The Author

by Hillary DePiano

apple, he did not think about how it tasted or how red it was or anything cliché like that. He instead tried mentally to describe the sound it would make if you threw it at the president’s head or how silly it would be if one were to get stuck on your soccer cleats. He had been an engineer until this semester when the registrar switched his schedule with poor Sally Lou Oogenhagen, a freshman who had intended to major in creative writing. Instead of complaining of the error, he decided to run with it and took his new mission very seriously. (There are rumors that Miss Oogenhagen transferred after some unfortunate mishap involving a shower, a St. Patrick’s Day cake, an inappropriately timed fire alarm, and a goat named Melvin.)

  Soon, Bill did nothing but write. For him it was a passion and a status symbol. Day in and day out he created characters like Timmy (a dyslexic with six toes on his left foot who can only eat soy beans), Krista (a pineapple saleswoman who came ashore just off the coast of Peru to find that Wednesday now began with a “W“ and apparently had all along), and Eduardo (a bumblebee who spoke entirely in questions). He felt that he wrote them so well, that to him these characters were as real as he was himself, and for that reason, he had always been very careful how he treated them. It wasn’t until Greg‘s comment that he began to see the real problem.

  Bill always tried to write happy stories, but last week, his professor had required that he write something sobering for a change. So to prove his versatility, he began to write and before he knew it, poor little Lizzy Carpenloo, a shy and quiet orphan from the big house on the hill, had been devoured by wolves. The moment he typed the words up onto the screen, a short and shrill gasp of fright escaped his mouth and tears began to form in the corner of his eyes. He ran from the computer and sat, huddled and sobbing, in the far corner of his room. An hour later, he re-approached the computer and tried to delete the words. But it didn’t matter. He had killed her and she would always be dead, even if he re-wrote the ending. He pictured this little zombie girl completing the rest of the narrative and decided to leave her death as it was. But he wrote in a large and elaborate funeral for her and made sure to have several characters talk about how certain it was that she would go to heaven, assuring her future.

  But Greg‘s comment had made him see the bigger picture. Lizzy’s future was at least laid out. But what about all the others? Oh, sure it was implied that Timmy and Zach would live happily ever after, but he’d never really specified.

  What about Krista, whose story ended as she was taking a big bite of mango pie? Was she still there in suspended animation, jaw open wide, the pie almost touching her tongue, waiting for more words to appear on the page to dictate her next action? Would anyone answer Edwardo’s final query of “Where’d all the honey go?” He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t give them life and then abandon them. So he began the LJFOSA.

  It stood for Literary Journal for Fending Off Suspended Animation and it was his own little charity project. Bill would write in it everyday. He wrote this big house, moved all of his characters into it together, and he would chronicle their activities twice a day, just to make sure that they were not floating around in literary limbo. He did this mostly for his older characters, for in his more recent stories he had learned how to leave the endings open-ended enough that the characters would be able to make a living off of the details afforded them. This brilliance on his part began to give him confidence and he began to consider himself the greatest writer that ever lived.

  He knew that the LJFOSA was the right thing to do, but to be quite frank, things were beginning to get out of hand. Broomhalt, the Viking warrior, kept drinking milk straight out of the carton and Detective Lampo kept “investigating” what was under all of the lady’s skirts. Zeke, the kid from Tarantulas Taste Better With Salt had now hit the terrible twos and Kezwart, the magical cat, kept spinning all of the thread in the house into HTML, so that they all had great webpages but no clothes.

  This was the source of Bill‘s problem in writing his newest story. This one had a page limit of 10 pages and his narrative needed exactly that to play out. There was no room to give the friend ample page time to assure that he would be all right. And he truly could not afford to have another character move into the LJFOSA. He tried to justify to himself that if he just mentioned the friend’s name again in a later section that would be enough to imply to the audience that his life continued. But it was really getting to be too much, trying to keep track of all these characters.

