Deadline

With only a few hours left to deadline, the writer scrolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter.

There won’t be a short story this week. I realize I promised a new, freshly minted short story every week for a year, but I have to beg off today for illness.

He stopped.

Wait, that isn’t right. I wasn’t ill during the entire week.

He’d been ill only the past three days, and badly ill only the last two days before the deadline.

Really there’s no excuse. Still, I feel like death warmed over.

He smiled. It was a paradox, yet one used often enough to have become a cliché. Nobody knew what death felt like, much less “warmed over,” whatever that meant. But it was one of those oddities of the English language: a good simile that nobody really understood, but one that everyone believed they understood.

Then another thought occurred.

This whole thing is a lesson... well, a reminder.

Because he never knew what stumbling blocks might crop up later, he’d always taken care of business at the first available opportunity. Okay, he thought, and leaned over the typewriter again, his fingers working the keys.

I think maybe this is a lesson for me, or perhaps more appropriately, a reminder. I’ve always told others that I do what needs to be done at the first opportunity. I don’t put it off because who knows what might happen in the future? After all, I could have written a short story for this week anytime from 9 a.m. last Thursday through... well, through 8:59 a.m. this morning.

If I’d written it on Thursday or Friday, Saturday or Sunday or Monday or even Tuesday, I’d have been home free. But I didn’t.

Going against my own good advice, I put it off until Wednesday, the day before it was to post. But I began to feel ill on Monday afternoon, with a scratchy throat and slightly clogged sinuses, neither of which I treated. I decided those ailments were temporary and blamed them on the ice pops I’d been slurping on during the day. They’re only 25 calories each and they’re very nice on a hot Arizona day.

I completed a considerable amount of work, but not my short story for the week, and even took time out in the late afternoon to watch a favorite old film on TCM: The Maltese Falcon.

You can’t beat a Bogie movie when you just want to chill for awhile. I determined to lay off the ice pops the following day. The scratchy throat was annoying and it felt a little worse by the time I went to bed.

I woke up twice on Monday night. My throat seemed to have found several new nerve bundles and a box of matches. It seemed simultaneously on fire and scratchy, which doesn’t make sense intellectually or maybe even medically but makes perfect sense when you’re living with it.

A dam developed in my sinuses too. They were so stopped up that I could barely breathe. And  all of that was compounded by a throbbing toothache. When I could no longer find a comfortable position in bed, I got up and crept into action. I treated my sore throat with some Halls cherry mentholyptus that had been in my desk drawer for at least a year, the sinuses with a double dose of coricidin, and the aching jaw with acetaminophen.

I normally walk every day 5 to 9 miles, but I decided to take Tuesday off, opting to stay in and work. Notice I didn’t write “stay in and write.” I edited seventy-some pages—sixty in a novel and sixteen in a short story—and returned the latter to its author. But for some inane reason, even with what I should have recognized as my budding illness, I chose to wait until the following day, the penultimate day to the deadline, to write the story for this week. And then? Nothing.

During the night on Tuesday, the sore throat moved to my chest, the sinus problem seemed to develop into a full-blown infection, and the toothache crept along my jaw until the whole thing was a hot throbbing mass.

Naturally, my first thought was that perhaps I could walk it out, maybe shove it through my system more quickly, as if a virus (or whatever—all those little microscopic things look the same to me) enters at a particular point, works its way through the maze that is the human body, then exits cleanly until next time. So I walked.

I took off at first light, logging a respectable 6.3 miles with a pace just over 17 minutes per mile. For good measure I even threw a fairly long, fairly steep hill into the mix at about the halfway point of my walk. When I got back, I sat down at my desk and— promptly nodded off. Yes, I fell asleep at my desk. 

I thought briefly about how much I’d enjoyed watching The Maltese Falcon the day before and decided to take the day off. No work, certainly no more walking. I’d sit on the couch, tune the tube to some mindless drivel, turn down the sound so I wouldn’t risk it catching my interest, and nod off. So I did.

