The Scrivener's Jest

I drove you home. You asked me inside, A question with a promise. When I said no, You smiled Kissed my check, And went inside. I drove away, A fork in the road Not taken. But even now, I feel you Your lips on my skin. Your kiss a burn.

Note: I often do the Very Short Story prompt (vss365) which started on Twitter and moved to Bluesky. There is smaller following on Mastodon. Skin was the prompt for today, and I wrote two. I thought I would post one here

“Are you leaving?” she was looking out the window at the car in the driveway, engine running.

“You know I can't stay.”

She slumped forward and leaned her head against the cold glass. I wanted to go to her, pull her in my arms and tell her I would never leave. I walked out the door, instead.

The air was bitter, but I didn't care. I just kept moving not daring to look back. The car was old but the interior was clean. The driver, an older man, smiled at me through his mirror. I nodded, and we were on our way.

She was my first love, the one I still remember. The one I always left.

I didn't have to

The thought was irresistible. I could stop, go back. I could make this right even if for a moment. Why not? What was left to lose? I told the driver to stop, rushed from the car as he called to me, raced to the house, pushed the open the door.

“I'll stay. I won't go. Please! Just be here!”

My answer came in silence and dust. The house was empty. No one was there. I fell to my knees, trying to find her memory in the cold and bitter night. I looked to the window, the last place I saw her, head pressed against the glass, a ghost of the past.

Nothing remained.

One of the reasons I took the moniker of scrivener is as a sort of homage to Bartleby.

I love the power that comes from not doing what is demanded. It is these quiet revolutions that work to deny those who claim power any agency or impact.

There are many who claim such power and authority. Some are explicit in their demands for obeisance. You see them at the office, in the schools, in the halls of government. They are contemptuous children, little would-be rulers who make fools of themselves and those who follow them. Others are more circuitous in their demands. They couch their orders as a service to you. “If you want to succeed, do this,” they call. “Don't get left behind!” They are charlatans pretending to sell you a life of happiness and privilege if you bend your knee (usually on someone else's neck). In the end, they serve no one but themselves.

What neither understand is that authority is not claimed. It is given. Sure, they may have power enough to force you into a cage, to bind you, to break you. Bartleby faces just such an end. That, however, is not authority. It is violence, a fleeting control, at best, that always comes back to haunt those who would use it.

Sometimes, resistance must depend on such brutality. There is a nobility in pushing back and honor in standing to fight. But not every fight requires violence, and not everyone can raise their fist to strike. There are moments where the best you can do is look up, hear the demands, and quietly say, “I would prefer not to.”

And then do nothing they say.

I earn my sins by the day. Choices and consequences, The results of actions Freely taken Sometimes in error, Sometimes with regret, But actions taken, Nonetheless. I do not mourn the cost, Adding daily to the count, Sometimes in tears, Sometimes with loss. We are all sinners here, The fallen and damned, The unsurrendered, Still trying, often failing Sometimes in defiance, Sometimes with love.

I started writing when I was young. I had a little notebook that I would write my stories in, and I carried that around like it was my most valuable possession (because it was). Sadly, I don't have that notebook, anymore. It was lost in some move, somewhere. For a long time, my stories were just mine. I didn't share them. I wrote just for me and no one else. Even now, so much of what I write—even these tidbits—are just outgrowths of my own reflections. I became a better writer, though, when I started writing with others. In other words, I became a better writer the minute I started role playing.

Truth be told, cooperative storytelling in any form is great. Role play is just the most obvious example. I started when I was still in high school (a very long time ago). I grew up in the Satanic Panic of the 80s (we need to specify now, since Satanic Panics are far too common), but I managed—with a lot of effort—to find ways to play. By the 90s, I was hooked. There was no going back for me. I still play and write regularly and really don't plan on stopping.

While role play is amazing, it is not the only form of cooperative storytelling. I also love paired or group writing, writer table discussions, even those random improv games where you build a story on a theme. Put a few people around a campfire and let them spin a tale, and I am there. Creating a world or a moment with someone else is magical.

It is a dance, you give and take, build and complement, add color and conflict, and they do the same. Sometimes, it all falls apart. A misstep happens, and the logic crumbles. You laugh, reset, and start again. Sometimes, though, your creations become something special. Memories and stories that linger in my mind even now. Moments, ephemeral, with impacts of forever.

That is what I look for in my shared tales, when the story and characters move almost on their own accord. Where you and your partners are no longer the craftspeople of a world but observers documenting a living space. I have seen rooms filled with that sort of magic. Heard the gasps as people lost themselves in a shared story.

It is a high I will chase until I am dead.

It is the work of art that makes the outcome useful. We forget that to our detriment.

