One cold November night Madeline sat at the table facing the blank screen on her laptop. She stared out through the big window at the dirt road as raindrops rippled the street-lit puddles. Most of the sepia leaves on the red oak across the street had fallen. Cars and foot traffic had ground them into cornflake-sized pieces that rain turned into a soggy mash. The few leaves that remained on dripping black twigs hung limp and forlorn. The brass pendulum on the old Regulator wall clock swung back and forth, slow, morose, steady. It had just struck eight o'clock. Zoom slept curled in her wicker basket next to the laptop, dreaming her cat dreams. The lamp on the other side of the laptop cast a golden light in the corner of the room and over the painting of a path that led through a redwood forest. There was a sense of everything closing down, curling inside itself as winter approached.
She sipped chamomile tea from the green mug with Tchaikovsky's black signature, the mug Forrest had given her along with a yellow mug with Mozart's signature on it. His wife was a musicologist, but since she died he was slowly retreating from the soul print she'd left on his life.
Words didn't come easy for Madeline. She'd read in so many places that writing is simply a matter of putting one word down after another. But she knew the process was much more complex than that. Write about your life, the advice went. Write about what's in front of your face. What are the tiny things people do, the little things they say. What could be cozier than sitting at your desk writing? It wasn't as if she wasn't also a reader. Her favorite writers were Celine, O'Brien, O'Connor, Joyce, Dostoevsky, White -- the Irish, the Russians, the French, the English. The first two because they knew and understood suffering so well, the third because of their sensual grasp of absurdity, and the last because there's nothing richer than the English language in capable hands. Most Americans wrote unevenly with mixed results. That's because, she decided, America is still formative, in search of an identity, which it may in fact never find. Although she did have a deep respect for Twain.
She sipped chamomile tea from the green mug with Tchaikovsky's black signature, the mug Forrest had given her along with a yellow mug with Mozart's signature on it. His wife was a musicologist, but since she died he was slowly retreating from the soul print she'd left on his life.
Words didn't come easy for Madeline. She'd read in so many places that writing is simply a matter of putting one word down after another. But she knew the process was much more complex than that. Write about your life, the advice went. Write about what's in front of your face. What are the tiny things people do, the little things they say. What could be cozier than sitting at your desk writing? It wasn't as if she wasn't also a reader. Her favorite writers were Celine, O'Brien, O'Connor, Joyce, Dostoevsky, White -- the Irish, the Russians, the French, the English. The first two because they knew and understood suffering so well, the third because of their sensual grasp of absurdity, and the last because there's nothing richer than the English language in capable hands. Most Americans wrote unevenly with mixed results. That's because, she decided, America is still formative, in search of an identity, which it may in fact never find. Although she did have a deep respect for Twain.
