The Micro Machine

Simple rules led to a difference in what Grayden Lute wanted to say. He stood at six feet two inches and possessed the color of a Franklin stove. The prompt seemed easy enough to understand: “Write flash fiction in fifty words exactly and submit in twelve hours from opening this link and win fifty- thousand dollars.” At exactly six pm, the clock started. From his home in Wilmington, Delaware, he could only think of how agonizing the feeling of writer’s block existed in his mind. Nothing could soothe his brain or tame the raging fire going on in his thoughts. He paced the room and looked at the scraps of paper he had jotted down ideas and sketched outlines. None of that mattered.

Dressed in all black, he felt like he was at a funeral for his writing career. He sat back down at his desk. His left palm rested on his chin. Small beads of sweat appeared on his brow. They looked like little droplets of morning dew assembled on his forehead. The time ticked. Called “the squirms” by the greatest philosopher in at least two millennia, Lute challenged himself to be ever present within his way of laying down words on the page.

The pen in his hand served as a lightning rod for his mind’s creativity. That spark of ideas had to register in order to be made real. He just put down random tidbits, singular like amoeba. They did not form into wondrous sentences like symphony guiding notes along a sheet of music. Some of the words weren’t even words. They looked like graffiti. By tearing through page after page, he looked at writing manuals and searched online for various ways to express oneself. He opened the door to his room and went to his apartment’s kitchen. He figured that a sandwich and a swig of water would clear his mind and make it fill up again, this time with valid thoughts. Bread, sardines, and mustard all combined to make the perfect snack for knocking out that squirming feeling.

With the break over, he knew he had to return to the desk. Everything looked in place. His sneakers, color coded, lined under his bed and looked like warriors in dress uniform. His bed appeared as if he could use it for an example of excellent housekeeping. The television looked dustless and the floor, wood and covered in spots by rugs, looked immaculate. Lute wished to become inspired by his clean abode, and yet, he could feel no inkling of stringing words together. Not even fifty! Maybe that was part of the challenge. The microfiction aspect of it made it alluring, seductive. He wheeled about in his office chair and started jotting again. It was like spraying water on a wagon full of rocks and expecting something to grow. His pen was broken and the black ink oozed like blood from the tip. He swore and then sought a towel to clean his hand. The paper had been ruined with some semblance of sentences laid out on it. After he washed the ink off his hands with rubbing alcohol since the soap and water failed. He thought of that word, or actually its root: fail. Often used in Internet speak, he fought against it just as he fought against this feeling that he couldn’t write.

Another word appeared on his consciousness dashboard: crippling. People often spoke of “crippling writer’s block.” This didn’t seem like an issue where his mind was immobilized and unable to put words to paper and processor. He could come up with random words here and there, but those touches of poetry and wit never seemed to materialize. In his quest for literary greatness confined to fifty words, he looked to books. Of course! With the memory of hearing how some unpublished writers wrote out the sentences by established authors. He tried that. He selected one of his favorite novelists. The words cascaded in wondrous prose that lifted from the text and danced…but they weren’t his words. He put away the book on the shelf of his immense library. The fire still raged in his cranium.

When he had already cleaned his hands, which still looked purplish like he had been squashing blueberries between his fingers and palms, he somehow left no trace on the book that he had started to “write.” The squirms kept coming. All it took was fifty words. Just that little space and he could earn a thousand dollars for each word. That window of time began to close, however he kept battling and warring against that queasy, uneasy feeling. It was like talking to someone and only jawing out words of nonsense. It did not sit well with him, to say the least. He used the room. He looked out his window. Some shops with people walking enraged him. They don’t understand, he thought. They just want to buy their kombucha and oat milk lattes. They don’t know about real work. They don’t know about the life of the writer! He turned away from his window and pounced on his office chair like a panther.

By looking at the screen with the writing from the book, he erased everything and it looked like the letters transformed into pieces of an imploding building toppling to the ground. He sighed. His eyes closed and he breathed again. Memories of when his father first bought him a journal flooded his consciousness. He remembered the joy on his father’s face when he showed him his first entry. It was short and shabby, but it was his. He also recalled the screenplay he wrote in eighth grade that his best friend Rod produced and directed. The applause from his middle school fellow students and the staff resounded in his memory banks. He wondered how he could write so many words and now, when fifty thousand dollars stood on the line, he couldn’t come up with a phrase.

