K AY L A RU T L E D G E
T h e r e L i v e d a Fe a t h e r e d , F l i g h t l e s s Man
A
t the exact moment when every word he has ever written is being thrown out of a window, Herman Griffin Walforth has only one more sentence left to speak. He does not know this of course. He has been going mute for months, but it has been a process of unconscious drowning, the sort of painless, golden crystallizing that bugs slowly encased in amber experience - a warmth, and then a numbness, and then nothing. Someone could have, of course, tried to warn him. To do this, they would have had to meet Herman at the beginning of his story, long before the window, or even the house the window belongs to. They would have to go back to the very beginning. warmth. Like every good beginning, there was a muse. And the muse was Mia Glass. For years afterward, Herman would tell people they met on a street, or at a play, or in the middle of the squash section at the farmer’s market. Mia knew they met at a conference, one of those goal-setting, creativity-sparking, be-a-better-you affairs that are supposed to inspire but are really used by companies to pacify employees with a weekend away from their regular lives. The end is found here, in the beginning: all Herman can remember is gold, and then Mia, like the beginning of a world, or the silence before an orchestra. Mia remembers they met in a buffet line, exchanging the sort of pleasantries common to the extremely disinterested. When Herman told her he was a writer, she told him it was wonderful. And the way the word rolled off her tongue, thick and heavy, like a smooth marble across a wooden floor, made him shiver. Words out of her mouth had life and depth, they rang and moved and hummed, and hearing her speak was like hearing a bell being struck. So Herman didn’t tell her that he hadn’t written anything in months, to the point that his editors were pestering him and the usual royalty checks had started getting smaller and smaller. He didn’t tell her that releasing two popular books didn’t mean success, just a crushing pressure to release a third, the kind of pressure that drove him to ridiculous conferences that were supposed to ‘realign his creative self ’. Instead, he ran back to his hotel room, up the two flights of creaky stairs, jiggled the lock right-left-right and burst into his room. Among the smell of stale cigarettes and carpet coated in dust, Herman ripped off a corner of the newspaper and wrote a sonnet, right over Page 12C and May 6, 1975, right over -“TROUBLE ON THE NEWPORT CLIFFS: PETTY THEFT FRIGHTENS TOURISTS”.
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