Laura; 1-2 (with author commentary)

Below, you will find the first and second installments of Laura 11/27. Since they are not quite as long as the installments to Her Safe Space, I felt I should post these installments together. This will also give new readers a chance to get caught up. Going forward, I will be posting longer installments, and each post will be it's own installment so as not to confuse readers, but also to give readers a large enough chunk of writing to satisfy the urge to read.

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1

Laura’s Got a Gun just didn’t feel right.

He played with his fu manchu, still not long enough to make him look more than twelve.

The story was incomplete, but that could come later. It could always come later. The title could not. He wanted her to understand that he had been listening to her all along, that despite slip after slip, something she said once upon a time had finally resonated, and would now be the cornerstone of his recovery.

What the hell was it?

He had always been a lover of words, a sapiosexual and an artist. Laura was everything that made him feel grounded when he was sober, so damn right.

He listened when she spoke.

For the life of him he could not remember the exact diction. It made him bite his tongue in concentration and to recede into some part of his memory that he could jog loose.

Nothing. Nothing but a string of blackouts.

He wished he could forgive himself but found the task to be impossible at best, the memories of their acquaintance buried deep within drunken mumblings, expressions of adoration and dedication and love that never seemed to melt the icy walls between them. Brief periods of latent sobriety would occasionally wear the ice thin enough for him to catch a glimpse of her before freezing over again, either by his mistake or hers, layer upon compounding layer, like icicles.

Finally, he wrote To Laura and the date next to it. Perhaps he could title it later, and as long as he stayed sober for as long as it took to come up with a title worth having, he would remember how he felt that day.

He jotted down words like ‘humility,’ ‘loyalty’ and ‘moments lost’ before setting his pencil on the bright yellow paper, pushing back from the desk and stretching.

2

He was tired. He had been up since before 6 that morning--not sleeping is about as par for early sobriety as the latent sense of inferiority that goes along with it--and he hadn't eaten since breakfast. He should have been hungry but wasn't.

Now, he watched the sun set over the river from the comfort of his second floor one bedroom apartment in Lowell, Massachusetts. He had chosen it for the view, which cost him about $150 more per month than it probably should have, but it was well worth the cost to be able to let Old Faithful take him click by click on any journey upon which he had his heart set at the time...all with a crystal clear view of the Lowell skyline.

He stood up from the rolling chair his mother had so generously donated and listened closely for the nearly inaudible sound of the wheels coming alive. This time, they didn't, which surprised him. The floor wasn't exactly level, and more often than not the rolling chair would steal away toward the kitchen. He learned this the hard way the first night but still hadn't thought to put a rug down.

That would come later.

For now, he needed the store space under one of the floorboards in the study. It was in this store space that he stashed bottles of gin, occasionally a bag of pot, and a small black hunting knife he'd never used. It was still wrapped in the swath of oil saturated burlap he'd received along with it.

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Author Commentary

This piece took on somewhat of a life of it's own. Truthfully, I had no idea where it would go when I sat down to write the second installment, but I'm writing outside of my comfort zone. Ironically enough, going outside of my comfort zone has resulted in a much stronger piece. I attribute my new voice to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, an anthology of short stories that Stephen King just released.

Many of my stories include knives, and storage locations beneath floorboards. I'm not sure what the knife represents but it's rare for me to write a story that doesn't include one. The name Dana is actually taken from the first draft of a novel that took me a year or so to write, which included a knife and around which much of the character development was built. The name Sarah, who is absent from this story but appears in Her Safe Space, was also drawn from this novel.

I am in the process of writing the third installment, which keeps getting better and better. I can't explain why without turning this post into a spoiler. I will say, however, that allowing the story to come as it will instead of shaping it makes all the difference in the world between strong writing, and beating my head against the wall like a freaking woodpecker.


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