Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[FearfulJesuit]

Scenes from a Waffle House at 1 AM

The wind roared over the vast, cool plains of North Dakota that night; the little desolate town of New Stockholm stood silent, its few inhabitants taking a rest from their little run-down lives in their little run-down houses on little run-down beds, save for one exception: the local Waffle House.

   New Stockholm's other restaurants, its seedy motel and even its general store had left with the prairie wind, but the Waffle House had not. The truckers came in off the interstate from Minneapolis to Seattle to eat a greasy plate of scrambled eggs and bacon consisting more of fat than of meat, and they never left. The night shift was a constant fixture as well: two widows named Phyllis and Wendy who had nowhere else to seek employment and a teenage good-for-nothing by the name of Zachary whose meth habit required him to hold down some sort of a job until he could start his own lab. The greasy spoon's lightened beacon of squares spelling out WAFFLE HOUSE stood as a monument to the vast wastes around it, as inviting and visible as the Pharos and as impenetrable as the Pyramids, commanding the inhabitants of New Stockholm to look on their own works-- their general stores, their farms and their little houses, many of which had long since fallen into neglect--and despair. Nobody of any consequence wanted to live in New Stockholm; only the elderly, abandoned by progress, clung to its homesteads.

   Nobody, that is, save for four people. On any given night at the New Stockholm Waffle House, beside truckers named Jimbo making passes at Phyllis and Zachary shooting up a portion of the personal stash he kept in the long-since decommissioned charity donations box, there also sat four people with typewriters at a table long since reserved for them, as it was most nights. They were an incongruous sight next to the caffeine-addled truck drivers: a man in his late teens in a beret, a turtleneck and jeans, another man of the same age in a wool cap and a pipe, a woman in her early twenties with short dark hair and sunglasses, and a fashionably dressed man in tight jeans about a decade older than the rest of them. The first three wrote various pieces and just barely managed to scrape by; the fourth too often chipped in to make their ends meet, since he had a steady job writing pornographic novels with titles like The Italian Billionaire's Pregnant Secretary for middle-aged upper-class women.

"Stephan," the man in the beret said to the man in the pipe, "did you ever get that article on rural poverty and collectivization for that underground Communist mag written?"

"I'm working on it now," he replied. "I have to actually go out into the town to do research on the people here to write it well, which I don't feel like doing..."

"Do you ever go out during the day?" interjected the woman.

"I crash at Carl's place during daylight hours, you know that," he said, pointing to their older companion. "Besides, I've got that novel I'm working on."

"Your magnum opus?" asked Carl.

"You betcha," he said, pulling out what appeared to be a 500-page manuscript. "This is Part One. You've never seen it, so I'll pass it around- though I think Millie's seen some preliminary drafts."

"I hated it."

"You might not now."

There was silence for about half an hour as the others leafed their way through it, marking it up in places, and generally having quizzical looks. At the end of it, Carl looked up.

"Stephan," he said quietly, "I write romance novels for a living- bad ones, but romance novels nonetheless- and I can tell you right now nobody will buy this, nobody will publish this, nobody will read this and it'll be fifteen hundred pages of your life that you'll never get back. It's as dry as War and Peace and about twice as long. I mean hell, man," -he pointed to a section he had marked out with pencil- "you spend seventy pages just on this guy's thoughts over the period of an hour. Joyce can pull it off, but you can't. This isn't even a tale of tragic love, it's a tale of tragic...tragic..." He stared at it for a minute. "This is a tale of tragic sexual repression or something. Look, crushes are fine, for emo kids who write poetry, but you can't make novels out of them..."

"More coffee, Wendy, keep it coming," shouted Stephan. "Rhys?"

"Carl's right. You're not fifteen anymore, Stephan. You need to make a living. Do what Carl does. Write stuff you can make money from, even if you're not that fond of it. I mean, pfft,"--at this he flipped through the manuscript, "you take-- hold on, what's this?"

He pulled out a piece of paper that was very sparsely marked up compared to the rest of the manuscript.

"'I dedicate this book to Millicent Alison Tylor, in whose presence I have spent night after coffee-fueled night writing this Proust-scale monument to limerance.' Well well, Stephan..."

"That-that wasn't supposed to be there! And in any case," he said, with a definitive tone of voice, as if this were the last word, "I was going to edit it to be more subtle."

Millie stared at him for a few seconds, and finally broke down in tears.

"I can't, Stephan."

"Millie..."

"I CAN'T, STEPHAN! I'M NOT INTERESTED, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU WRITE!" With that she stormed out of the Waffle House and got a hitchhike with a trucker. Stephan stood outside in the gale the rest of the night and went to sleep only when Carl took him back home at 5 am.

At 7 that night, when they got back to the House, they were greeted by Rhys, with the news that, having thought better of the matter, Millie had tried to get out of the truck and walk back to the Waffle House; a few hours in she was hit by a pickup on the interstate and that was the end of that.

Stephan looked at the floor for a few minutes lost in thought, then put a quarter in the jukebox, chose "Sweetheart like You", and walked over to where he'd put his manuscript and typewriter. He tore up the dedication page and started to type anew.

"I dedicate this book to Millicent Alison Tylor, in whose memory I have spent night after coffee-fueled night..."

[blackmagechill]

This is about a page of writing you'll never get back! It's about as dry as War and peace and three hundred times shorter!
(Nice, was pretty funny to read at the end.)