a/n: this one's an excerpt from the novel i'm writing! it works together with the next part of this collection.
I'm a writer, she told herself. It repeated again and again in her head, far more quickly than she could ever speak it aloud. I'm a writer.
The screen in front of her was blank, glaring. It was pure white, and pure torture. It didn't move a bit, but somehow caught her up in its sinister stillness, so that she could not move without its help more than it could without hers. Even her eyes were frozen, intent on watching the villain that only gained more power under such meticulous inspection.
Her ears buzzed, the seemingly friendly hum of the computer the only noise to fill them. At first she listened carefully, hoping the machine could tell her something, some secret trick to using it, but then she realized what a fool she was to have not realized the truth: the screen and the computer creating the noise were one in the same.
She wondered what had gone wrong. Years ago, she'd had no difficulty with this type of task. She and the computer, and even the screen, had been friends. She had written terribly, mistakenly, though unbeknownst to herself until long after the deed was done. Those had been awful attempts back then, and she was glad to have been the only one who had seen them. She hadn't written in years as a result. Now she was more than ready to start again with improved understanding of quality and skills.
And yet. She couldn't write a word. She was paralyzed.
Thoughts raced in her head, ideas churned, but none were good enough to risk immortalizing them on paper. When she was a child, that had been the draw of the written word, but now she knew it was just as much a danger of the craft.
Those words, they could live on forever, maybe regardless of whether she wanted them to or not.
Her fingers, which had hovered, incapable of moving, over the keyboard, for nearly the entire moment of paralysis, now started to fall closer to it. It wasn't that they'd regained their ability to move at will, but instead that they keyboard itself seemed to have developed some sort of gravitational pull which immobile hands were unable to resist.
No,she thought. No. I was mistaken, after all. I'm not a wri-
A noise, a clatter, and a blast of music from her brother's room interrupted her thoughts and her struggle and accelerated her hands' approach of the keyboard to a dangerous speed. They crushed the keys, and each other, and words appeared to break the spell the writer and empty page had held over each other. Her eyes blinked shut for a moment, still registering shock, but when they opened the page was no longer an enemy. It was a friend, the friend it had always been, working in tandem with the computer and it's melodic vibrations and the keyboard with its encouraging tug, and this page, this friend, was making an offering:
It was short, it was sweet, and it was born of a moment of fear, of mistake, the random scribbles of hands meant to write but denying their desire to do so, it read:
ash
