Next: Clear Cut
He’d fallen asleep on the camper’s bench seat, propped up by a stack of pillows and cushions. Harry’s binder lay open on the table. A light glowed in his peripheral vision, behind his left shoulder. What time is it? he wondered. The faint beams shaded into black half way into the galley. It was nowhere near dawn.
He’d been dreaming.
He closed the binder and set it aside, slouching forward, his jaw propped in the cup of his right hand. He felt groggy, only partly alive. The dream fragments were dissipating, coloured mist and receding echoes absorbed into the crannies and folds of memory. He had to get something down before the faint impressions vanished entirely.
No lights, he said, feeling his way toward the head, wrestling the door open. Not yet. He found the sink, twisted the faucet, splashed cold water on his face, then dried himself with the hand towel hanging from a rack to his left. It wasn’t so much a sense of urgency that impelled him as obligation. To who? For what? The narcosis of sleep persisted, his thoughts and feelings permeated by a damp, chilling fog.
His laptop reminded him of a clamshell, laying dormant on the far side of the dining nook table. He’d shoved it aside to make room for Harry’s binder, regretting that the crabbed, shaky Mural Gazer script wasn’t clean and crisp like his digital fonts. Shifting the binder and repositioning the computer in front of him, he half expected Botticelli’s Venus to materialize when he opened the lid; grunted instead at the blare of light, which resolved itself into the shape of a rocky island in the middle of an unknown ocean—his screen saver.
S-H-I-T-H-A-P-P-E-N-S, he typed in his password. The opening screen dissolved, replaced by a haphazard shingling of panels for emails, his calendar, news, weather information… One-by-one, he closed the programs that had been idling in his digital background, begging their questions.
Except for Notes.
There was an immediacy to writing in Notes, which Buddy had come to appreciate. Every letter you typed was saved instantly; every sentence you erased, obliterated forever, unless you could reconstruct it from memory—real memory, biological memory, not the mindless iterations of a stupid machine.
Notes was intended for quick sketches and memos to yourself, not manuscripts. Which made it his preferred program for creative writing. The impermanence of its documents freed him from the arthritis of language, making composition fluid as Van Gogh’s art, textured as the starry night swirling beyond the cramped, defining boundaries of the Looner Module.
Beginnings are always hard, he forgave himself.
He hovered over the ‘Create a new note’ icon, stunned. “What’s the title?” he asked… then got up, flicked on the galley light, put the kettle on. Waiting for the water to boil, he flipped back to the opening page of Harry’s binder. MURAL #1 – STEAM DONKEY AT WORK, Harry had inscribed at the top in his cursive script. But that didn’t really say what it was about.
Or did it?
Buddy mulled the title as he poured hot water into the French press. Waiting for the coffee to steep, his dream came back to him: the chuffing steam donkey, the men yelling, the whinny of Charlie the horse, the quaking thunder of the felled log rampaging through the bush…
“It’s not about the steam donkey.” But the steam donkey was the story’s focus—the gravitational field around which it coalesced. What else could you call it?
He pushed down the plunger, poured himself a coffee, and set it down next to his laptop. Where’s the story happening? he pondered. Clear Cut, the title came to him. A perfect title in its imperfect way, he decided. Poised on the dining nook bench like a concert pianist, he set his fingers in motion and began typing his version of Harry’s story.
Next: Clear Cut