Somebody Could Have Told Her.

Books. Lots of pieces of paper held by the string and glue of the binding. The paper full of words and the words have definitions and form, but they don’t mean anything to her anymore. Nowadays, she just sits in her bed, knees clamped to her chest like a vice. She rocks back and forth until the morning comes. And when the morning comes… well, you know.

People come by to see her and they knock on the door and peek into the windows and they scream her name and jiggle the handle. She doesn’t answer, even if they see her, she just looks over and smiles. She doesn’t even wave. The books now, all those layers of philosophy and proper grammar, they are all stacked up along the walls, thrown all over the floors. When she finally has to eat, she trips over them, when she bothers to get up and go to the bathroom, she uses excerpts from the Old Man and The Sea to wipe her ass. She uses parts of the bible to roll joints and cigarettes, her favorite is Leviticus and after that: Genesis. She used to read that and think about how good God and everything and creation and animals and people were. She used to. She doesn’t anymore.

She wanted to write a book, she wanted to be like all her heroes, all the great storytellers. She wrote short stories and compared them to those of Carver or Kafka; she thought that she stood up pretty well next to them. She labored over typewriters and laptops, she hung out at coffee shops, she networked, and she sold herself.

This is what you have to do to make it, she’d say.

She gave her English Professor a blow job in the back of his sedan, she swallowed his cum, and when she asked for feedback on her stories, he’d said, I just gave it to you.

Just a boulder in the path, she told herself. Not everyone will be like this.

She finished her book about two years ago and married her editor. They divorced and he married a new writer in his stable last week. She went to the wedding and if she had friends, they would have told her not to. They would have said: stay at home. They would have said: do not follow them to San Juan, it’s their honeymoon, not yours. But thankfully she has no friends, nobody to warn her. But better yet, nobody to tell what she had done.