The End

He lay on the couch with the blanket clutched tightly to his chest. He hadn’t slept in a few nights; he couldn’t sleep in his bed and the couch offered no solace either. A shiver coursed through his body as his lungs tightened. A watery cough rattled its way out of his phlegm filled lungs.

The ferocity of the cough forced him to sit up; the blanket was nothing more than a means to muffle a sound. The beads of sweat on his brow felt like ice freezing to his skin. Between breaths he ran his hands though the gray bristles that covered his head.

Suddenly, and with the same speed the chills had taken him moments before, a wave of panic washed over him.

“This is it,” he muttered, wiping his mouth with the blanket.

His attempts to stand were stifled by the ravages of life that his age brought upon him. Wrinkled old hand searched for the only support he had left in his life, the cold yet contoured silver handle of his cane found it’s self-resting against the couch.

“Come on, we’re not done yet” he wheezed to the cane as he forced himself free from the bonds of gravity.

He staggered to where his laptop had been set up month ago, a thin carapace of dust collected on the closed lid as if sealed away for a lifetime. With a labored breath he collapsed into the chair and lifted open the lid. As the computer sluggishly powered on he smiled at the thought of two obsolete machines working together again. The irony gave him the first smile he could remember having in his decrepit state.

It wasn’t long before he had the word processing program open in front of him and the curser eagerly blinking in front of him. The wheezing in his lungs became rhythmic as his memories of sitting in front of the computer gave him a long lost feeling of home.

He spread his hands wide, pressing his fingers together giving out a few painful snaps and cracks. He set his aged hands to rest on the home row and began to click. The keys were pressed lightly at first with each word landing heavily on the screen.

Words became sentences.

The familiar rhythm, the sensation of creation, his hands quickened their pace. Typos quickly lost relevance as his hands moved.

The sentences became paragraphs.

He could remember the years of his youth spent hunched over these very keys, with the same vigor of those long lost days he reached behind the laptop and pulled the machine onto his lap. The ring of dust left on the table went unnoticed as he continued to click away.

Paragraphs became pages.

He clicked harder, faster, the painful arthritis was slowing be silenced by the screams of his muse. A smile crept past his chapped lips as he continued. The dialogue flowed from his fingertips; each line rang through, no filler, no stumbles.

After the first ten pages his hands burned.

After the first thirty his arms ached.

He pressed on, he pressed on though the night, he was in a zone that exhaustion could not penetrate, that fatigue could not falter.

His coughing persisted until a spray of liquid hit the screen. He wiped his mouth with his hand and picked up typing without missing a word.

Dawn’s shattered light crept across the floor, but the writer gave it no heed. His vision was blurred now, worse than before. But even without seeing the screen he knew each line was coming out perfect.

The cool morning light filled the room as he closed in on his final chapter, his left arm was completely numb now and the faint sounds of clicking was all the evidence he had that he was still writing.

With a final hacking cough he felt his pounding heart seize. His watery lungs were no longer willing to pump; his useless eyes began to close. His body gave a last violent jerk for life, straightening his legs and leaving his arm curled to his chest.

There were no revisions required; he had mulled this work over in his mind for years. His entire career as a writer, his life it’s self, had dwindled down to this point in a lifetime of work in which a writer finished his masterpiece.

In his last moments he set out to accomplish the one thing that he had put off through out its duration of his life. His masterpiece lay there full exposed on the computer screen before him, compete and unabridged.




Exile

Original_exile@hotmail.com