Oh, ShotgunShy

Moonsky

I’m trying to break my severe writer’s block. I found myself typing without really knowing what I was typing, and I decided to run with it and wrote this stream of consciousness something in 15 minutes or so. I think we should all have 15 minute writing exercises. They’d be like bicep curls for the otherwise out-of-shape writing part of your brain.

Anyway, Moonsky …

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I once slept on a train.

 Washed in the pale of the moonsky, I was lulled as the silhouetted hills rolled by, like the scaly humps on the back of a giant lumbering reptile. The last thing I heard before I was embraced in the warmth of slumber was the steady but drifting thud of the tracks underneath me.

I entered the dimly lit den of the Strange One, as he sat in his maroon suede chair. He rose, took my hand in his own porcelain one, and with the other motioned to the pine desk by the fireside. “You have some unfinished business, sir”, said the Strange One. And while I knew not what he had meant, I knew what he had said was true. and though I had heard in full what he had spoken, I knew that he had no mouth with which to see,  no eyes with which to hear, no ears with which to speak.

There were only two sheets of paper on the desk. Before I seated myself, I knew what I was to discover next: the papers were blank. There was a solitary pen placed astride in between the two sheets, though a curious pen it was. Both ends of its piano black length were shaped into shiny arrowheads, crude in its purity.

Unfettered, I plunged one end into a dark and thick ointment, clutched the cool pen between my fingers and turned my hand upward, so that I may gaze into my palm. And while I wrote in this peculiar but oddly comfortable fashion, I placed my free hand onto the second blank sheet, passing it across and lower down the page.

As my scribing grew more and more frantic, I noticed two most troubling things. First, the sheet over which my empty hand was traversing was populating itself with text that mirrored that which I was writing on the other parchment! Secondly, and more disturbingly, the upturned hand with which I was purposefully writing was changing. My palm, the one into which I had thus far been staring, was becoming smoother, the once deep and interlocked weaves of lines were dissolving before my eyes, sinking and flattening, shape-shifting into a uniform bed of paleness.

And I when I knew I was finished, I looked up. And there I was met by the gaze of an empty faced man, sitting at a pine wood desk by the fireside. A pen hung loosely in the upturned fingers of his limp right hand, dark as the shadows under a moonless sky. The strange man, I noticed, had no eyes, no mouth and no ears.

I rose from my chair.

And then I woke up.