Writer's Block

The white of the blank page on the computer screen filled the room with a dusty haze and shone off his face in the manner of a dull moon. One hand lay rested on the keys and the other was wrapped around a cup full of clear liquid. His gaze was fixed on the upper left hand corner of his reality, but he didn’t perceive anything. Instead he concentrated his energies inward and scratched around in his mind with a sharp metal rake looking to unearth something to fill that damn page. The rake pulled up lots of things; a song lyric, movie scenes, foggy memories of the colors of the walls in high school, old pets, and all of it was useless. He needed something new.

Taking a break from the mental yard work, he shifted focus to his eyes for just a moment. The room pulled into view, and the ceiling corner he was looking at slowly came into sight.  Something was wrong. A shadow was cast on the ceiling that shouldn’t have been. Like something spiny and dark. After a minute of watching it, he pieced together that it was pulsating and getting larger. Also, unlike a shadow, it had depth.  He slowly rose from his chair, keeping his eyes locked on this thing. He did not immediately see the humor in the fact that he’d found something new.

The dark thing grew larger and larger, eventually enveloping the room’s sole light source, the computer. In the dark, he could hear the thing creaking and growing. He backed up until he found a wall and followed the wall to a corner. The thing continued to creep through the room, though due to the newfound darkness he didn’t know what kind of progress it was making. He soon struggled to hear the thing over his fevered breathing and violent heartbeat.

Standing in a corner blind, he started to feel a presence on his chest and legs. As it grew in strength, he felt a similar pressure on his face. His panicked breaths shortened due to a lack of available air. It wasn’t long before the dark had closed in on all his senses like a second skin. The pressure was unbearable.

And suddenly the pressure was gone. It was more than gone. On the pressure scale, where the needle had been at an unreasonably high number, the needle suddenly snapped back, but didn’t stop at zero. It raced back and finally came to a stop at a similarly unreasonably low number. He could feel his parts separating in the vacuum. His eyes pulled out of his head, and everything went white. His arms and his legs tore from his torso, and his torso tore in half.  Each piece of him became two pieces, again and again.

All that was left of him was his consciousness, which had been spread to every corner of this new universe. He could simultaneously feel that this place was infinite and that it was expanding. He was inside the dark, a part of it. As it grew, he grew. He was the darkness, and he would devour everything outside before long. 

Just as he accepted what he was learning, there was a blip in reality and everything flushed away like someone had pulled the plug. He pulled his face off his keyboard, his eyes fighting to stay open and a small trail of drool following him away. On the screen was a blank page, save five characters.

nbgfv

He could feel where those keys had been pressed into his forehead.