Suburban Macabre

Why couldn’t she finish it? The characters had developed, the plot had taken shape and the end of her story was in sight, yet each time she sat down to write, something seemed to repel her. The first few pages had come about fairly easily and from then on the story had practically written itself, what had changed? She sat, with the light off staring longingly at the glowing white screen of her computer monitor, the word processor open and sitting dormant at page 77.
She sat in her own little cliché, the proverbial moth attracted to the flame. She could not force herself to look away, waiting for that divine bolt of inspiration that was sure to come at any moment. Many moments had already passed, for hours it had been this way, sitting, reading then re-reading, continuously editing and then changing dialogue completely, nothing was ever good enough. Disgust was the only way to sum up her feelings. The story appeared to be degenerating before her eyes, every word became pointless to her, every action was boring or predictable. Did every morbid scene have to take place in a storm? Did the antagonist have to be a misunderstood person with hidden emotions? Why not throw in a few vampires for good measure, screw it, delete the whole thing!
“No talent hack.” She berated herself, again and again, she always had been her harshest critic. Sure friends and family may have praised her work in the past, but what else could she expect? They only wanted to make her feel good, but she dared not show anyone her unfinished work for fear of truly being cut down. “For years she had been harbouring the dream of becoming an acclaimed writer, the inspiration came from reading classic novels. Horror had always been a favourite subject of hers, and she tried to emulate those that had already achieved her goal, though all the while striving to be original in some way.”
Emulated originality, the term by itself made her laugh her. In school she was often encouraged to use the style of her favourite authors, and she did, one or two times she had copied characters and gave them flimsy aliases, though she tried to make them her own in some way. One trend she noticed was the subtle undertones of violence that would emerge throughout her writing, as though she writing her subconscious thoughts into her characters. This amused her seeing as most of them ended up being murderers or vicious thugs, she always liked the idea that she had a darker side, that she was not a person to take lightly. For a 17 year old girl in the suburbs this would not be considered normal, maybe all those horror books, movies and video games had had an effect after all.
“Write damn you!” She shouted the words at herself and followed them up with a punch to the side of her own head “How hard can it be? You’ve done it before, and your not gonna let some stupid writers block stop you! I know the situation, I know the people, I know what will happen, just write it down…I can do this.”
It was true, she did know the situation, the people, what would happen, she had been planning this for years, but what gave her a better perspective on the subject was that she had been basing everything on the people around her. She had used her home, her town and her friends as the characters and settings, it made writing easier, and also gave it an eerily familiar atmosphere. She had wrote about the deaths of her close friends and manipulated love interests between all of them. Everything about the story was believable, it was her life; many events had actually happened though they had been changed slightly to fit the story; it didn’t seem written so much as acted. Each character action and each line of dialogue was near perfect in many respects.
So what was wrong, why couldn’t she write the ending?
“What am I missing?” once again she traced back through the pages, her fingers pressed against the screen as has she poured over each line. Then she came to the last line that she had written and oh how clear it became! Last week, the hospital visit! The last thing she wrote was the last important thing that happened in her life. All she needed was the ending to happen, her perfect ending. The ending in which each of the characters dies.
“Perfect, I‘ll make my ending happen.” she whispered, a smile appearing on her face, but not the smile of a happy teenager. There was something menacing about it, something that betrayed a sinister urge within her.