Elisabeth Jason Romance

Confessions Of An Inkwell Dry

     I cannot say how many days and nights I watched her at her craft, the smoke of her cigarette curling languid and stoic about slightly curved lips, now in a smile, then in a frown as she willed the blank pages to bleed for her with maniacal, stern-eyed patience. She spoke to them, beseeched and threatened, cursing the fingers that refused to fly over the paper as they should have, could have in her dreams, where all things were possible.

     Like a sated cat I sat upon her desk, fat and lazy to her frazzled left, ever eager to offer my reprimanding stare. I am full, I whispered. Why bother if you cannot empty me?

     She would sigh then, in just such a way that I was sure she would sweep all of us, the indifferent tools of her profession, onto the floor and never return to her torture again. But she never did vent on us her frustrations, never made us victims in the battle between her and her faithless, fickle muse…not even when her hands grew arthritic and each word caused her chipped nails to scrape gaping wounds into the parchment did she surrender and sacrifice her best friends and most loyal enemies on the altar of penmanship. Until her final scrawl, she remained with us, confiding with a thin, bitter smile that her life had passed her by in a blur of ink stains and deaths, births and days when it seemed it would rain forever, or never rain again.

     How she cursed the language! Often, I would see her read, absorbed in some volume of epic beauty, and she tried valiantly to keep her tears at bay, humming softly her regrets, her ineptitude, the lament of one driven by inspiration which, like a star of the western city, came perpetually late, the fanfare of failure ever on its heels.

     Filled with passion and blind faith, she took to her writing then, stabbing her pen deeply into my center, and soaked the pages with words that were like gold upon her tongue, precious, but unsatisfying, the empty kisses of a lover who did not love, but drove himself into her womb and filled it with blasphemies and ironies to breed ugly children of cliché. Still, she craved this possession, and when she gazed up into the darkest corners of her room as if to bleed them of wisdom and rage, her eyes sparked wild with sinful prayers for recognition.

     If only she had slain them when she was young, I think, these demons who drove her into the waters of defeat and crucifixion by doubt, the beasts that demanded she attempt the impossible, the spilling of ink into a lucid photograph of her soul, there for all to see and beloved by even the razors who sought only to cut her fragile ego to shreds. Casting herself into a writhing sea of black, I saw her frozen with fear as she beheld her demons upon the chariot of age, unstoppable, merciless, the inevitably harbingers of unwelcome maturity, of having to take her imagination and squash it, shape it, tear it into rectangular pieces of nothing that would fit neatly into coffins, into books.

     Whenever this happened, the stench of rotting magic filled the room like great, black wings come to descend on and devour her childhood. I felt pity for her, sorrow as the creatures mocked her with forgetful nostalgia until she drifted, poignant on the siren song of a scratching quill, to her doom, ever short of a clever phrase or weeping memory.

     She could not help it. They were her bread and air, the words, that honeyed prose on heedless Sunday afternoons and stormy nights, when the winds battered at her windows and stirred her to keep company with the smallest hours, where thoughts became living things vying for the flutter of a tired lash to set them free. How could she have ignored the call, the challenge?

     She is gone now, my mistress, fodder for the decades, but could I move, I should like to topple myself and tell her tale, the story she now tells in death more vibrant than her autumn hair had been in her youth, when first we made our ominous acquaintance. Her dreams lay buried with her shell, tragic heaps of decayed hope and unfulfilled desires.

     They all seek life within the rounded walls of my kin, these stranglings called writers, and they never know the truth, though I know they search for it. Fame before the grave is what they want, to touch but one heart, perhaps, to rouse in their silent observers a response, a shout of outrage, an impassioned moan, a stolid breath of unrequited love, or the spawning of a fateful tryst with the pen.

     They never see me, never recognize my power. Few find honor at the bottom of an ink well, and I do not, cannot loathe myself when I bite my tears into their skin as far as I can and take to their destruction. Some persevere, and those I call worthy opponents. Others…

     It was I. I killed her. Not because I hated her or did not wish for her success. I did it because it is what I was created to do. They call me Ink, and only my most willful children are allowed to bleed black. I am the executioner of ill-told lies.

Copyright Elisabeth Jason, 2006