THE PROCESS: By D. A. Hernandez
Saturday, September 12th, 2009He flipped through sheaves of old trunk stories dug up from the abyss of his closet to recall the moment in time he’d first discovered his passion for the craft. His first short story received rapturous applause by his English teacher in the fifth grade. A small tale about a boy and a time machine which malfunctioned and left him in ancient Greece during the reign of King Minos and his legendary maze.
“To think in my class I’d have a writer!” the boy’s teacher had exclaimed.
The boy soon had notebooks full of stories and poetry and a wide world of ideas. As a man he experienced light successes, but nothing as grand as the day his teacher had made him a star.
It’s not that I’m blocked, he thought to himself leafing through a notepad of story outlines. It’s just that my ideas just aren’t good enough.
“I’m just not good enough am I?” he said aloud to the man tied to the metal chair.
The man didn’t answer. He couldn’t. His mouth was bound by metallic tape. Hands too. He could only stare back at the writer, bug-eyed, pupils dilated with perfect fear, beads of sweat drooling from the pores of his pale face soaking the front of his shirt. His knuckles were gray as old bones, the fingertips pulsing like little red Christmas lights as he squirmed under the restraint of the leather belts the writer had secured to the chair.
The writer had considered stripping him naked to make the cleanup easier, but left him clothed for the moment, remembering that those parts could be edited out later in the final draft. For now, let him have his clothes. Let him believe he might get out of this dressed, unharmed; alive.
“My mother always told me writing was for people who were lazy. I used to think she was right, that I’d wasted so much time trying to be something I’m not.” The writer stood up and closed the front cover of his old notebooks, shutting away the past and preparing for the new. “But not tonight, Mama. See, happy reader, tonight I’m going to work hard to get the story just the way I’ve always imagined it.”
He crossed the room to a table covered in a wide, draping tarp of plastic and caressed the handles of several tools and cutlery placed in neat rows on a chrome salver. He marveled at the subtlety of their sheen, twinkling like a handful of sharp stars against his palm. He chose a pair of sleek enterotome scissors and flourished them in front of the man’s frightened face.
The man’s eyes swelled glazed in sticky tears; back stiffened as he gasped; hands cementing against the armrests as the potent stench of piss clouded the room, rising from the wet blot oozing between the man’s trembling legs. It looked like a Rorschach inkblot butterfly, the writer thought before the stain became a shapeless blur.
“Don’t be afraid. We’re sharing this together. Afterall you claim to love my work, now you are a part of it. It’s no different than an artist and his subject,” the writer suggested flashing a toothy grin. “I’m making art and you are the canvas.”
The man convulsing in the metal chair didn’t seem keen on the more violent idea of art for art’s sake.
He hadn’t planned his evening this way. The idea just came to him as he closed up shop at the disappointing book signing of his poorly received novel. The fan strode up alongside him, startling him and regaling him with praise. Perhaps it was the man’s eagerness to please the writer, to shower him with accolades, a strange courtship that convinced the writer to venture into territory he’d never wandered.
He started with the fingers first, snipping the tips while the man was still conscious. The man wavered in and out, but all it took was the tight clamp of the scissors to jolt him aware again. The teeth would be next. It’d be tricky, the leverage required to pry them loose, but the writer needed to experience all the nuances the victim would go through, every twinge of pain, each momentous expression of agony riddling across the subject’s face.
The writer was impressed by the man’s composure. His screams weren’t much behind the strict tape. The long moans emanating from him followed by guttural spasms as he nearly choked on his own vomit was a bit much, but the writer proceeded with his work amazed at how simple it could be when you just put your mind to the job at hand. It was quite intimate being alone with the stranger, he romanticized as he gave the pliers a hard jerk and hit the sweet spot with a wet crack, and the man’s yellowed overbite pried loose like a blood dabbed diamond from the mine of his mouth.
What was it his instructor had told him during that waste of time writer’s conference?
Ah yes, writing is agony.
It is a painful process.
It is blood gushing from a victim’s savaged fingers. It is the torture of a victim’s mouth prodded wide as each tooth is extracted forcefully without medication; the extreme mutilation of flesh and bone, and that one sweet moment when you look back at all you’ve done and smile, confident that you had created something beautiful from so much despair..
After the writer finished his work, paying careful attention to the editing process as he scoured the scene clear of evidence, he took a hot shower and settled in for the evening. Relaxed and clean, he sat down at his desk. From the bottom drawer he pulled out a brand new canvas notebook and several ball point pens. With the evening’s research compiled and the images still so fresh, he took a deep breath, smiled as the words sprang to mind and placed the pen to the page.
©2009 D.A. Hernandez
David Alan Hernandez is a native-born Texan currently enrolled at Austin Community College, with plans to complete his bachelors degree in creative writing at Texas State University. Writing has always been an important facet to the author’s life, starting at a young age, and that ambition and drive to create continues to flourish. He experienced his first taste of being published on the online literary journal for horror and fantasy fiction, The Harrow and also in The Rio Review.
