A feeling of overwhelming sadness engulfed Frank.
“All the great stories already have been written,” he
lamented to no one in particular. He
closed the book he had been reading and stood up. “And the best ones have been re-written over
and over with an infinite number of variations.
Romeo and Juliet are transformed into Maria and Tony. Boy meets girl, etcetera, etcetera,” Frank continued
with a heavy sigh.
He headed back to the main road, walking past the
monuments and tombstones. The cemetery
was one of Frank’s favorite places to walk and think.
“Why must the protagonist always start out young and
full of promise?” he mused. Even if they
spring forth old and mean, they soon flashback to young and promising like
Ebenezer Scrooge in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. And old and crotchety is somehow always redeemed
by the final page.”
* * *
He stared at the light forcing its way into his
bedroom around the room darkening shades.
“I may as well get up,” he grumbled. “Another goddam sleepless night in an endless
series of sleepless nights. What did I
ever do to deserve this?”
He picked up the tumbler containing a quarter inch
of tea-stained liquid from his nightstand. He sniffed the residue of melted ice. Even a glassful of whiskey had not been
enough to deliver an hour or two of blissful unconsciousness. He painfully negotiated the stairs down to
the kitchen and placed the glass onto the pile of dirty dishes in the
sink.
* * *
“And he made everyone miserable with his presence,
and then he died, leaving a mountain of bills for his unfortunate heirs. Now why doesn’t anyone write a story like
that?” Frank wondered aloud as he turned onto the main road. It had been days since he’d written anything.
Now
let’s see . . ., how about a story about a writer struggling to find a
story? Now that’s never been done
before. A wry smile
spread across Frank’s face. He began to
walk a little faster as his bladder signaled the two-minute warning. I
shouldn’t have had that cup of tea before going for a walk. He struggled to think of something else,
knowing he still had a good ten minutes of walking before there could be any
relief.
Who
wrote the First Story? Frank pondered. What
would it have been about? Perhaps it
involved The Hunt. He thought of the
ancient paintings in those caves in southern France. Every
picture tells a story, don’t it? The
Rod Stewart song danced around in Frank’s head.
He felt his bladder relax; the urgency lessened.
Are
words even necessary? In the Beginning
was the Word. And what is the Word? Everybody knows the Bird is the Word!
“Noooo!” Frank shouted out loud. He grabbed his head, trying to prevent the
earworm from nesting in his brain.
“Think Biblical,” Frank said to himself. And the
Word was good. It was very good, and it
was fruitful and multiplied. Words
became phrases, phrases became sentences, sentences became paragraphs, and
paragraphs became chapters, short stories, novelettes, novellas and novels, each
with a story to tell. The stories could
be fiction or non-fiction. The stories
might be written in prose or poetry, spoken in plays or sung in musicals,
operettas or operas, containing words employed by the writer to describe some
aspect of the human experience.
His thoughts stopped abruptly when Frank walked up
the steps to his front porch, opened the storm door and inserted the key. A quick twist and push and Frank was inside. The urgency returned and he ran up the stairs
to the bathroom.
