p. h. madore : “headlong into the wreckage”

I threw my coffee at the white door. Caffeine splattered back to my bed, striking my arm with liquid heat as a cloud of ceramic shards spread before me.

It was something, but I needed everything.

I struck across the bedroom, took my first novel from an otherwise empty bureau. Used my dampened cigarette to set the manuscript blazing. Smoke swirls bellowed victory, and I dropped it to keep from harm. The sprinkler system defeated my creation.

Frustrated, I went to the Common Room and smashed an already-busted television using my strength, gravity, and a battered fire extinguisher. Kicked off my slippers, stripped my pajamas, and dove headlong into the wreckage.

I rolled around, reveled in the pain.

Now I was getting somewhere, but my body became angry and refused to carry on the creative process—forced me to pass out. My blood was dried and useless by the time I awoke, so I showered away my cuts and character-sketched the bruises.

 

The damned postman came around the time the sun reached its apex and gave me my mail: a stack of letters, nine packages. Each box held a crisp copy of my novel, His Way, and a long-winded or implied brown-nosing autograph request. Except one dog-eared and beaten copy—the only one I signed, re-packed, and set in the outbox. The rest I added to the hundred-deep stack which sat atop what was once a dining table but had, since the weight exceeded its ability, become a collapsed failure.

I sat on the floor near the television remains, next to the stack of admiring or hateful or time-robbing letters I had no intention of answering with a fresh pack of cigarettes. When I stood, there were five unread letters and zero cigarettes left. Night had fallen.

I went to the Sacred Room and sat at my typewriter. Distracted immediately, I looked around the purple walls and read the only thing posted, the deed to my property. Took a lonely pebble from the desktop and chucked it in an attempt to puncture the deed. To nullify it, make it interesting.

Instead a newspaper clipping fell from behind the deed and, as a dove, glided over to me. I picked it up and remembered its details like my father's face: how, "when frustrated with the by-laws and insolitude of the grounds," I'd purchased the entire so-called writer's retreat using His Way's cash advance. I crumpled the clipping, tossed it in a corner. Nine words arrived from divinity, or so it seemed. I typed them desperately, fast:

J. Alex Sampson didn't care about the next idiot.

It wasn't much, but I was elated at the revival of my creativity—of fingers cold and uninspired for a simply wrong length of time. In the closet of the Sacred Room, I remembered, there rested a box full of other clippings—expository lies, trash; assumptive, probing, slanderous, superfluous, praising fluff which had no right to be inked yet nevertheless hogged space in my brain, in my home.

 

How illogical.

After hunting successfully for it, I sat this box near my desk and crushed the first clipping, and the next sentence came to me. Then two more.

As the pulp mole-hill in the corner grew, so did my tale. I took a break to revise. Went back to the top, started new. Brewed fresh coffee, drank it from the pot like spring water. And wrote on into the break of day, the dusk, the moonlight. Until my body quit on me yet again, and I was forced to rest.

{ issue zero