DARK DAYS IN RAINTOWN
Still in the Land of the Living
2.
Still in the Land of the Living
Two days later it happened. The very thing every writer wants to happen, at least once a year, and more than several times in a lifetime. Take your pick. A new idea walloped me on the side of my head. Like a hard knock in the head from a boxer’s glove. Not just any boxer. Not a gym rat who’s only a boxer inside his head. An in-shape boxer, who has a shot at the title. I had a feeling about this idea. Maybe it was the one. A story for the ages, a story meant to stick in people’s hearts and brains, a story created for the long haul of history. Maybe it was the one.
I’d just come back from the local Safeway. Sweating from the heat on an early August day, and carrying in a bag full of groceries when the idea hit. I set the whole bag in the fridge without even unpacking it and slammed the door shut. I had to put my story on the page before it flew away. Stories are like birds. If you don’t keep them fed and happy, they’ll fly out the window.
After putting on a pot of coffee, I sat in front of my computer and the words, characters, sentences, scenes…characters…people made flesh…flowed out of my fingertips. It was a story about a guy in a dark, dead-end part of town, and he’d come to in a room he didn’t recognize. He had no idea how he’d gotten to the room he’d found himself in. There was a woodland scene on the wallpaper, and the bed was soft. What had hit him on the head had been hard. Maybe a finely wrought lamp with a metal base. The kind they don’t make anymore. A door opened just a crack. Then it opens wider. A woman stepped into the room. With soft green eyes and upturned lips. She rushed to the bed he was sprawled on. Sat down next to him, and her dark hair fell onto his cheek. He opened his mouth to speak, but first, she screamed.
“It’s not possible,” she said. “You’re dead, Joey.”
“I feel pretty rough,” the man said. “But as far as I can tell, I’m still in the land of the living.”
She stood up and backed away from the bed, without watching where she was going. Unsteady on her feet, she tried to catch herself. But her high heels had gotten tangled in a telephone wire. The man leapt up from the bed as the dark-haired woman was about to topple all the way to the floor. He reached around her waist, gripped her shoulder, and swung her to an upright position.
The exertion made him dizzy, and he felt himself falling with her in his arms. The man glanced sideways at the pair of them reflected in the wall mirror. His face was mine. Entwined together, they fell to the floor, with a loud thump. The last thing he heard as they went down, was her whispering into his ear, “Hold me closer, Joey.”
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