by Wendy Greenhalgh
*
I make myself gratuitous cups of tea. My editor calls asking about the pages,
“Yes, yes,” I say, “I’ll have them with you by the end of the month.”
But I know I won’t and already her voice has a strange quality to it, tinny and far away and I find my gaze being drawn back to the screen on my laptop, to the skittering of letters on it, and I’m sure some of them are missing.
*
I get up and go to the kettle to pour it into my mug, but when I get back words are missing. On the phone my friendly Mac Man Dan, says it’s probably just a glitch. I update my Facebook status - thinks their new story is occupying another dimension that swallows up words … word count seems to be getting less each day! It’s a joke, ha ha. Except I can’t get over the feeling that it isn’t, it really isn
Sentences don’t end where I left them. I rub my eyes with icy fingers. It’s so cold in my flat that I don’t sleep well, my gas fire casts out a thin haze of heat that scorches in proximity and barely takes the edge off in the corners.
*
It keeps on happening, dozen times. Flat gets colder. This morning my Mac made no sound as it powered up. This has never happ
happened before. I think I’ll go out, work in a coffee shop, or in the library, but when I try laptop off I can’t, it remains on, the cursor blinking at the end of the sentence, even when I disconnect the power cable and remove the battery. Mac Man Dan is mystified, he says I should bring it in, but
*
missing. Sentences
*
I order my shopping online because I cannot leave my flat I am prevented from leaving the room. Something is drawing me back. Lose at least nearly a whole chapter. Gone. There is ice on my windows, flat sheets that crackle when I touch them, even though the sun is shining outside. Dead quiet.
*
The silence is moving. There is a shallow haze along the edge of my bookshelves, a grey miasma of nothingness over words and words and words. It is consuming them. The walls are a little closer, they are being drawn in too. less words every day. There is the smell of staleness in the air, and strange currents tug and pull at me when I try to move between and the door. I begin weighing my papers down with my glasses, pebbles, mugs of tea, because if I don’t I swear they move. They move towards my desk, towards the
*
I have begun sleeping on the sofa. I cannot leave pulled back. The phone rings but I can’t tear myself away from the screen, looking at it is like leaning over a precipice
*
Broadband down. I try, I try to reach the phone. Mobile battery d
*
I lift the desk lamp in my hand, I bring it down on the screen hard. When I come too, lying on the floor by my chair, the lamp is gone. I lose a knife, a paperweight, my shoes and
*
less every day. thousands of them. A dark flurry gone. Nounsadjectivesverbsadverbsprepositionsgerundsmodals winking out.
*
When I try to reach the bookshelves, to put my hands on words, give me a story, give story, I cannot reach
dragged back towards the screen, sucked as volumelessly as water.
less words every day. I write, but at the end
there are less than when I started dark patina of silence laid over. When
collapses it creates a mass so dense it distorts time and space.
*
Whole sections of my manuscript are
missing, sentences end
where before there was narrative.
*
I call for help, but the words are gone even before they leave my mouth, snatched from my tongue.
*
I sleep wrapped up in the duvet beside my desk. The books on my shelves shift in the night, I can feel them juddering against the wood, pulled out against their will, against mine,
they fly across the room and skid against the floor, sliding closer
and closer to my desk,
inching their
way
dustily
towards me.
*
I cannot reach the fridge. I keep on writing, words that blink out almost as soon as I pause to read them. The only thing is to keep on typing. Quickly. Not checking my words. Then I can complete a sentence.
*
Doze off at the desk and wake to find all my books all my papers gone, anything with words on, even the takeaway menus in the desk drawer. Nothing left now except the words in my head.
So tired.
Cannot sleep, must keep writing, keep writing,
feed it, feed
the hole,
hold it off hold it off, stop it happeni
*
Can’t stop it
*
I feel the letters being sucked from me one by one as I press the keys. Can manage only simple sentences.
*
There is a tremor around the edges as if the wall cannot hold much longer.
A sullen, insidious vibration beneath my fingertips.
My mouse flashes on and off without warning.
It is a warning.
*
I lick
the condensation from the window,
ice is cold and slippery against
my thirsty tongue.
*
I write
I write write words
on the screen.
they are
I am
Tags: fiction, Wendy Greenhalgh