Fiction Short Story

The Writer's E-Zine Home

Writers' Village University - F2K: Free Fiction Writing Course - ePress-online
Writers' Village University Membership Information

Fiction Short Story

by Craig Wolf

Swallowing Sparks

One spring morning in 2002, I understood the method of my suicide. Understanding brought knowledge. I could stop it; I knew how to stop it. Would I?

You sit there, reading this, you say, “Well you must have, because I’m reading this first person narrative.”

Don’t be so smug. You think everything is that simple, that clear, that crisp? Frozen and etched out of time like a high res photograph? Then you’re an ass.

The wind was howling outside. No storms, no rain, just fierce Oklahoma wind. It’s what woke me, my eyes blinking in the darkness. I lay there, aware of the glowing alarm clock on the nightstand to one side, the uneven lump of my daughters beside me. The two of them had climbed into bed between my wife and me sometime in the night. Scared of the wind, no doubt. It was the kind of wind that could inspire fear, a probing and insistent thing, the invisible hand of some angry giant, fee fi fo hum, I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your soul out.

I blinked in the dark, and a voice inside of me said, “Right on schedule.”

I froze.

What the hell did that mean?

Nothing. Nothing. Less than nothing. Go back to sleep.

I looked at the clock. 4:24.

Man. No chance of going back to sleep. Sleep and I hadn’t been on good terms lately anyway.

And what did that voice mean?

Right on schedule.

Schedule for what?

And I knew.

I was killing myself. Suicide is not always conscious.

I’d left the law firm the prior January, tired of running the administrative support. Working for lawyers is like singing for dogs. I left behind the world of wearing a tie, of kissing undeserving asses, of worshiping money above all gods, of swallowing pride and sense. I was 35, and I had the uneasy blessings of Virginia, my wife.

She’d said, “You need to do what makes you whole.”

I’d wanted to write science fiction stories since I was a kid. But the world doesn’t owe you your dreams, and there are a million tiny debts to pay. I knew I couldn’t make it just banging out stories. Writers starve. Believe that. We live in an age of overpaid athletes and televised banalities, a world shallow and wide and as inconsequential as worm farts. You think that’s a gross and stupid metaphor, don’t you? I stand by it. Turn on the television. Do you ever see anything of value? I don’t. I see nothing that shoots sparks, that displays the solid evidence of steel hitting rock.

But I needed something to replace my salary at the law firm. I didn’t make very much there (lawyers are a cheap bunch with everyone but themselves) but still my wife’s salary wouldn’t carry us. For a time, I’d been selling used CDs on eBay, earning a little extra cash from my hobby. I thought I could ramp that up, write some and work my way up to writing full time.

Right.

By the middle of May, we faced bankruptcy.

I don’t owe you the details.

I was paralyzed. A 35-year-old man with an uneven work history, a failed small business, with pride torn and scattered in shreds. With two daughters and a wife taking more crap than she deserved. Did you know that failure has a taste? It tastes of old, sour bread, and of wine left to go flat.

And I wasn’t writing. That was my suicide weapon. I wasn’t writing.

But the voice, that morning, wasn’t mine.

Shake your head if you must, but it’s the truth. And it scared the hell out of me. I climbed out of bed, threw on my robe, made for the coffeemaker. The pale, bone white light from a streetlight shone into our kitchen, and I made coffee there in the dark, my heart pounding.

“Okay,” I whispered, “Who was that?”

I was a mediocre Lutheran. My first thought was that I’d heard an angel. Never heard one before, but why not?

It sure wasn’t my muse. That sucker’d been quiet for a while.

Not true. It was a lie that morning, and it’s a lie now. The truth is my muse had been yammering away, firing sparks at me, and instead of fanning them into the flames of stories, I’d swallowed them whole, letting them burn tracks down to my gut. The stories I couldn’t bring myself to write smoldered in my belly. Killing me.

If I didn’t write, I’d die.

And I stepped into the kitchen.

It was me, not now, but somewhere down some ragged road, gaunt and older and abused. But me. Definitely me. I’d know myself anywhere. I leaned back against the counter, scared half to death. Was this some sort of pressure and despair induced hallucination? Had the sour failure of the last months pushed me to the brink of psychosis?

The wasted, blasted shell of me walked across the dark kitchen until he stood inches from me. I could smell him. He reeked of smashed dandelions and hot dust. Of machine oil stressed to the smoking point. This close, I looked into his eyes, and my bowels clenched. Those eyes, those empty, fatal eyes.

“Right on schedule,” that version of me said, and smiled. You don’t want to see a smile like that. Take my word.

I whispered denial. Lying to myself. Hah. In every sense of the phrase.

“Keep it up. You’re on the right road. You’ll be here in just a couple of years. And then we’ll both be free.”

He finished with a sigh, a sigh that sounded like the hiss of a gas jet and smelled like car exhaust.

“Free?”

“Free. Free at last, God almighty, free at last.” That grin again.

“I’m dreaming. This is a dream.” But the coffeemaker gurgled behind me, and something inside me, my own voice, long smothered, said, “Stop lying.”

“Sure,” said the other me, “That’s right. A dream. I’m dreaming, too, and I’m a dream having you. You keep thinking that.”

The truth doesn’t set you free, you know. That’s the big lie. Only courage does that. But the truth shows courage where to fight.

“Three years,” smiled that me that was yet to come, “You’ll keep saying this was a dream, and you’ll deny, and you’ll keep swallowing those sparks, and you won’t be living. And that’ll take you to me, that’ll bring you here, and then we can go. It won’t be this garage. Not this house. And Ginny and the girls won’t be around anymore to find us. We’ll take a weird comfort in that.”

Sometimes I think that all that has happened and all that will happen is going on simultaneously, that the future and the past are illusions that we teach ourselves. We’re good at that sort of thing, you know. Sometimes I think that we stand surrounded by all the history of the universe. Yet it’s still flexible. I think God allows us that.

“No,” I said, “You’re wrong. Not like that. It won’t happen. I’m sure of it.”

That possible version of me cocked his head in the way that I do, and he said, “Maybe. Maybe you won’t use the hose on the Volkswagen. But I’m there, and I’ll be there waiting for you.”

He held out a key. I hesitated, then took it.

And he was gone.

I looked at the key. It was a key for a Volkswagen. We didn’t own one. Virginia liked them, and wanted one, but we had never bought one.

In the glow from the streetlight, I looked at that key. I closed my fist around it, left the coffeemaker, and turned on the computer. It scared me. The blank glow of the empty page scared me. But I scared myself worse, and the time for swallowing sparks was done.

I wrote.

With that damned key lying on the desk beside the PC, I wrote.

I write.

And we still don’t own a damned Volkswagen.

Copyright © 2004 Craig Wolf

About the Author:
Craig Wolf has seen his work published in TRANSVERSIONS, Deadbolt Magazine, Flashshot, and AlienSkin, among others. His first collection of short fiction, PRESSURE POINTS, has just been released by Fine Tooth Press. He lives in Oklahoma with his wife and daughter and a small army of cats.