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  Bill lay awake that night, burdened by the responsibility of so many lives, when he decided that the only way to get to sleep would be to clear his mind. He hadn’t realized how busy his mind had always been until he tried to clear it. So for the first time in his life he didn’t think about building bridges or fluids. He didn’t even think about his next story or what was going to happen tomorrow in the LJFOSA. He didn’t even wonder how an image of him sleeping would look as a book jacket. He just let his mind be blissfully blank. So, Bill lay in bed and slowly closed his eyes. Maybe it was because he too was a writer but within seconds he sat bolt upright in bed with his eyes wide open and a cold terror all over his body.

  “Who’s there?” he called. He jumped out of bed and turned on the light. But there was no one in the room, not a single living creature to explain why he suddenly felt like he was being watched. He swallowed deeply for a moment and desperately tried to figure out why he felt eyes panning from his blue-socked feet up his blue and purple striped cow-printed pajama legs to his ashen and paranoid face. It wasn’t a ghost. There was something real behind it. He could feel something real. Something that felt more real than he himself was.

  Bill nervously ran his fingers though his hair, the leftover gel and bed-head combination making it look wild and frantic. His eyes were wide and darted from side to side and suddenly he closed them, feeling as though the unseen force was looking him right in the eyes. He stood with his eyes tightly squeezed shut shivering both with fear and the cold draft from the open window in his room. His breath was quick and short, and that, coupled with his eyes, made him look like a woman in a Lamaze class.

  Suddenly self-conscious of how ridiculous he looked standing like that, he opened his eyes and began to pace. But there was no escaping the feeling. It followed his every step. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Perhaps because he was always wrapped up in the stories of his life. He was getting very cold from the open window but was afraid go over and shut it for fear of what he would find outside. So, I shut it for him. And he totally freaked out.

  He began by hitting the ground in a quick and comical faint, as if someone had given him the sort of punch that spins Charlie Chaplin around and makes him fall lifeless to the floor. He was only out for a moment and, when he came to, he opened his eyes, smacked his lips with post-sleep satisfaction and then opened his eyes wider and began screaming multiple short feminine yelps in a continuous and decidedly steady pattern as he scrambled to his feet. As he emitted this arrangement of cries, he turned his head and body both frantically and both in opposite directions, directing at least two screams to each object or wall in the room before repeating the pattern. He then dove for a corner of the room and assumed the fetal position and began a terrified wail of sobs. After a moment of this, however, he turned to the wall behind him and, as if seeing it for the first scary time, began to scream a long siren at it, scooting away from it on his butt. He backed himself up all the way to the next wall and repeated the pattern multiple times until, luckily, he rammed his head on the frame of the bed and was out cold.

  Story. He found himself still under the bed with a headache, a sore throat and a lot of questions. He slowly helped himself up and looked over at the LJFOSA. He picked it up and fingered it gently at first and then suddenly clutched it to himself like a kindred spirit. He was disappointed at first, betrayed even. How ironic. He was one of them all along.

  “I felt so real.”

  I’m that good.

  “B
ut if I’m just a...” Bill still couldn’t bring himself to say the word. “ . . . then how could I have written. . . them.” He gestured towards the LJFOSA. “In the name of the almighty Twain! So, then you wrote them. And me. You wrote a person who writes people? Was I writing my own story? Have I become my own character? LAYING THE LAYERS ON A LITTLE THICK, AREN’T WE?!?” Bill had started to cry in spite of himself. I felt a little bad.

  Sorry but the layers have to end somewhere. Didn’t you read the title? I gave you that huge hint. Hey! In the great scheme of things, you made out better than poor Libby, Julianne, or Leslie. I didn’t even bother to explain the project to them. At least now you know that it really is a question of authorship. And if it makes you feel any better, you’ll be much closer than Eugene . . .

  I let him interrupt me because I really didn’t know where I was going with that last part anyway.

  “Julianne? Leslie? Libby? Eugene? Who are they? Wait a minute! This extends beyond me? How many other lives have you created just to fuck with!” And so, the sound of Bill's scream echoed into the night. It was the beginning of a new time for him,