When Writers Attack
When Writers Attack
by David Michael
He picked up the knife, looked at it. The light flashed off the shiny blade, hitting him in the eyes. A cliché.
Still, if it needed doing…
He pushed his chair away from his desk and stood up–carefully. The knife might be a cliché, but it was a damn sharp one.
She sat at the sewing machine, piecing a quilt block. She glanced up at him as he stepped into the living room, then focused on her stitching again.
He stood behind her, the knife in his hand, looking down at her.
“How’s your story coming?” she asked.
He plunged the knife into her back, pulled it out. Then stabbed her again. And again. One more time, to make it an even number. Blood flowed from a criss-cross of red wounds on her back.
“Nothing special,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to be working.”
“What’s all this blood then?” she asked.
“It’s unsatisfactory,” he replied. He dropped the knife, pulling his foot back at the last minute so that the knife missed his toes. He considered his options for a minute, then said, “Be right back.”
He went to the garage, found the axe, came back.
She still sat at the sewing machine. The stab wounds in her back were causing her some obvious discomfort, making it hard to push the material under the sewing foot. She looked up at him again. “I’m getting blood all over everything,” she said. “If you’ve made me stain the quilt block…”
“Sorry,” he said, and hefted the axe. He eyed the joint between her right shoulder and arm. He lifted the axe, lined it up, and brought it down, hard.
The axe blade bit into her deltoid muscle at the top of her arm, scraped down her humerus, peeled back skin and muscle and bits of bone. More blood flowed, but the arm didn’t sever.
“Shit,” he said. “I’ve always sucked with an axe.”
“Really?” she asked. “What about my arm?”
“Yes, really,” he said. “When I was a teenager, my dad kept having to buy axe handles any time I chopped wood. And you’re left handed, anyway.”
“When did you ever have to chop wood?”
“I didn’t have to. I liked doing it.”
“You just sucked at it.”
“Exactly. And it seems I still do.”
“Why are you trying to kill me?” she asked.
“I’m not, not really.” He tossed the axe down on the floor, beside the knife, and walked back into his office.
“The knife?” she asked when he came back. “What was that about? The axe?” She noticed what he carried when he came back from the office. “And now the gun? I didn’t know we had a gun.”
“We don’t,” he said. “Hell, we don’t have an axe.”
“OK,” she said. “So … if you’re not trying to kill me …”
“I’m not.” He pointed the gun at her, pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
“Then what are you doing?”
He looked at the gun, studying it, found the safety and flipped it off. He pointed the gun at her again.
“Is this all because I didn’t load the dishwasher last night?” she asked.
The muzzle of the gun dropped, and he stared at her. “What? I don’t care if you didn’t load the dishwasher. Hell, I loaded it myself this morning.”
“Yeah. I wondered if maybe you were upset about that.”
“Nah.”
“Then why are you murdering me?”
“I need a story,” he said.
“And this is the best you could come up with?” she asked. “Murdering your wife?”
“It’s not like it’s gonna hurt,” he said. “It’s just a little blood, some gore.”
She looked at what was left of her arm, at the blood pooling under her chair, dripping on her quilt block, splashed across the white plastic body of the sewing machine.
He lined up the gun to shoot her, looked down the barrel at her.
She just looked back at him. That look.
“It’s not like I’m doing anything else,” he said. “Just killing you.”
The look continued.
“Did you want me to do something else?”
The look didn’t falter.
After a minute he sighed and let the hand with the gun drop to his side. “Fine,” he said, and went back into his office.
He sat in his chair, stared at the blank laptop screen. “My story today is gonna suck,” he said, loud enough to be heard in the living room. “And it’s all your fault!”
Copyright © 2006 by David Michael. All rights reserved.
Tim Harrison said,
August 3, 2006 @ 3:55 pm
I rather enjoyed this story. Very refreshing.