I Thought I Had Nothing To Write About Today

The wide Olivetti typewriter clicked smoothly as James' fingers depressed the black keys. At first it was only a chore, but it had quickly become a devil's plod through eighteen hundred pages of research material on snuff films and cocaine nightmares. He'd greased his eyes with horrid pictures and graphic depictions written by what he could only assume were real monsters existing among us. He figured that the ones who collected this tribute for human immorality must be slouched individuals with shaggy locks and over sized, tusk-like, incisors. James did his best not to picture that slathering gape and what it must have consumed in order to write that which he was forced to review for the magazine, the way it must have split open in two thick bloody petals to laugh while it all went down, and decided it was best to just keep his head below deck and well into writing. Three hours into the march across hell a phone call shook him mid sentence about being shaft deep into a postmortem geriatric.

"Thank God," He said into the receiver, "I mean hello?"

"Donny?" said a woman's voice on the other side. An anchor was thrown overboard in James' chest and landed squarely in his stomach.

"No you have a wrong number," he managed, trying hard not to sound weak.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Thanks though,"

James leapt, "But maybe I could help you find him?"

There was a bit of a pause on the other end and James was suddenly aware that he was clutching the end of his desk hard enough to whiten his knuckles. He really didn't want to have to go back to work, and talking to a stranger, to anyone, was better than reading another hundred pages on penile skull insertion.

"Um, I think I'll be ok for now, thank you though."

"That's cool but we have two Dons here in the office you know, is that who you were looking for or maybe just Don is a nick name? Don Schafer or Don Williams, maybe? I could go look for them really quick," James said, making another pass. He knew he was the only one in the office, it was Sunday, but her voice was a light at night and he was running for it.

"Oh, um, neither of those but thanks for the help, I'm sure I'll find him, ok thanks, take care now, ok?"

The phone clicked off before James could have another go and he dropped the receiver onto the cradle, trying hard to keep his eyes away from the photos he'd been studying before the call. There were little pinups of rotting sheep, sepia tones of knife wielding men in black executioners masks, spreadeagled women leering out from the glossy paper drenched in fetish fishnets with latex cocks strapped to their foreheads. Looking at them earlier he'd been suspicious that somehow he'd turn fifty and they would come back to him in vivid detail. He'd be in the middle of pleasuring his wife when suddenly everything he was would go limp, an ulcer would form in his bowel and he would start the convulsions he'd somehow avoided when he was twenty. From then on, he decided, staring down at a particularly gruesome depiction of a man enjoying a cow drawn in red, black and peach crayon, he would cry every time he saw himself naked and would only get hard if he was wearing something one hundred percent wool.

He shakily found his fingers over the wide Olivetti and started again, trying hard to picture the food this article would buy instead of the trips to a counselor that he was steadily buying stock in.