Page 24 of An Unfinished Story
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“There’s your fucking word count! Let’s keep going.” He let his fingers dance again, another burst of word graffiti.
A staccato piercing sound came from the other room—two chirps. Probably one of the smoke alarms. Ignoring it, Whitaker took a deep breath and reread his work. There was no gold to be mined from his burst of inspiration. His agent would shake his head. His publisher would shut the door. His dad might spit on him.
One last irritating chirp sealed the writing session’s fate, and he pushed away from his desk. No way would he get anywhere with this nonsense screaming at him. Barreling out of his room in a fit, he opened the utility closet in the hallway and was surprised at his organization. Amid a stack of cardboard boxes crammed into the closet, he found one labeled “Batteries and shit ...”
In the living room, Whitaker eyed the fire alarm above the sofa. A bag of Doritos had been left open on the coffee table. The zombie game he’d been enjoying lately was frozen on the television. He hopped up onto the sofa and changed the battery on the alarm. With a green light and chirp of acceptance, the fire alarm seemed to be satisfied.
It was too tempting to collapse onto the sofa for a quick few minutes of game play. He unpaused the game and dropped back into an alternate reality where he was a meathead Special Forces soldier well equipped with several futuristic guns, trying to save the planet from the zombie apocalypse. He moved to the edge of his seat as he rained down terror.
The guilt of not reaching his writing goal hung over his head, and he eventually paused the game. Returning to his office, Whitaker faced the mostly blank page again.
“I don’t get out of this chair for five hundred words. Period.”
Another chirp from the living room.
His teeth ground against each other, and he resisted the urge to slam his fist into the keyboard. “Now I truly know that there is a God. And he’s a sadist who likes picking on writers.”
Whitaker looked up through the ceiling. “Are you enjoying yourself?” Thinking of Russell Crowe inGladiator, Whitaker raised his hands, palms up, and asked the popcorn ceiling with all the fury he could muster, “Are you not entertained?”
This time, Whitaker stomped back to the fire alarm, screaming obscenities. How could anyone accomplish anything with the interminable curses of being human? He ripped the battery out and returned to the closet, where he found a tester. Sure enough, it was dead. Why would he put a dead battery back into the box? What an idiot. Testing several more, he finally found one 9V battery with a bit of fight left.
Whitaker plugged the battery into the fire alarm and—voilà!—a green light, a satisfactory chirp.
Weary from his battle and feeling creatively listless, Whitaker retreated to the kitchen to plan dinner. As he opened the fridge, he heard movement in the living room.
“Anyone there?” he asked, looking for a weapon to protect himself.
With a quickening pulse, Whitaker extracted a knife from the butcher block. It was a paring knife, the smallest in the block. He quietly set it down and drew one much larger. Butcher knife in hand, he crept across the kitchen and entered the living room, prepared to fight the intruder.
It was indeed an intruder, but the knife wouldn’t be necessary.
“Good afternoon,” his mother said, while folding his business slacks.
“Mom!” he said, trying not to yell. “You can’t just come in here.”
Sadie Grant, dressed as if for a ladies’ luncheon, looked at him like he’d said something absurd. “Whitaker, you should be ashamed of yourself.” She looked around the living room. “I didn’t raise you to live like this.”
“I’m serious, Mom. You can’t just walk into my house. I’m forty years old.” He raised the knife. “I was about to stab you.”
She looked at the knife and then back at him. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous? It’s the twenty-first century. There is crime in this neighborhood.” Whitaker set the knife down on the coffee table. “I’m tempted to call the police.”
Sadie ignored him and continued to fold. “Please pour me a glass of chardonnay. I’m parched.”
Chapter 11
ALWAYSLISTEN TOYOURMOTHER
Returning from the kitchen with her wine, Whitaker joined his mother in the living room. Ashamed of the digital slaughter paused on the flat screen, he found the remote and turned off the television.
The Doña Quixote of Florida was humming to herself and folding clothes from the pile of laundry on the chair. Her bulbous gray hair was styled the exact same way as he’d last seen her. And the time before that. “The door was open. I knocked.”
