To cut a long story short

Alan wanted to write a short story. His wife tried to stop him, but it was no use. He made himself a cup of tea, climbed the steps to his attic-room study and sat down at the computer. Downstairs his wife sat at the kitchen table, head in hands.
Alan started typing and the story began to flow. The computer’s clock read 15:37. Should be finished in time for dinner, he thought brightly.

Alan’s wife cleared the dinner things away and got the ice cream out for dessert.
“Where’s Daddy?” asked her youngest.
“He’s writing a short story,” she told him.
“Oh God!” sighed her eldest melodramatically and rolled her eyes.

It always started this way. An idea for a short story would pop, apropos of nothing, into Alan’s brain and he would head determinedly for the study. His fingers flying over the keyboard, the screen quickly filling with words, the pithy tale would ebb and flow towards a neat and satisfying conclusion.
Then everything would change. The characters, heading towards their predetermined ending, would rebel and buck against their fate. Maybe a lover from the distant past would reappear and throw a spanner in the romantic works just as the couple are walking off into the sunset. Or perhaps the glass of champagne toasting the seemingly happy ending is spiked with an hallucinogenic drug, creating havoc and humiliation. A story could even be turned upside down by a white rabbit with a mysterious secret turning up on a packed commuter train.
Whatever the reason, the tight, compact story of no more than a few hundred words would invariably turn into a sprawling epic of several hundred pages. This in itself wouldn’t be such a bad thing but for the fact that once he started a story Alan couldn’t stop until it was finished. He did try. When he sees it is getting late he saves the story, turns off the computer and goes to bed.
In bed he lies with the last scene he’d written freeze-framed in his mind. He becomes increasingly agitated, eventually throwing the covers back and striding back to the study. As the computer whirs back into life he paces impatiently until his words float back onto the screen. In the morning his wife wakes up alone, the other side of the bed rumpled and abandoned, the frenetic clacking of the keyboard emanating from above.
From now on he emerges only to use the toilet, pausing neither to shut the bathroom door nor to flush, muttering all the while to himself before climbing the attic stairs once more. His wife takes food and water up, leaving it at the top of the stairs without a word. He does not look round or acknowledge her. Later, when she returns, the plate is empty and the water gone, but Alan remains hunched before the computer, his thickening stubble and hollow eyes caught in the monitor’s glow.
In the rest of the house, life goes on. Alan’s wife and children learn to live their lives without him, sharing their personal dramas and triumphs with each other while above them an intricate web of fiction is woven into existence.
But finally, at last, the typing stops. He leans back, re-reads the last line and nods to himself. He lets out a deep sigh, saves the file and shuts the machine down.
He feels a tired elation as he moves through the darkened bedroom and lays down beside his sleeping wife. “It’s finished,” he whispers in her ear, his voice hoarse. She rolls over and holds him tightly with relief then pushes him away and tells him to take a shower.
Tomorrow he will print out the story and stack it neatly in a box in the garage, on top of several other identical boxes. One day he may even get around to reading them.