The Author (1)

I began this recently as a short story, inspired by a Stephen King short story I read a day or two ago. I'm thinking now that it'll be longer than a short story because I have so many ideas, but ideas are always expendable, plus I could always make some of the less-connected-in-my-mind ideas into another story, or possibly a sequel to this one. This chapter is a bit shorter than I'd like it to be, hopefully sequential installments will be longer. So, anyways, I hope you enjoy it.

It began like any other day for Barry Patterson.

He woke up and tumbled, quite ungracefully, out of his bed. He had a bad hangover as usual, and was hit by the throbbing pain in his head almost instantly upon awakening. He walked over to the small kitchen-area of his apartment and got a glass from a cupboard in the corner of his kitchen, filling it up with water from the sink. Moving over to another cabinet, he retrieved his jumbo bottle of Advil. He popped the top off and poured four into his hand. He knew that that was twice the recommended dosage, but he didn’t really care. This headache hurt like a bitch, and he didn’t exactly feel like waiting for it to calm down.

He thought hard about why he’d been drinking so much the night before. Various empty bottles of alcohol lay scattered across the floor, and he knew that even though he drank often, he didn’t drink that much. It then snapped into place: He’d had a date the previous night.

He’d gone out with some girl a friend of his had hooked him up with. He hated it when his friends tried to interfere with his social life, although at least it gave him something to do. Going to the restaurant with low expectations, he was somewhat stunned by how extremely casual the whole thing turned out to be, as if he had just been having a typical conversation with a person who’d been a friend for his entire life. This bothered him a great deal, and spent most of the time during the date also thinking and worrying about how he must have screwed something up, and other small details that of course hadn’t mattered to her, but he didn’t know that, and it went on and on through his head.

When he had arrived home he started drinking in an attempt to wash away his worries and paranoia, and now here he was, awake with a throbbing headache, he wanted more water, and he couldn’t even remember her name.

After getting his drink, he sat down and began to rummage through his pockets. He vaguely remembered the girl giving him a slip of paper with her name and address on it…ah, here it was. “Eileen Murray”, the card read. “Apt. 87A, Leland St. Jamaica Plain Boston, Massachusetts ”. He grinned, half-remembering a conversation from the previous night about how odd it would be if someone suddenly forgot the city, let alone the state that they lived in.

Since he was off work from Fran’s Auto Repair that day, he decided he’d go pay her a visit. He walked out of the door on his house on East 4th Street, putting on his sunglasses to offset his light-sensitive eyes, and looked up at the sky. He withdrew a cigarette from the box in his pocket, and held it up to his lighter. The end caught alight, and began to produce an upward-spiraling smoke. He took a long drag from it, and then threw it on the cigarette-butt littered ground in front of his apartment, crushing it underfoot as he began to walk away from his house.

He knew all the smoking and drinking he did was detrimental to his health, as his doctors had seemingly enjoyed to remind him at every appointment he had, but had reached a point where he didn’t care too much anymore. He sighed, and quickened his walk to the “T” station on Broadway.

It was the last time he'd see his home for ten long years.