Elijah tore the last five pages out of his notebook one by one, scrunching each into a tight ball before throwing them into the waste basket at his side (which was over-flowing because he had spent the last three days in this chair, at this desk—even taking meals here—struggling to complete his manuscript, which was due at the publisher in the morning, but which was not interested in letting itself be written) and beginning again with another, more-desperate tactic to to seduce the climax of his novel out of his mind and onto the page, adding Shouting at the Desk Lamp to a long list of as-yet unsuccessful strategies which included such gems as: curling and uncurling his toes, pressing his fingers into his forehead, sighing and swearing, banging his head on his desk, using his pen to create pointillist drawings of various swear words, and screaming out the open window into his garden (which was in full-summer bloom and looked remarkably lovely in this evening’s golden hour); though, not surprisingly, this last caused his neighbours to move their dinner party inside; but now, after having summed up how he felt about his lamp, he returned to the window to soak up some latent inspiration he thought might be lurking in the yard, “because,” he told himself, “unless some miracle occurs… like a man strolling into my garden pushing his dying wife in her wheelchair, who—while they’re admiring my petunias—are robbed at gunpoint by two of the nurses from the hospice where the wife is staying—just like the scene I’m stuck at in my novel, but—then the man uses his wife’s intravenous drip tubing like piano wire to strangle one of the nurses, and the wife picks up her wheelchair and throws it at the nurse with the gun, but—just before it hits her—the nurse shoots the husband and runs away, then the husband and wife lay on the grass in each other’s arms (the man bleeding to death and the woman succumbing to her illness from the stress of the attack) and they hold each other until they both die, right there in my garden,” he said to himself, pausing for a moment before, “well, that’s all well and good, but I’ll never get this book finished by staring out the window.”
This story is my response to the January 7th prompt, “Write a 250 word run-on sentence.”