The cliche writer sat at his cliche writing desk staring at his cliche typewriter biting the tip of his cliche pen. He was aware that he was writing on a typewriter and it really didn’t make sense for him to have a pen that he was biting on, but the pen wasn’t without purpose. The pen was there to portray the frustration of the writer, being stuck in a cliche and all.
The writer sighed the most cliche sigh that any writer has ever sighed. It was the same sigh that one might find escaping the mouth of a bored princess stuck in a tower for too long, or perhaps of a young man stuck in the theater watching a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie.
The writer thought, I know — I could write a story about a man who lives his life backwards — being born an old man and slowly getting younger. The writer quickly remembered to his disappointment that that had been done. He was hit by another stroke of original genius. Perhaps there’s a man who is a ghost, but he doesn’t know he’s a ghost, but then the writer recalled the movie The Sixth Sense, where Bruce Willis’ character has this very experience. Outside of being a copycat, the writer didn’t want to find himself in the same trap as the writer of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan, who wrote many very successful films, but quickly himself became a cliche for always having stories with a clever twist at the end. He knew he needed to show range in his writing, adaptability.
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, the writer looked up from his typewriter and realized that the room had gotten quite dark. He went to turn on the lamp, but when he went to twist the knob to do so, nothing happened. He shrugged it off, leaving his bedroom to go to the nearby laundry room, where he kept spare light bulbs.
In the laundry room, he found there were no spare light bulbs to be had. In fact, there was no spare anything. Meandering the room, he searched high and low for any sense of familiarity in the laundry room, but he found that it was in fact completely gutted of every last one of his possessions, including the washer and dryer he knew so well. “Why do I feel like I’m meandering the laundry room right now?” said the writer. “Normally, I’d glance around it, or search it, but I feel as if I am meandering.” The writer stood still before once again shrugging and leaving the room. There must be an explanation, he thought, and returned to his writing desk to grab his phone and call his roommates.
Predictably, the writer couldn’t find his cellphone. He meandered and meandered the whole house over searching for the device, but found nothing. I know what you’re thinking, ‘did he check in the cushions of the couch?’ and the answer is no, he didn’t because the couch too was gone, the whole house around him was empty. No matter how much meandering he did, there was nothing to be found.
The writer returned to his typewriter, still there in the dark, waiting for him to write his story. “Aha!” he thought, sitting down to write. The writer manically wrote the words on the page,
AND EVERYTHING RETURNED TO NORMAL
But nothing returned to normal. The cliche writer was still in the cliche dark with his cliche typewriter and no story to show.
In a fit of rage, the writer stood up, knocked over his chair, and in a large angry wave, he punched at the wall beside him, but his fist went right through the wall.
The writer’s heart beat fast, like a wild, untamed mustang meandering down the side of a mountain. He knew the truth now; he was a ghost, but not just any ghost. He was the ghost of a cliche writer, trapped in an M. Night Shyamalan film.
©2020 by Brice Maiurro. All rights reserved.