A Writer Of Endings

He was often called nihilistic for the fact that he could only write conclusions. And what’s more, his conclusions were always depressing. He had filled notebook upon notebook with death and divorce. His characters were always walking out doors, never in them. The train was always leaving, never arriving. He was never sure how this had come to happen, but it was now completely impossible for him to write anything but. Openings were out of the question, and it had been a very long time since he had even considered writing a climax or inciting incident. He would try to establish a sunny suburb on the day of a child’s birthday party, and the next thing he knew a six year old was floating face down in the pool.

Realizing that he had no future as a writer, he tried to stop writing all together. He took up carpentry instead, but soon realized he could not escape it. Like an addict, he would find himself sneaking off to write the part where she leaves in the middle of the night for Tulsa, suitcase packed, alcoholic husband asleep on the couch, only to strike a deer with her Buick, three miles out of town.

And then came to him a brilliant stroke of luck. A friend, a striking young man who fancied himself the sort of Brit who could write about ancient wars with a sense of colloquial nostalgia, came to him with a tremendous problem. A story had begun of two young men secretly in love in the trenches, and though be had followed their relationship and courtship through the story, he now could not find a way to end it. The block had agonized him for weeks, robbing him of sleep and appetite. The Brit begged that he help finish the idea. He though for a moment before tossing off a page in which they kiss tenderly in a mobile hospital, just before one succumbs to a death brought on by mustard gas exposure. The story now finally intact, the Brit took it to his editor and was met with glowing reviews.

From there, our malcontent hero, met a plethora of people in need of endings of the tragic persuasion, all introduced via the Brit. There was the woman who fancied herself Sylvia Plath in new skin, writing of a loveless marriage and a torrid affair with a musician. To her he gave a final tryst in amid the willows that ended in the blood of both men, hearts upon each other‘s daggers while the maid looked on. There was a young Marxist consumed by the glory of revolution. To him he gave a hero’s death in a labor struggle. And to the boy from Mexico City, he gave a bullfighter laying down his sword, like the peaceful warrior, in what would unquestionably be his last fight.

With all of his wonderful endings and the awards his recipients earned from them, he began to enjoy a dubious sort of fame. He was known in all the literary circles, but no one would dare speak his name outside them. It is a known fact that writers are a selfish breed. They would rather die or have their typewriters smashed before their eyes than admit that someone else had composed a single comma of their piece. He began to grow bitter. He would sit in the bookstore pouring over everything he had written, now published under other people’s names. He would grumble and toss books aside, until a meek counterworker would get her manager to ask him to leave.

He kept a tidy profit, but his own need for recognition was growing everyday. The New York Times would list at least half a dozen books that he knew would still be going on if he hadn’t stepped in. What good are stories, he thought, If they never end? Who would read the Stranger, if Mersault just kept sitting in a prison cell, waiting to die?

He stopped writing for others, and their pleas for new endings fell on deaf ears. The Brit was revealed to be a fluke and a hack when his stories began to end clumsily. The woman who thought she was Sylvia Plath slowly died of consumption when her books were no longer publishable. The Marxist found his own battle, and fell under the blow of a capitalist’s rifle butt in Antigua. And the young man from Mexico City took to the highways and found himself picking strawberries in Southern California.

And years later, the Writer of Endings passed in a hospital bed, after six long months battling pancreatic cancer. And his lat words before shutting his eyes were, “I would have written this better.”