we both are, she thought.

(Source: cacaococoa)

Two smokestacks loomed, silent and disapproving.

Still clothed in funeral attire, his suitcase felt ostentatious at his side, the snowy wisps of smoke too airy for the occasion. He looked up in wonder, just between the sister volcanoes.

He thought of his dead father, his successful brother, his dissipated son. He thought of his loving mother, his jealous wife, his innocent daughter, just two months old. Curiously, he had thought he was living the very definition of happiness. A kind of fretful, worrisome happiness, oftener tired than serene, but secure all the same.

It was the smokestacks that made him doubt.

They made him wonder if, maybe, in an alternate universe, he would have somehow found the green light across the water, if he could have reclaimed what he had lost. He wondered if he would have atoned for his sins when he died, instead of the reformation he had endured in life. Mostly, he wondered if she would have thought of him, had he pursued her even after the war.

Two people separated forever is a sad thing, isn’t it? Across dimensions and galaxies, two individual souls will never meet again. They won’t know it, but they will die alone, longing for each other.

(Source: rklara)

Between pinnacles of incandescence, there lie pools of darkness. Often, in the space of these pools, fantastic monsters begin to form, until they choke out the teeming nothingness that should have been there. And then they clot the imagination with unspeakable terrors, black flecks of desolation, staining and irreversible. It is on one of these nights, in one of these twilight zones, that such an encounter can occur.

Antony Smith was utterly alone.

He had been alone forever, in the flickering safeguard of electric light. It was a precarious balance, he knew, and had the light been snuffed out at the very moment, he would be devoured by personal demons.

The sleepiness was wearing off, the drugged numbness. He was becoming more alert by the second, a sensation that always caused him undue panic. Picking at the pavement, he began tapping his feet to an inaudible symphony. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Some. One. Please. Save. Me. Now.

As his head grew lighter, his vision grew clearer, and he began to feel the cold that had evaded him in the past sixteen hours. It should have been winter, but even in the neglected pockets of downtown suburbia there was no snow. Just an interminable deluge of cold. He was a collector of cold.

His mind rolled over.

Bright nothings with deniable substance.

Who was she?

Hastening of uncluttered footsteps, loose, undeterred.

Definitely.

“Antony Smith,” said a cool voice. Abrasively cool, disgustedly cool.

He didn’t look up. He much rather would have spent a few hours by himself, but the cold was beginning to set in. “You found me.”

“It took a damn long time, too,” the voice said. It belonged to a pair of leather boots, black and polished.

“Good,” he replied.

This seemed to infuriate the boots. “Get up. Come on, get up.”

Even though she couldn’t see his face, he closed his eyes against the boots and the voice, and rested his forehead against his knees. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.” A hand gripped his arm. “My God, are you drunk?”

“No.” Maybe a little. He wished.

“Then get up.” One boot nudged his side gently. “Let’s go.”

“No, n - “

“Antony, you’re not sleeping on the street. I don’t care if you’re a doped-up graffitiing pickpocket. You’re coming with me.”

He pulled his hood down tighter. “Give me a reason.”

“I will forcibly carry you to the car if you do not get up.”

Something between anger and misery began to burn inside. “Marianne, stop.”

She fell silent. Then, she destroyed his last resort, and pulled down his hood. Before he could turn away, her fingers gripped his hair.

“Shit!” Her tone made him wince. “I don’t see you for three months and this is what you do to yourself? What is wrong with you?”

“It’s not my fault!” he cried, yanking her hand out. He covered his face once again, but the dignity was gone.

What were the first words?

Hey, I could use a genius. Want to help?

Want to help?

How had he slipped between the cracks? Between murky sheets in a sea of mire, down to the bottom. How had he fallen so far? He clenched his fists, his head lowered, to keep the bitterness from rising.

There was nothing for so long he thought she had left. Maybe she had given up on him at last. Maybe she had gone with the evening stars. But then, there were the reassuring boots.

“I’m sorry.” The words startled them both, twin tear drops in a soupy sky.

“Please,” she said, softer than she had ever been. “I can get you something to eat. You can sleep on the bigger bed. Whatever.”

“Shotgun,” he said faintly.

“Sure.” There was a trace of a smile. “Anything.” She held out her hand and waited for him to pull himself up, then mussed his hair under his hood.

Redemption comes in the form of guilt and relief, doesn’t it?

Antony Smith felt weightless as a feather. His head was spinning, and details popped at him till he drowned in little things, so many things. His mind was racing at 140 miles per hour, his hands trembling from inside the dirty sleeves.

As they drove away into the night, he leaned his head against the window and listened to her breathing. He thought he heard a quiet sigh, broken and flightless.

“Marianne,” he said. The word was a nice weight in his mouth.

“Yes,” she said. “I thought you were asleep.”

“No, just…” His voice cracked. “Thank you.”

“Any time,” she said, and he knew she meant it.

(Source: tortured-teenage-soul)