Of course, the whole time—during my walk, during the brief waking interim at my desk, and while I was sitting on the couch—in the back of my mind the reminder kept going Ding! It’s Wednesday! Hop to it! Your story of the week is due to post at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning!

Ah, but on the other side of my mind was the little conscience guy with horns and a tail and a trident. He kept saying things like, Hey, you’ve written more than one story per week in a lot of these weeks so in the overall scheme you’re ahead of the curve and C’mon, dude, it ain’t like you’re a slacker and Y’know, it ain’t gonna kill you to miss one lousy week and Hey, get over yourself already, see. Nobody gives a rat’s ass whether you post a new story every week.

And somewhere in all that, the little dude’s voice had migrated from that of a flip, humorous Robin Williams to the undulating growl of a threatening James Cagney. 

He leaned back. Hope that doesn’t sound like so much complaining. After all, the intention was not to bore the reader with details that everyone goes through at one time or another. He only wanted to explain to those (very) few loyal fans of his stories why there would be no installment this week. Well, might as well press on.

It would be easy to say the little bad conscience guy won out, but in truth I was so drowsy I could barely hear him. My torso felt as if it were filled with wet feathers that had settled. My sinuses had caught the rhythm of my jaw and the two were throbbing in unison.

But there was something new: a bamboo sliver of pain was pressing slowly but inexorably up past the front of my left ear through my temple. I almost slipped into Whiny Stage: C’mon, man, I have work to do, a story to write, places to go, people to see.  

But I knew the routine. Somewhere along the way the sliver of pain would encounter my skull and stop. There it would begin to throb and grow larger and wider and deeper than the much lesser throbbing in my sinuses. I’d throw acetaminophen capsules at it as if to teach it a lesson, and after another day or two of rest, everything would be fine.

But what if the acetaminophen didn’t work this time? After all, we pop a few of the things, then wait, assuming they’ll work, and sometime later we realize the pain has abated. But what if it didn’t work at all? What if the  throbbing was only a cover?

What if, having encountered the skull, the sliver of pain splintered into fingers? They would continue to press against the skull, testing, rhythmically slipping bits of pain here and there in perfect sync with the throbbing so as to go unnoticed. Surreptitiously they would investigate cracks and crevices.

The pressure would continue to build—again, unnoticed because it’s concealed by that awful hot throbbing—and the fingers would test and probe and the pressure would build and the fingers would probe and the pressure would build and the fingers would probe.

And the throbbing would pulse and the pressure would build until that singular moment when it reached the critical level required to defeat a weak spot in the cranium, whereupon it would explode, leaving a hole that looked like the exit wound of a 158 grain .357 magnum slug traveling at nearly 1500 feet per second.

Anyway, none of that happened. Actually, the illness and its symptoms evidently began to abate with only hours to spare before the deadline.

I rose from my bed early and realized I could still possibly squeeze in a story in time to post it. But again, the little devil guy spoke up: It really isn’t necessary, you know. The ones who don’t pay attention won’t care, and the ones who are expecting a story certainly will understand. The little devil guy sneered. It’s just not a major thing, moron.

But I still didn’t like the notion of either simply skipping the story for the week or writing only a brief note of apology to my readers. My attention riveted on the little devil conscience guy, I thought, If I do that, I won’t be able to say I’ve written a short story every week, now will I?

The devil conscience guy said, Well no, but—

Ha! There are no buts! I grinned. If I don’t write a story, I won’t be able to say I didn’t skip a week. So I’m going to— 

Okay okay, the devil conscience guy said. Tell you what—instead of writing a real story, just explain what happened. They’ll understand and they’ll still get a story out of it.

And that was precisely the compromise the writer wanted.

Unfortunately, that sliver that was working its way up past the front of his left ear never made it to his skull. It encountered a blood vessel that had been compromised earlier in the week during a severe bout of coughing.

Apparently just as he was about to write the story he wanted you all to see, he suffered a massive aneurysm. He was more than likely dead before his head hit the typewriter.

End of report. Rupert Wagner, Coroner

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