Magnificence Lies Waiting In The Shadows

The writer had languished for days now as she shivered there, lonesome and unwritten. In that land of a thousand neglected lines and abandoned stories in a cob-webbed corner of his brain.

A shimmering affiliation of molecules and energy, waiting to be assembled — or reassembled — born in that magical first moment he conceived of her, but not yet delivered on to the virgin page.

A character yet to be beamed into a story burning to be told. To shape that story or be shaped by it.

Oh, he could still come up with this pretentious guff, right enough, but nothing worth dragging his piteous ass out of bed and over to his desk to actually write.

And still she waited.

Relying on this torpid lump to shake himself properly awake, and her with him.

Come on, she wordlessly implored, ‘Write me!’

But still he drifted. Hadn’t even the energy to feel sorry for himself … he found that observation amusing, at least.

When was it she had first come to him, exactly? Not even a completed thought, more a flit across the corner of an internal rumination — a flash reminder of someone he might have known, maybe? — just before he snorted off into another doze.

But she was here now … somewhere … and she would be written.

And so she waited, in this dark and wordless limbo.

For he who could take her to splendid places, give her great adventures.

Will I be magnificent?

Magnificent? She did not know … no light or flight of his imagination to reveal the colour, fleck or disposition of her eyes, the toss of her hair … will it be tawny, auburn, or black as this night that surrounded her?

The writer just thought he was just feeling low. No desire or compulsion to create. After all, it had been a hard week of death and random afflictions …

That beautiful young girl in the town … just gone 17 and the most heart scaldingly sad and uplifting funeral … choreographed from a dying teenage bed and soundtracked by songs from a heart yet to be jaded. But full of the unwanted knowing.

Music and songs to capture the melodramatic musings from a soft pink bedroom filled with furry animals, spangled dress-up mirrors and scented imagined love notes, and now drawing sighs and blurred sobs from every generation gathered in this sun-filled triangular amphitheatre of some-time celebration and unfathomable loss.

The burnished congregation all wearing something pink, as she had requested, and moving outside the church afterwards, the women taking the hollowed mum in their arms, and the men shaking the big brave hand of the tall, upstanding dad. All wittering the sweetest of banalities.

And then those two beautiful ball-gowned girls in those newspaper photographs, killed in that ballon-filled car as a special uncle drove them giggling to their debutantes ball, one last daub of a shared mascara and those happy shrieks as they caught a bump on the familiar road …

Or his robust, indefatigable brother. In his hospital bed now, immobilised, the tendons in both quadriceps snapped in a calamitous fall … then the bed sores, blisters, and the clot in the lungs and the two long nights in ICU …

The writer was well used to the odd brood and fallow feeling, when there was no effusion of words to dash out on a computer page.

‘I can save you, collect these random thoughts and take them and you on an adventure. Free your mind for wonderful things‘, the not yet written creature called out silently to him. But he was not listening, yet.

It took his practical wife to diagnose an actual ailment … a cold, or some such, which at least allowed him to be separate from those negative thoughts, and freed his mind to ramble again.

As still she waited. Closer now at least to her release, or unleashing, like those two scamps of dogs he was thinking about just now. Again!

Beautiful, dancing Bella, cranky, dramatic and haughty, and blundering Lily, the same diet, but twice the size of her ever-neat elder, but bursting with unquestioning love.

Yes, those bloody tail-wagging, gormless mutts, again. Diverting his attentions from her. Next thing it will be that damn garden of his, and that tedious birdsong and those prissy flowers. Maybe not, though, with all those dreary dark-clouded skies and the rain. The rain!

But something was stirring in his brain now, beyond fog and dogs and the immediate need for nourishment and libation.

Liberation!

He was stirring now and her reflexive inner voice was quelled. She was ready to begin.

Another sip of fortifying coffee and ambition as he began to type:

“The honking of big Jim Rattigan’s old black Morris Oxford taxi horn roused Molly from this last fitful doze, and the new beginning she had waited so long for was finally about to unfold …”