B L O C K

BLOCK
By Thabet-Abbas C. Burias


The air conditioner hummed loudly in the corner of the small room – the only sound in the night, as far as he was concerned.

Getting up from his bed suddenly, the man rushed over to his bag and took out his two good pencils. Then, placing them on top of his pillow, he tried to think of what he could write on. A quick glance around the room revealed nothing: a chair, a television set, some dirty laundry strewn about at odd angles, and a guitar case.

“I have got to get this place cleaned,” he muttered to himself as he continued to search the room, seeing for the first time that it looked like something out of a disaster story. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes wearily, sinking to his knees to reach the twin drawers under his bed. Left or right? The first phrases were leaving his head fast.

He had had first paragraphs of stories occasionally pop into his head as he lay half-asleep on the lower bunk of the double-decker. Most of the time he would simply dismiss them with a sigh, too lazy to write them down. Why did they always come as he was falling asleep, and almost never on demand? This time, however, he chose to put them on paper.

“Aha!” He smiled as a prospector would smile at the sight of a gold nugget, only this nugget was the corner of a green folder, buried under tons of accumulated laundry. Making a mental note to get the clothes washed soon, he pulled out the folder and pushed the drawer closed with his free hand. A small checklist ran through his mind by reflex.

Pencils – check.
Paper – In the folder, check.
Coffee –

“I can do without that,” he thought as he sank into a comfortable position, seated on his bed. Excitedly, like a child on Christmas morning, the man clicked the folder open and rummaged through its contents until he found several blank sheets of writing paper. Then, taking his pencil and a giant breath in one grand gesture, he wrote

The night was quiet in the…

His thoughts trailed off.

He tried to recall what had gotten him so excited in the first place, but couldn’t find it in his head. Frustrated, the writer took another deep breath and put down the pencil. He checked the watch on his right wrist. The date was just about to turn from 28 to 29. It’s going to be tomorrow soon, he thought.

The sound of the air conditioner seemed louder than its usual hum, bordering dangerously close to annoying. On an average night, it would have helped him relax, like a car engine to a baby. He had read that somewhere, babies fall asleep faster in a car because the engine’s purr is similar to the sounds in the womb.

Then he remembered. He was thinking about the sound of the appliance and how it would make a nice first sentence to a story. Once again he picked up his pencil and wrote under the first line

The night was quiet in the…
The air conditioner hummed loudly in the corner of the small room – the only sound in the night, as far as he was concerned.
Looking at the three rows of letters, he decided that the second one rang better than the first, and proceeded to cross out the unwanted line.

---The-night-was-quiet-in-the…---
The air conditioner hummed loudly in the corner of the small room – the only sound in the night, as far as he was concerned.

That accomplished, he began to organize the random thoughts in his head, but thought it better to just write as the thoughts came.

He remembered how he had thought about writing about writing, and then later on, about the act itself of writing. He pictured writers in their medium, going through the “pre-writing” rituals. He saw them tense, like coiled springs, arrows sitting in a taut bowstring, waiting to be released.

However, as he sat there drifting, the thoughts never came. The blank piece of paper he had been so excited to fill just a few seconds ago remained blank, except for the few lines he managed to squeeze out of his head. He thought: Oh, well, there goes another story.

With that, he put away his pencils, folded the barren piece of paper and slid it inside his folder...