Writing For Pleasure

Beady eyes peaked through half closed curtains and he saw.
The bus was coming.
He put away the writing things, almost ashamed of what he had been doing. First he closed Word, then he turned off the computer. He didn't want her to know what he had been writing.
When she arrived he told her how beautiful she looked and kissed her as she took off her jacket. She asked him if anything was wrong, was he OK today, her eyes betraying concern. He said there wasn't anything even as his mind slid precariously to the words encrusted in the memory files of the computer.
He watched her through hazy fog as she took off the white overalls to shower, admiring the way she hung amidst the soap and the hot steaming water. She dried herself in the bedroom, they coupled dreamily and then it was over, she slept quickly and soundly as it had been a hard day at work. He snuck out of bed after ten minutes of listening to her blissful intakes of sleep ridden breath.
A sense of renewed passion and excitement filled through his pours. The document lay there, open and exposed to his prying eyes. And it was ready to be fiddled with, changed, violated and splashed with his words much as paint splashes onto a canvas. He flexed his fingers expectantly.
The words flowed. It was brief and spectacular. One moment he was sitting in the domed courtyard of the great leader Alfred II of the Third Age of Britain. The leader himself was returning from victory in the Moon Dunes War to a chorus of praise and laser fire, and he felt exalted.
Next moment he was breathing the stench of the rock mines of post-Eurasian Conflagration Poland as the grimy Aryan slave workers were whipped and shot into working to their bones by their Pan-African overlords, and he was in tears.
Eventually his mind ran dry of exotic rebellions and his fingers ached and the coffee was wearing out. He glimpsed out the window and saw the first inklings of a red sun. He heard her stirring through the door: was she subconsciously aware of his physical and mental absence?
In the morning when she awoke at the usual time for breakfast and he was half asleep, still pulsing with the unpurged creative urge, she told him of a dream she had had the previous evening about her Great Uncle George.
A drop of milk fell into his cornflakes bowl from his wide open mouth as she recounted the tale of her aspiring great uncle, long since dead, who had fallen into a river when he was 59 after reading a review of his latest work of science fiction. In her dream he had climbed out of the river aged 65 to recount a tale of the luminescent abyss dwellers. Deep down in the North Sea after he had drifted out of the Thames they had found him and taken him into their care. There he had learnt their sacred arts of ear breathing, tongue swapping, and eye glowing, and he had befriended their elder Viscount Elector who told him all about the myths and histories of the underwater plains army. Long ago they had roamed the oceans deep searching for a defensible abyss, their prayers not answered until the catastrophe of Atlantis caused the Isles of Britain to rise up and a chasm to form to the east.
The dream was a good omen, she concluded, because it ended with him writing a story about the whole experience which got favourable reviews and modest success amongst the world's science fiction crowd (even if they thought him completely mad). Great Uncle George took his retirement abroad traveling the world as he had always wanted to.
Are you OK? She asked as his insomnia ridden eyes took this information in.
I'm fine, he replied, just a little pasty.
She accepted this and with a kiss was off.
He heard her bus leave, stretching his memory to think where it was she worked and what she actually did, and peeked out the window as the autumn splash dissipated into the muddy leaves. He stroked his cheek where the kiss had fallen and realized there was no trace of it at all. With his good leg and half good back he limped over to the computer, and as he did so his thoughts crept back to the war.
The hot desert, the screaming locals; foreign tongues so angry at being liberated. With great strain he stopped himself from thinking too specifically about it. That particular war was over for now and although future wars were brewing aplenty in the pipelines of diplomacy and despotism, he would have nothing to do with them.
"Time for you medicine now Tony, let's get you back to those sweet dreams.
The croaking witch called out to him and he felt the pinch on his arm and once again he was invigorated into writing some more. The words flowed even as his head hit the pillow¦¦.
Walking, briskly in the wind. Taking giant double steps, leaving imaginary footprints in the concrete. Another life filled his imagination
Keep walking, he said to himself, just keep walking. You can see the length of the coast from Brighton to Worthing. Imagine just walking all the way.
But why stop there? He pondered. Why not just walk all the way to Lands End and turn north-eastward until you reach Wales and then traverse the mountains there and make your way up to Scotland and come back down through the blustery winds of the north-sea coast.
"I'm going away and I don't know when I'll be back. Don't worry about me, I'll send you postcards. Take care of each other and tell grandma I said goodbye.
In his new life his jacket and the seagulls are his most treasured friends along with his shoes and the mangy dog that followed him since he gave it a morsel of bread under the pier at Plymouth.
An old man mistakes him for the ghost of his father one night in Dorchester, in Devon he is questioned by the police for robbery, and in Newquay a young woman with big freckles attempts to seduce him with a bottle of strong rum which he reluctantly declines. She follows him for a few miles but as the morning sun rises over the calm waters she is filled with a sudden and urgent fear of the unknown and blames him with harsh words for the predicament he has gotten her into. She runs back towards the town crying and he chuckles and sighs and realizes this is the most he has lived since the summer of '99¦¦.
Meanwhile, REM sleep and the unfathomable subconscious overtook the literary fantasy; his mind was finally at peace again. He was a writer.