Title: Ink
by Jack from Nottinghamshire | in writing, fiction
He moves along steadily, the canorous and graceful movements of the nib across me, slowly sculpting the detail with his words. Delicately. Lovingly. I open on a cliff-top scene, gazing out into the sunset over a bay somewhere in the south; the pen sewing together a vernacular sea with apostrophic gulls and a drop-caps for a setting sun, seams made from adverbs and hemmed in down the margin. A full stop closes the paragraph. Period. For now I am perfect, safe in the simplicity of my being: I describe. Nothing more.
My maker leans back in his rotating leather throne and takes a swig of tea from the ceramic goblet on his right. I feel his eyes on me, studying the loops, curves, the stems and tittles. I can only wonder what he is thinking. The first line seems to meet his approval, amused by his own wit. And he saw that it was good. He continues. His eye seems to snag on something in the third line from the bottom. A speling misstake perhaps? Or maybe too liberal with the ellipses'''.. He stops, thinks, his pen hovers over me for a minute. Something changes in his eyes; the spark of creation is gone, replaced by a cold frustration and dull annoyance. In a sudden and pugnacious surge of bitterness the nib strikes through me like a blade, slicing through letters, words, whole sentences torn apart in his anger. He slices back the other way forming a dark, angry cross over me. I lie there bleeding on the desk. Black blood. He puts me out of my misery and crushes me into a rough little ball that he hurls across the room into a stained, steel waste-paper basket. I feel like screaming out to him. But of course I cannot, I have no words, other than those he has granted me. And so I take the punishment for my sins and lay there in a wailing silence and die between last month's bank statement and the rotting corpse of a banana.
He does not mourn me as he would a child, friend or neighbour. No flowers, no ceremony, no tears. Nothing. I will be remembered only as a haunting embarrassment. There is no requiem for an unfinished story.
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