| Courtesy: polyvore.com |
Today’s
Prompt:
A gift is left on the back porch.
Word Count: 1,415
“The journal lay on the back
porch, inside a heart-shaped enameled tin box. I could hear shrills from the
kids in the house next-door, as they played whatever games kids played,” Etok
(/hey toke/) said. “Besides that, there was no one else in sight as far as I
could glimpse and my house was elevated at an angle so I could observe stretch
after stretch of asphalt up and down Johnson Street. Nothing to suggest time of
delivery, either. I bent over and plucked the box off the sanded wooden step,
no label, no name of sender, and no courier company insignia—no FedEx, no DHL, no UPS not even the local EMS. A spiral-bound
journal inside a heart-shaped tin box is all there was to it.”
“Uh, ugh,” Atta (/hatter/) said.
He wasn’t one for words and rarely let his emotion show.
“From a different angle, I’d be coughing
up a blatant lie if I said that was all
because there was something else. I could take it for given but I know the role
it played in setting the scene for this story. The pocket at the edge of the
journal held a colored pencil with
the word BIC inscribed across the barrel
in glossy gold letters. I’d never known BIC
for a pencil manufacturer. It was a pleasant surprise, indeed. I found the
eraser inside the box.
“Ray Bradbury once talked about
how Forrest Ackerman took him out of high school and got him started on his
writing career. Though, I’d been out of high school for a while at that time, it’s
still true whoever sent me that package got me started on my writing career.
“I had planned to hit the park
for my people-watching exercise when
I fell upon the unexpected gift. I decided I’d rather investigate the potential of the journal concealed in
the box lying in my hands. Little did I know it would turn out to be a far more
enriching experience than I’d bargained for. I took the box inside the house. It
was April 15, my birthday but I stopped celebrating it way back in high school.
My benefactor must possess a queer sense of humor, don’t you think?”
“Probably.” Atta rearranged
himself in his seat.
“I set up my study in a room in
my apartment, which should have served as the guest room under different
circumstances. I stepped in, locked the door and sat at my writing desk. The
first sensation that overwhelmed me the second time I opened the tin box was vertigo;
a reeling sensation that came on so strong I had to lean back on my chair to
keep myself from spilling over into my desk. I opened the journal, pulled out
the pencil and started scribbling
away. I saw a vision of the setting I was creating on the pages of my mystery
journal with stunning clarity; it was like staring at a picture in a frame. I
could smell the air, the heady bouquet of the woods, and above all, I knew it was really happening—everything in my story was going down right there
and then. That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“I know the feeling,” said Atta,
nodding in slow motion. He bent forward and grabbed his half-full glass of ale,
jiggled it softly as if he was trying to confirm to himself by the chink of the
ice cubes that the liquid content was still in there.
“The story was alive, Atta. I
don’t mean on an emotional level. It felt like every word I scribbled respired.”
Atta
said nothing only sipped on his glass of ale. Etok didn’t even know if he
wanted him to say anything.
“I sensed I was onto something
but I couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever the thing was, it was also on to
me. I think it’s more like it caught up with me and called me out, kind of. Do
you understand this level of hocus pocus I’m feeding you, Atta?”
Atta
grunted.
Etok
figured that was going to have to do. All he’d wanted was a listening ear,
something different than the walls of his room. He’d carried the burden within
him for months not willing to speak out for fear people might think he’d gone
off the bend and might ship him off to the institution. He’d called Atta up at
his home and the two had agreed to meet on neutral ground. That’s where they
were at; the bar around the corner.
The
music poured into the room from speakers hidden behind a complex arrangement of
grillwork. R&B played low-key besides that the place called The Joint was otherwise quiet. A suitable
spot to open up one’s mind on deep issues like the mess Etok had dragged
himself into.
“I churned out several
bestsellers—novels and short story collections alike—and I believed it wasn’t
ever gonna stop. That was until I started having the crazy hallucinations.
First,
was the revelation moment. The news
reports couldn’t have been local or it would have raised a lot of eyebrows. I
discovered news articles on the internet, though. They were sort of low profile
jobs, something people may or may not notice. But it was the answer to the
nagging sensations I often experienced during my writing frenzies. And when the
first journal was filled up, I received a fresh supply deposited right there on
the back porch same place I found the first one. The second appalling
observation I made involved the BIC
pencil. It didn’t shrink. My word count would run into hundreds of thousands
sometimes and the lead in that writing implement would not fret.”
Atta
shifted his gaze and looked straight into Etok’s eyes and a thought flared in Etok’s
mind, he’s going to laugh me to scorn. He
waited for me to come this far so he could really crack up. Atta did no
such thing. He seemed to weigh his options like he was caught between making a
comment or just letting Etok ride. He suspired.
“Go on,” Atta said.
“You wanna know what decided me eventually?
“You know, I’m all ears.”
“I read a story about a guy
who’d lost everything; his wife, his kid, his job and finally his house was up.
I looked up the date the incident happened and it coincided with the day I started
writing my novel with a similar storyline. I didn’t what to make of this
information and I couldn’t really tell anyone. I wasn’t afraid cause I knew I’d
done nothing wrong…” Then he added. “Intentionally, I never knew all those
people who died in my book were real
people so I couldn’t care less. But it still bothers me a lot if I killed them
or just knew they were going to choke
and my muse made the best of it.”
“Was that all.” Atta’s question
took him by total surprise.
“What?”
“After you stopped writing, was
that the end of the whole mess?”
“It was for a while until three
week ago that was when my birthday came around again. On the fifteenth, I
stepped out of my house and there was another heart-shaped tin box lying on my
back porch. It had all the quaintness of the first box it could have been its
twin. When I opened it, I found not a journal but a complete manuscript. It was
done in my hand writing although for the life of me I couldn’t remember penning
the damn thing. There was a note written on a pad that said, ‘Happy Birthday!’ I burned the
manuscript and got rid of the box.”
“Then?”
“I’ve been receiving…” Etok
looked into Atta’s eyes and knew something was different about him. His mouth
had grown wider, he couldn’t explain how. And then right there before his very eyes,
Atta became somebody else. Atta became him.
Etok was staring into his own eyes, the eyes of the second Etok who until then
had been Atta. He saw the second Etok reaching with deadly talons for his gut
and tried to scream. The scream caught in his throat and he choked on it and
retched feverishly. He looked around to see if there was anybody in sight;
anybody who saw what was happening and could get help to him but there was nobody
else.
As
the talons wrapped around his neck, a crazy joke tormented him, offed by a character from my own book, The Shape-Shifter.
Eneh Akpan
June
21, 2013
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