You know, I haven't posted in a while. I haven't written in a while. I recently started a deal with Stephen that if he works on game development and I work on writing, we must share with each other every Friday. This encourages us to keep a deadline and put a fire to our feet! Hopefully this will work! For now, I am posting an old story that I still feel has lots of potential to get bigger. What do you think?

Thanks for any advice/suggestions.


It is a big lengthy...




Intervention
By: Anna R. Fay

I came to my computer and sat down within the plush leather chair before the old hand-me-down desk. I scanned quickly over the cluttered counter and counted the Coke cans. I attempted alliteration about all the awkward objects in array. They were clever consonants and counts to poetic construction. I fell and failed famously… I decided to grab a pen and a Post It Note to scrawl my artistic ideas. Perhaps a haiku could break this atrocious block in my path.

College life sucks hard.
Individual failings.
This haiku sucks too.

Okay, so perhaps that wasn’t the best option either. I scratched out the haiku and attempted it again. A new motivation!

Squares keep me held back.
Creative expression, gone.
I want a cookie.

So the haiku bit wasn’t working for me. I scrapped the idea all together. Furtively I tossed the Post it Notes in the garbage and turned to glare at the darkened computer screen. This was my own personal hell I had designed. All the creative juice a writer could ask for and I was wasting it before a computer I was too lazy to turn on.

I glanced around the small cube like room and begged for something to catch my interest. The remote control to the television was a full three feet away from my current position. Television was instantly scratched off my mental list. Playstation might be an option, but alas! It too was a full five steps from my chair. Entertainment by blowing buildings up vanished. I looked longingly at a book I should have started reading weeks ago but had left to rot in a drawer. Should I dare be an overachiever now? Poof! That was eliminated. I turned to the only object left within my reach. The computer. I pressed the button…

The mechanics of the computer within crackled and groaned to life. I heard Poe, my computer, grumble at me in machinery language. “Do something else… Please, I am begging for a break.” It was true. I stayed on my computer more than any college student should. I spent my life wasting away on flash game sites and playing Free Cell until my mind was numbed by red and black symbols and numbers. Windows seethed at me in a flickering fashion, glaring as procrastination was setting in. I looked away.

The background exploded in my face and I stared at the colorful background. It was a façade for some semblance of normality or happiness. Oh beautiful fall! It’s a time of peace and pumpkin pie! It’s not a time of locking yourself away in the library, pulling your hair out over seven papers, three projects ten books and a million power point slides. Of course not! It’s a season of joy and cuddling, not contemplating if you can survive the semester.

I clicked on Microsoft Word in prayer that something would spark me. Nearly ten minutes I sat there, fumbling with the idea of pulling up Free Cell to “generate ideas”. I knew that if I clicked that King avatar I would play the game for two hours with no advancement on the Word page except “the”. What was a good exercise to try? I had heard of one.

“Have a conversation with your creative conscious,” the site had said. How the hell was I supposed to do that? How the hell was I supposed to talk to myself without sounding schizophrenic? Without my even wanting to the scene began to form before me.

My creative conscious would stroll in the room with a pair of ripped dungarees and a stained t-shirt. She’d probably be smoking a cigarette to spite my asthmatic state and even possibly chugging a beer. God forbid she have a Greenday shirt on, I’d have to kill us both. Her hair would be in disarray, poking from a low kept ponytail and her face would be covered in pimples and scars. Scars from where she pushed too hard at them in an effort to keep her appearance.

I’d be in my chair glancing nervously at the clock every few seconds, waiting for her to show up. When she finally arrived I’d tuck a strand of hair neatly from my face and glare at her.

“Where have you been?” I’d pipe in first, my voice a little higher than I would have liked.
“Seeing the world while you crash and burn in your damn room,” she sounded like a woman on more drugs that a pharmacy had to offer. I had really let her go to waste.
“I have been here, waiting for you. Why haven’t you come?”
“Bitch, I was out having some world class fun. No way was I going to sit here and rot with you.”
“I am not rotting.”
“You’re a nervous wreck. You haven’t used me in weeks.”
“Days.”
“Weeks.”
“Maybe months,” I sighed at her in resolve and looked her over again. She had gone to shit. There was something poking out of that shirt, something I hadn’t noticed before.

“Is that a beer belly?” I squealed and jumped from my chair, startled by the absolutely piss poor shape my creative conscious had gotten too.
“Yeah, and stop referring to me as ‘creative conscious’. That’s way too mature for your lame ass. Call me… CiCi.”

I blinked at her; once, twice and a third time before I finally replied, “CiCi? Alright, fine.” I had no urge to argue with her over a nickname. “Where have you been?”

She flopped down in one of the chairs, sitting like a jock with an itch problem. The beer arm laced over the back of the chair and the cigarette would go to her lips. I could feel my lungs blackening already. “You can’t smoke here,” I muttered in refute. CiCi let out a cackle of laughter and shook her head. She tossed the beer left and right and finally took a long hard swig. I could taste it on my tongue. It was that mundane flavoring of watered down piss.

“Jesus that’s foul.”
“Yeah, like you would know,” she scoffed at my lack of partying and alcohol interest.”Besides, I’m not real. Smoke alarms don’t detect the imagination, Anna.”
“Touché,” was all I could think to spit at her under my breath.
“I have been hitting the road, touring the campus. Oh, yeah I’ve been with you but always a few steps behind. You know that tree you liked so much the other day? Yeah, I saw it too. Made a few lines about it, scribbled them down and then burnt them. ‘They weren’t any good.’”

Her voice was mocking of my words spoken not a day or so ago. My eyes widened and I shook my head. “You did what? What were they? Why would you do that?” I screeched at CiCi and she smirked. “Give me that Post It Note.” She nodded to the stack of yellow. I grabbed it and handed it and a pen over to her. I felt the pen scratch across the paper as she scrawled in familiar hand writing. The lines were passed to me and I read them carefully four times over:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
That is true.
But what admiration for this tree is due?
It’s older.
It’s tall and it’s nearly bare of leaves and life.
There’s color.
Red and green mix to make astonishing gold.
It’s a war.
The wind blows remaining cadets into dust.
It is still.
No more cadets, no more colors, only claws.

The lines possessed a beauty I had only glanced over. These… These were my words that I had been too selfish to put down. Here CiCi had taken the time to slap them on a tarnished yellow Post It Note to rub it in my face. My eyes welled with tears and I quickly blinked them away.

“That’s beautiful. Why would you destroy that?” My voice sounded hopeless.
“It wasn’t for an assignment.” She eyed me with wise chestnut brown hues and looked over the wire glasses that I knew so well. It seemed that the poor rendition of trailer park brilliance was correct.

“You pass off all writings unless it’s for class. If it’s not for a grade or if it’s not an assignment you abandon it and put it off to the last minute. But-“
“The last minute never comes.”

“Bingo,” she made a fake gun with her cigarette fingers and took a long hit from the roll. The smoke filled my lungs again and I looked down at the Post It Note. She was right; I had been letting myself go. Here I had to have a conversation with my creative- with CiCi when I could have written all those things before.
“I’m sorry,” was all I could choke out to her.

She smirked and downed the rest of the beer. She straight shot it to the garbage and took the cigarette to the sink and doused it in water that was left in a milk glass.

“Let’s have an intervention,” was what she said to me. The strangest words I had ever heard but the most useful. She crossed the room and sat down in the chair next to mine. My fingers began to work.