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by Riley Hall
The little girl watched as her mother drove away, she wrote. She sighed and held the delete key, and watched as it vanished more completely than it could have with smoke and mirrors. She bored her eyes into the screen again, a frown folding her face and her brain screaming in agony.
The mother walked slowly toward her child, a tear sliding down her cheek. She moaned. Two beautiful characters sat contentedly, fully formed in her head, and she could not manipulate them. Her job, her work was to place them in a setting and solve all of their problems. But she couldn't do so. They had no problems, because her beautiful characters were only her and her daughter. Again, she pressed the delete key and watched the cursor devour her words.
The mother was becoming desperate, she typed and then laughed. Oh, the truth of the words. Tomorrow was her deadline. Without a complete, perfectly horrific story by tomorrow morning she would be without a job as well. And without a job she would be without a home. The possibilities began to fly through her head. A picture flashed: she and her daughter were cowering in a cardboard box as rain pelted onto the street around them. Another picture: she was starving, dying. Another: alone, she stood alone in the world, negotiating the worth of her body to a man covered in filth.
She had to stifle a scream. Surely she was exaggerating in her head. Surely it was only the influence of the late night and her stress that poured these visions into her mind. She laughed. Perhaps it would have been, had the visions not haunted her every day for the past year. Plagued as she'd contemplated taking this job. . .contemplated every moment with terror. I can't do it, she would think. I'll never survive. I have to survive, she thought, tears of frustration streaming down her face.
If only, she thought silently, if only she had inspiration. She wanted to die, she wanted to scream. . . but no. That would wake the child. She couldn't wake the child.
The mother told her daughter to go to sleep and wished her not to wake, her fingers had punched out the words before she could hold them back. She gasped and smashed her forefinger into the delete button, the words disappeared from the screen, but they still burned in her head. But why, a tiny voice whispered in her mind, why deny it now? Slowly, she began to nod. There was no denying the truth of her thoughts here, now, in the quiet solitude of the night. She wished her daughter would not wake. Not to sleep forever, but to die. Before the child, she had written stories upon stories. Horrors upon horrors and hatreds upon hatreds, all shining like stars in the night. "Brilliant," the critics had called her. "Terrifying." But now. . . this job was the only one that anyone would offer to her. A monthly story for a tiny magazine read only by it's publishers and the animals whose cages it papered. This. . . this was what her daughter had done to her.
Again, the writer choked back an outburst. She closed her eyes and concentrated on writing. Inspiration, inspiration, the word pounded in her head. All she could think of was her daughter. Her stupid, destroying little daughter. And suddenly, inspiration struck. In the end, the critics had ripped at her because they she was "horrifically unrealistic." Because her descriptions had "deteriorated into cartoon images." They, she let out at a laugh at the memory, had compared her to Elmer Fudd. "The Elmer Fudd of horror" to be exact. For the first time, she saw the hilarity of this, her laughter grew louder until it was echoing in the office around her. Then, with the same suddenness with which her laughter had begun, she broke it off.
Well, she thought, a smile curling on her face, none describe reality better than those who have experienced it. Slowly, she pulled open her desk drawer and slid out the bright, golden letter opener. Light reflected off it and danced around the room. Her smile grew. With steps so careful she felt like a lion creeping toward its prey, she walked out of her office and down the crooked little hall. She stopped in front of her daughter's bedroom. She lay her hand upon the knob and turned, and felt a grim satisfaction that the hinges did not creak: she had been planning this even before she knew it herself.
With a surge of excitement, she ran screaming and laughing toward the small bed. Her daughter sat up, her eyes wide in surprise. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words ever escaped her lips. In one swoop, the writer stabbed the letter opener into the little girl's throat. Her eyes full of delight and anticipation, she watched as blood spewed from the girl's throat. It spiraled onto the sheets like smoke spiraling in the sky. The girl's face paled, her lips changing into a darkened purple hew. And the writer smiled. She walked back to her office and took her seat. She wrote:
The writer stared at her screen, blank and white, as the untouched snow of the morning. . .
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