Last Day Deals

As I write blood drips from my lips to the page. I wonder if they will keep the stains in the final print. My blood is important to the tale after all. This blood is old blood, from ten years past. Blood from the day I died.

It was a Thursday in February. The summer had lost its edge but warmed my fingers, curled around the wheel. I was driving home after a long night guarding an empty factory from the possibility of bored teenagers and idiotic criminals. I may have been driving a tad too fast, but who is on the roads at 3am? So as the bitumen sped beneath me, the desolate road spread out in front of me.

Until, all too fast, light crossed my path. In less than an instant, the monstrous muscle car was crushing my mousy hatchback around me; then, nothing.

I was standing in absence, a lack of anything as far as my eyes could see. I am not even sure upon what I stood, or if in fact I existed to be standing. Time meant nothing as I was, so I cannot tell you how long I waited until something appeared. I could simply say it was a little boy and leave it at that. But it wasn’t, behind the frail body and baby blue eyes an intelligence shone, and a malevolence emanated.  His head cocked to one side, a displaced grin on his face. ‘Do you want to live?’ I heard without ears, stranger still he said it without speaking; in a melodic, cheerful voice.

‘Yes!’ I cried, I could not hear myself.

‘Good, I will give you ten years. But you have to play nice’ he almost giggled.

‘What?’ I tried in vain to understand.

‘I’ll trade you ten years for -umm- yourself?’

I felt as if I was in a schoolyard being swindled out of my lunch money.

‘Deal’ I couldn’t help accepting, I didn’t want to die.

‘Deal’ he shot back, his grin growing impossibly wide.

He disappeared in a blink of distorted red light. My body came back in a blink of cracked blue. The lights alternated until I realised I was what I was staring at, police lights through a smashed windscreen.

I did a mental check, nothing hurt. I moved, taking of my seat belt and stepping out of my wreck of a car. There was not a single scratch on me. I was fine.

The six months is a blur, a myriad of confounded specialists, opportunistic journalists and overcompensating friends and family. I told no one of my deal. They would have thought I was crazy. Worse yet, some people might believe me. So I acted the bewildered fool; then went back to work.

It was after a year I started to write. My job allows me a lot of down time. So between duties I scribbled away in note books. In less than a year I was publishing my first book. If I knew what I knew now, I would have burnt them all.

[A short writing task for uni, we wrote a sentence, then passed it on to someone to write the next sentence, ect. Then after we did that 5 times we had to write a draft for a story idea using the idea’s produced. This is what I came out with in an hour.]

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As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

— Orhan Pamuk (My Father’s Suitcase)
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I Remember You - A short story by Jack McEntee

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Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations. The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble. But one conciousnes rules over them all, that of the dreamer; for him there are no secrets, no illogicalities, no scruples, no laws. He niether acquits nor condems, but merely relates;

— Strindberg, preface to ‘A Dream Play’
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