So much of this digital space is beautiful and meaningless. Give me the grime. Give me your rough drafts and typos. Let me read your misused words and inconsistent lines. Let me see your art, imperfect and imprecise. Let it be broken and mistaken, but let it be you.

The world is buried in replication and with each copy we further degrade. A thousand images and stories that all look the same. Parody fails because what we ridicule is already a parody of itself. Significance is buried and lost. We feel alone. Each one of us, a single human in a universe of mannequins. The digital was never meant to be clean. We are, after all, messy machines.

So, give me your mess. Give me your chaos and your truth. Be ugly and dirty. Be hungry and aroused. There is no shame in humanity, only in the lazy and vain attempts to quash it.

I understand that it is hard. The words are not always there. My hand is rarely steady, and I color outside the lines. My voice cracks when I sing, but still I sing. Still, I write. Still, I add the color to my creations. They are never perfect, but they are mine. When I share them, I share a piece of myself.

Your copied works do not impress me. They degrade your value and demean you. You are silent with them. They speak for you and tell me all I need to know.

I can write you a poem In any flavor. Shall I make it dark A hungry desolation, A gnawing emptiness, Growing with desire, Dripping with lust? I can be your incubus. Or would prefer innocence Youth, a lonely child On the cusp of discovery, Filled with hope and possibility, Running in the sunlight, Dancing with fairies in the dusk. A memory of a time, When you still felt alive. I can be your salve. The words are easy. I spin them like yarn. Building a tapestry That I offer freely, Then fade away, Revealing nothing.

I write a lot about loss and absence which is funny because so much of that loss is self-imposed.

I can be a cold bastard, sometimes. I grew up being shown that love was a chain wrapped tight around my throat. If I broke the rules, it tightened and I choked. My love was to be unconditional. Their love only came at the end of the leash they kept me on. For awhile, it worked. I was a kid. I bought a lie on the pretense of love, and I did my best to play my part. Well, I did until I didn't.

When I left not much of love remained. Over the years, I rebuilt slowly and not always well. Even now, I love hard, but I drop people easily. The older I get, the less I forgive. There are very few sins in my world. I have no time for moralists or busybodies, but the boundaries I draw are absolute.

I don't even regret most of it. When I write about loss and absence, I am not writing about a person. I am writing about a possibility. I am mourning what might have been. I am mourning what I wanted to be.

And so I write, and the world moves on, and I think of what could have been in different place and time. Loves lost and friendships undone in the blink of an eye. We are all just trying to find our way. What we thought would last forever often crumbles and fades, or worse it remains the same as we grow beyond it. In either case, what was can never be what will be.

Nothing remains forever, but in every loss and in every absence there is an opportunity for something new. I find real hope in that. I always have.

There is a strange horror to cacophony. Once it begins, it offers a sort of effortless conundrum: join in or stay silent. Whatever you choose doesn't matter. Requiring nothing, it feeds and builds on those trapped within it. Lonely silences, easily broken, cannot quell it while attempts to overwhelm it only add to its power.

You can scream and shout. You can feel your voice in your head, but the moment it leaves your mouth it disappears into the static haze of a million voices more. A thing of chaos, the cacophony swims through us like a storm, enforcing silence through endless noise.

“And mine eyes fell upon the countenance of the man, and his countenance was wan with terror. And, hurriedly, he raised his head from his hand, and stood forth upon the rock, and listened. But there was no voice throughout the vast illimitable desert, and the characters upon the rock were SILENCE. And the man shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, and I beheld him no more.”

— Silence – A Fable by Edgar Allen Poe

This is the curse of our time. We bury ourselves in image and in text. I consume multitudes daily, and it is never enough. I would devour you, just to hear your voice, to know you in the precious silence of a moment.

We cannot stop the cacophony. It has raged since we first built settlements on the plains of this world, and it only gets louder as time goes on. All I can do is pull you close in the raging storm and whisper in your ear, “We are still here.”

They say the night shift kills you slowly.

Gods, I miss it.

I miss the midnight, the empty offices, and the silence. The world abandoned save for the few, the ghosts. We haunted the backrooms and the alleyways, eschewed the clubs and bars where the remnants of the living clung to the bright lights of day. We did our work, invisible to everyone else; and as the sun, we faded away.

Perfection.

I did a lot of night work in my younger days. I was a delivery driver, security officer, data center tech. I even had a gig as an overnight hotel worker which meant I did a little of everything from cleaning, to security, to driving the hotel transport, to running odd things to rooms in the middle of the night.

It becomes a world unto itself, and that is the crux of the problem. The death the night shift brings is not in the work but in the dissonance. I never wanted to come back. I wanted to stay in the night, but the realities of our world require the day. Thus, torn between two worlds, we dissolve.

This unfortunate reality, a lesson, in so many ways.