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This is a little piece I wrote as a challenge for the discord writing group I am in called We Write at Dawn. This is a simi-poeatic flash fiction that made me stay up to write this at three in the morning and crying my eyes out. I wrote this last year and didn’t think it was worth sharing, but this little story has stayed, not only on my mind, but on the minds of my husband and one of my favorite critique partners and early readers. So maybe this little piece is worth sharing after all.

Words fall from my ever shifting mind pattering against my soul. Drenching me in the need to collect them all, lest they are dashed against the ground and evaporate into non-being.

Please, God, just leave me alone. Why can’t I make it one day with no need to leak my heart onto a page? Or worse? The soul wrenching pain of drought—the desert of an author’s Hell.

These words fall like liquid from the sky, rain drops I have to catch—I can’t let them fall—with my fingers, or in buckets, with bowls, or even forks. I have to keep them. I have to save them from the void that is the floor where they get lost in the dirt and the grime. To splash on the faded and threadbare rug. To be lost to time. A minute or two till two.

I need to catch them all. Like some kind of Pokémon. Hoarded with the cardboard boxes full of mites and musty memories.

I can’t sleep. I can only catch the drops as they continue to fall past me. Don’t let them fall. I need them. Need them all. The right words will be in the next bucket, I’m sure.

“Fox?” My wife, Natalya, she used to love my words. She married me because I could smith a sentence out of spare parts and sentence fragments. I could weave them together in a beautiful quilt that kept her warm and safe. They had sound. They had rhythm. They had grace. And now… Now they are only rain relentlessly battering my wordless soul, empty and spent. I’m weary. And she kept talking to me, throwing out words like cheap whiskey. “Fox, you haven’t slept in five days. Please…” I felt warm fingers slide over mine as I pulled back. No. I needed my hands. I need my buckets. I need to catch the falling words.

Doesn’t she understand if I can only catch the words the right words everything would be better and she’ll love me again

Patta pat, pat pat.

“Fox, please, it’s almost two. Come with me.” Her voice swam out of the depths to caress my ears. She was out of sight now. Did she move, or did I?

It was almost two, she said. 

Two.

What a to-do to die today, at a minute or two to two;

A thing distinctly hard to say, but harder still to do.

For they’ll beat a tattoo, at twenty to two,

A rat-tat-tat- tat-tat-tat- tat-tat-tattoo.

And a dragon will come when he hears the drum,

At a minute or two to two today, at a minute or two to two.

I grasped at the air, vexed in frustration. Those weren’t my words, but I eagerly scooped them up and put them into my bucket. That was a lot of words. I can use them. Like the monkey accidentally writing Shakespear. I just got to smash enough of them together.

Natalya’s honey and pepper colored bun with her kind blue eyes broke through a haze before me again—like the sun peaking through the layers of heavy gray clouds pregnant with weather—and I smiled at her then, my wife of fifty years. I gently brushed the word leaking down her soft cheek with my thick, calloused fingers and I told her, “when I collect them all, you’ll see. We’ll be young again. You’ll be happy. I can make it better.”

She nodded and smiled. Ooooh. I love her smile. She guided me to a chair and asked me to sit. She looked tired as some other lady handed her a clipboard and pointed to some words on the pages. Words? That redheaded hussy has my words!

I stood, reaching forward, but Natalya pulled away. Back, from me? Stingily keeping me from my words? Betrayed. I roared, “GIVE ME MY WORDS.” Then, in a whisper, “I thought you understood.”

She took a deep breath as I felt a pair of strong and firm hands grip my shoulders and gently urge me back into the chair. I looked around. High-definition images assaulted my eyes like I hadn’t seen clearly in days; The pewter-blue scrubs the redhead with the clipboard and the two men behind me grasping my shoulders were wearing and the sign behind the desk that read “Brookdale Senior Center” in large blue and friendly font. I saw it all at once. It was so much information surging like a tsunami into my overly-tired brain.

I looked back at my wife. My Natalya. Her face looked ashen. Dark bags hung beneath her deep blue eyes. I failed her. I didn’t find all the words fast enough. Maybe I let one fall and splash on the ground! Was she signing herself into a nursing home because I failed her? Out of sixteen published books, I never found the right words for her. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t find the words.”

“Oh Fox. I only ever needed three words from you.” She nods solemnly to the men behind me, and I was shocked to find that it was my chair that rolled along with them through a set of double doors. “I love you,” she called after me. “I’ll bring you your words.”