Unsolicited Writings

Tins of deviled ham. A larger shard poked out of her right
cheek like the blade of a tomahawk. The tongue of the lock,
still stuck out like a stiff steel finger, bumped the jamb. It
wasn't until after the thumbectomy, and that bizarre birthday cake like a left-over
prop from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, that the balls of crumpled-up paper had
begun to proliferate in the wastebasket again. The actual manuscript of
Misery's Return had been safely deposited under the bed, and there it still was.
If someone had delivered all twenty reels of the
new Rocket Man chapter-play to Annie's house, would she have waited, parcelling out
only one a week, or even one a day? "Christ, she's had a heart attack,
he thought, and there was a moment's alarm which was immediately replaced by joy.The
truth of everything was so simple in its horridness; so dreadfully simple.
"Come on, come on, come on. The Princess and the Pea. One
sting, he thought. Anything to be out of it.

She was a woman full of tornadoes waiting to happen, and if he had been a farmer
observing a sky which looked the way Annie's face looked right now, he would have at
once gone to collect his family and herd them into the storm cellar.
""Annie, if you spend your whole life thinking the worst thing you can imagine is
going to happen, you have to be wrong some of the time. "Misery's eyes,
that gorgeously delicate shade of cornflower blue, had fluttered open. Oh
boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn't matter how
rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons
said on that record — don't stop til you get enough. "Paul's
attention had been so fiercely focused on the trooper that he did not see Annie
until it was too late. I did have an older brother, though, and we used to go to the
movies every Saturday afternoon. It spilled out of his fingers onto the
board and then skittered toward the edge. It had taken her
less than twenty minutes to read his first stab at it; it had been an hour since she
had taken this sheaf of twenty-one pages. No, she said at last, although he had
headed west, so she assumed he must have gone toward Springer's Road and the few
farms out that way. He had taken the aspirin instead of the drink, but that
didn't change what was going to happen now; he was going to sit here for fifteen
minutes or maybe half an hour, looking at nothing but a cursor flashing in darkness;
then he was going to turn the machine off and have that drink.
Daniel could say, for instance: "Luckily, Careless had his Winchester with him
and plenty of ammo. He thought her illness might have been
short indeed — a thunderclap coronary, say, followed by a trip to Saint Joe's,
followed by. This thought was of a broken-off
piling which had jutted from the sand at Revere Beach. Now she stood beside the
car, shaking her finger at his closed window, and again Paul could dimly hear her
voice: " — think you are so-so-so smaa-aart! "She
stared at him, that furious black gaze, and must have seen the truth in his face,
because after a moment she slung him contemptuously back in the chair.
"He muttered something that meant nothing — something that meant only get
out of here, dream voice, get gone. I doan know if it be true, but the
Bourkas, dey say even when you get behin»her, the goddess, she seem to be lookin»at
you. Geoffrey had been chiming in his own memories of the
adventure, wholly in the grip of his grief by then, and he cursed that grief how,
because to him (and to Ian as well, he supposed), Shinny had barely been there.
"So you just sit there,»she said, lips pulled back in
that grinning rictus, "and you think about who is in charge here, and all the things
I can do to hurt you if you behave badly or try to trick me.
At last she came out of it, as always with an expression of faint
surprise, as if she had not really expected the world to still be here.
He had burned her broken her back stuffed her tubes full of paper and
still still still she was coming. He was reaching
for the wheels, meaning to pivot the chair so he could roll back to his room, when
he realized he was pointed more or less toward the living room, and the living room
was where most people kept their telephone and — Light bursting in his mind like a
flare over a foggy meadow.