The Lady in Prayerbooks (standard:romance, 948 words)
Author: KShaw	Added: Sep 10 2005	Views/Reads: 3345/3	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A writer is troubled by a letter he's recieved. Is it her, is she the one?

Tom Schofield woke some mornings with nothing but a blank space for a
brain.  He'd wander around his home, pick up the paper, read a line or 
two, and then move around some more. 

There were beautiful pictures on the walls, pictures from his childhood,
elves, fairies, long eared rabbits, and photographs of his children and 
grandchildren. It was a strange house, filled with all kinds of 
absurdities, a computer, a printer, a scanner, and other modern 
tragedies of technology. He looked at the chair where he often sat, the 
same chair from which ‘Frank' was born, the very chair ‘Poppy' went 
from to meet all her friends, the chair in which he had despaired, 
laughed out loud, and tricks were played on his mind. 

Moving the mouse the screen-saver disappeared, revealing a letter. He
scanned down the letter to see again the sentence that had kept him 
awake. 

"What do you want with me, Tom?" 

Why that particular sentence should hurt him, he wasn't sure; he just
kept looking at it. It came from someone he'd never met, simply 
exchanged warmth with over the Internet. After all, he mused, Tom Hanks 
did it, falling in love through exchanges of email, so why not him? 

Through the night he'd tossed and turned in his bed. No other woman in a
long time had made him think so much about his life; the ridiculousness 
of it, the tragedy of it, the loneliness of it, and now the direction 
of it. This writer had confronted him. "What do you want with me, Tom?" 
 His eyes focused on that sentence. He recalled that night he sat in 
this chair and out of boredom and panic answered a ‘lonely hearts' ad. 
Leaving the chair that evening he wondered if he wasn't going mad, what 
kind of frustration makes a man answer a classified ad, and what, he 
wondered, makes a woman post one? A questioned she had answered for 
him. The thought of hurt wasn't on his mind when he answered this most 
interesting and seemingly honest request for a male companion. He would 
answer and probably not receive a reply anyway. He pondered, and in the 
end talked about silly things. His eyes read down the reply for the 
umpteenth time and stopped at certain sentences to think about what he 
was reading. "Tell me what to do next, Tom." 

She explained that she was ‘ordinary' and wasn't sure why he, being so
expressive, so articulate, should want to know her, as if ordinary 
wasn't what he wanted. Extraordinary people, most of whom he wouldn't 
give the time of day, dotted his days. She, to the contrary, allowed 
him to think of himself as normal. Sure all the trappings of success 
clogged up his life, but they hadn't clogged him up from the reality of 
what was good. He wanted to say something honest, in the best way he 
knew how, which was to write to her, to make her understand him, tell 
her that his life went just as far as the ocean went, and that was very 
far. 

Characters had walked into his life and remained there. He picked up a
book, dusted off the spine with the palm of his hand, and looked at it. 
He was a man who had seen his work sold, read, and dismissed or 
acclaimed all over the world. Writing, he knew, had a deep affect upon 
him. Being so much fun when an idea comes floating by, waiting to be 
plucked out of the air and thrashed down onto paper. But writing is 
mostly about not having an idea. When the blank whiteness of paper 
becomes some absurd monster waiting to devour him with ‘blank-paper' 
screams  haunting him in his sleep...'you can't leave me....you can't 
leave me like this!'  And with his hot early morning drink he'd sit 
down to find something to say, but what? 

He looked hard at what had gone before. Six weeks of hard work had
produced little he liked, and when such things happened he lost 
confidence, thinking about becoming a writer with no outstanding 
ability, no peculiar talent, in fact the only writer in history who 
might put down a million words without slapping to life one substantial 
character, in one small base of a story. 

What, he wondered; could he say about writing that hasn't already been
said? Moons had waxed and waned, trains had arrived and departed, lives 
teetered on the brink, suitcases packed and unpacked, bells rung in far 
off steeples, journeys begun, finished, and yet being travelled. Soft 
burning September skies, a dog barking over the hill, letters written, 
sealed, posted, talking of love, or fear, or fun...and all these things 
might have happened, but went by unnoticed because of writing. All the 
time he kept thinking to himself ‘What if a letter arrives and I'm not 
here to receive it?' And because he's a writer, he is here, and no 
letter ever came, till yesterday. 

Loves came into his life, glowed, burned, and failed, and he never
noticed because of writing. Love, like a train, blew its whistle and 
moved off.  There were tears in the back of his eyes as he fought back 
the memories, and the staring blank paper in front of him. Now there 
was this woman confronting him, telling him how she feels, and in his 
heart is reaching out to her. He is hoping she can see him for all that 
he is and not what he's achieved, or what he has, for only the love of 
his children has been worth keeping. 

He moved back to the chair and flopped down. 

‘Dear Tom,' he wrote... 


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