A-Sides Page 11

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  The autumn breeze, with just a breath of warmth in it, flicked the pages of the story as Anne gave it back to Michael.

  “I like it.”

  Michael beamed. All the pensiveness that had been coiled up inside of him released itself in a smile.

  “You really like it?” He looked at her closely.

  “Really.” She paused for a moment. A bird twittered and she seemed to wake up. “What made you think of such a thing?”

  Michael looked at the ground, his hooded eyes like two inkwells. “We’re graduating at the end of the year.”

  “I know, but….”

  “Sometimes I get scared,” Michael said. “Sometimes I feel like the man in the story. I worry about being able to make it.”

  “Just a story,” she said softly.

  Michael looked at the sky, as if expecting an answer to be written there.

  “You’re right,” he said, still looking up. “Just a story.” He looked at his wristwatch, then smiled at Anne.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  SHC

  By

  Victor Allen

  Copyright © 2014

  All Rights Reserved

  “I remember Bill. Sounds like the title of a stage play, doesn’t it?”

  The reporter pressed the record button of her digital recorder, poised her pen over her tablet, and watched Sheila Tidwell light her cigarette.

  “I guess I knew him better than anyone,” Sheila said. “He was like a little boy in so many ways. I remember the day he got the news that his novel, ‘Three’, had pushed past the million seller mark.

  “He came on with his eyes shining like a ten year old who’d just been given the keys to a chocolate factory, or something. I got the rest of the day off and a pretty nice bonus. But by the end of the next week he seemed to have taken it as a matter of course and was working on a new project.

  “I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, but it was really an autobiography about him and his two closest friends. That’s hard to believe if you’ve read it -and I see by your expression that you must have. Right now you’re saying to yourself, ‘no way, babe. The things in that book are too far out be true.’ Well, think what you will, but I knew him for twenty years. Every word is true.”

  The reporter said nothing as Sheila took a drag from her cigarette. Sheila’s dark eyes never left the winter scene outside the window: cadaverous trees, blinding snow cover, and hard, blue skies.

  “It’s still hard to think about what he must have gone through when he died, even before he died. The pain, I mean. Years spent with all that agony in your head, and then to find him like that and nothing around him even touched. I think I can almost understand that. If I were to make a bad pun I could tell you that people were always burning him up or that he burnt himself out. Isn’t that what artists do? Those things used to be figures of speech, but they’ve turned quite literal in this case. In later years, it took its toll. He drank too much; you could smell the gin coming out of his pores sometimes, and he’d gotten fat. Not a good thing on top of his diabetes and a bad heart. I tried not to let it show when I made up his insulin injections and set out his nitroglycerin tablets, but I could see it in his eyes that he knew I was disappointed, and that seemed to hurt him.

  “You probably think I’m being callously flip about the whole thing, but Bill would have wanted it that way. He never let on to the things that were bothering him, letting those things loose in his writing and never directing them at any one person.

  “I never saw anybody who could take the burdens and troubles of other people on himself and ease their pain like he could. He would have been a wonderful shrink. I mean, look at me, a humble secretary, but he remembered me.” Sheila slowly wiped a tear from her eye. “He made sure I was taken care of.

  “But there is this one thing that only a few besides me know about. Probably what you’re interested in. I’ll tell you as mechanically as I can because it’s the truth, believe it or not. It happened so often that I got used to it and never saw it as anything unnatural.

  “Most nights after he finished his writing or his dealings with the editorial people, he would go into his study and sit in there behind a locked door for half an hour or so. During that half hour, if I was still around, I would feel something come out from behind that locked door. Something floating and spiraling. Power, energy, something I knew was there but just beneath that edge that we can sense as human beings. Creepy. It would spin in the air as if it had eyes, looking for someplace to vent its rage. Yes, rage. That’s what I felt. That rage would pour out of the room along with, a little later, the sound of crying….”