AI wired generators tantalized him like grapes hanging just out of reach. He could get away with it, he thought. But then remembered his father. A strong man from the North, he would have no dealings with a son that resorted to dishonest work. Another sigh escaped his lips. For him to know that the idea of using AI would be blasphemous, tantamount to plagiarism, bothered him. He banished the thought. In his own way of doing things, he knew that the hours peeled away like pieces of a banana. The rent was due, and he had been a professional writer trying to make those payments. Never mind the water and heating and air bills. This fifty-thousand dollars would prove to be potentially life-changing in a lot of ways. He contemplated how he had been with his one-time fiancée. She wrote, too. Actually, she wrote poetry but never wrote anything down. Everything was extemporaneous. Her skin looked like cinnamon and her eyes appeared like cut jade. Her name was Sorrow. This wasn’t a name change or a moniker. This was on her birth certificate.

Lute remembered when they broke up. It wasn’t messy or anything. They simply met under a street lamp and hugged. They looked at each other for a moment and got into their respective vehicles. With such ease and grace, they broke off their union and the planned wedding. She moved from Delaware to Alabama to pursue her career in hazy bars and dives. Lute just let her slip from his grasp and permitted her to spread her wings and fly into perpetuity….

The keys kept calling. They wanted him to depress them. To show his ability and his strength as a writer. They yearned for him to concoct a story so succinct and curt and gorgeous as to warrant fifty large ones. He kept sweeping through the cobwebs in his mind to match his room and the entirety of his apartment. Everything looked clean. Glass dazzled under the light. The wood fixtures looked polished and new. Only his mind seemed to be cluttered by too much reality tv and video games. The spell of wanting to focus on his project made him want to keep going, but he couldn’t. He lumbered to his bed and plopped down like a cadaver leaving a gangster’s grasp. It was one o’clock in the morning.

He found sleep. No dreams played in his mind. Instead, he fell into a slumber that seemed as deep and mysterious as the cosmos. The things that usually come with the depths of sleep made him all the more susceptible to going deeper and deeper into the somber world of heavy napping.

Awakening, Lute looked at the time. It was four forty-four in the morning. He swore again and hopped onto his chair. Central to his abilities as a writer, he still looked at the ink stained pieces of paper and a desperate, mocking blank page. In a daze, he looked at the situation as any other. With the amount of time he had remaining, he just glanced around his room, seeking to defeat the squirms and experience the exhilaration of lying down original words. The kind of words that could make him fifty-thousand dollars richer. The kind of words that could mean the difference between him and having to get a second job as a ride share driver. Though honorable, he couldn’t picture himself preparing chilled bottles of water and incense to drunk and potentially dangerous clients. No.

And damn anyone who said writing was therapeutic. In the sense that it was like recovering from a ghastly car wreck and trying to gain physical stability, maybe that term would be applicable. This was all mental, though. And imagine that, Lute figured. What if the automobile collision had been an attack on the brain? What if the neurons had been altered and the person could become proficient at playing the piano? If he had to say whether he could get the job done in just a few moments, he would be able to keep his mind trained on his work. That’s something he always detested. When someone said that writing wasn’t “real” work, it was like talons digging into his skin. He knew what they meant, but he knew they didn’t understand how wrong they were. Of course it wasn’t like safeguarding a nation as a fighter in the armed forces. It wasn’t like performing calculations of a nuclear physicist. Yet, it obviously could be just as bruising and agonizing as any other line of work.

Alright, he thought. It’s five o’clock on the dot. I’ve got fifty-nine minutes to make magic. Lute included in this time period only the recognition of his past efforts. As a professional writer, he could consider the idea of typing up a piece that reflected the powers of issuing forth ideas. He was used to nonfiction texts that featured unremarkable prose and very little room for lyrical aspirations. Then, the screen started to fill.

It was slight, but the immense concentration that he applied to every word conjured up something of worth and great import to him. In the piece, a father graduates from college and the son, the president of the institution of higher learning, hands the degree to him. In the story, flashes of light and cameras capture the moment and show how in just a few words, he could present scenes. The massive task to fashion the minimum amount of phrases weighed on him for a moment and then lifted like an elevator in a skyscraper. Five-fifty seven. He entered all the metadata and submitted the piece to the platform promoting the contest. Five-fifty nine. Lute smiled. He had slayed the squirms. He had championed the much maligned writer’s block. It occurred to him that he had made something of himself with just a few taps of the keys. Something more than just the guy who touched up text books. He had become a machine. By churning out this microfiction, he had harkened for the call of his father and the philosopher to stop writing, think it over, and return to the work once the contradiction evaporated. He beamed.