Work Text:
Autumn had fallen over the valley, leaves turned color in its wake. Squirrels worked over the ground, digging in the leaf litter for precious acorns and maple seed to—squirrel—away. But those were features of the forest. Elliott sat on the edge of the slowly-rotting docks, booted feet dangling above the indigo sea. Wine-dark, he thought.
He drew a dip pen out of his breast pocket. It was curious that he preferred them so in an age of mechanical pencils, ballpoint pens, computers… Dip pens seemed to hasten his writing, both literally and inspiration-wise. He took out his ink pot and unscrewed it, gently placing it on a level section of dock board.
The words did not come to him. He sighed. It had been like that lately: his brain’s ink pot running dry, nothing to place on the page but—blankness. He pulled his legs up, hugged them close to his chest, and looked out over the waves. White clouds scudded over the horizon, contrasting over the darker shades of the rest of the sky. The waves made a rhythmic pulse against the shore as they washed up. He tapped his fingers along, layering sixteenths over the ocean’s larghissimo, breaths keeping a steady half beat.
He sat there for a long time, only getting up when he could feel the cold radiating up the marrow of his bones. He returned his pen and ink pot to their places and walked into town, the motion warming his muscles, allowing him to resume his usual brisk pace.
He strode into the library and set himself upon his favorite cushion. Gunther had not acknowledged him, which was how he liked things. He cracked open an anthology of ancient poetry and began to read the foreword, already sinking into the rhythm of the words. He whispered anapest to himself, liking the way it felt to say. Anapest, anapest, anapest. All the meter terms were beautiful to him. Dactylic, iambic, trochaic, spondaic, -ic, -ic, -ic. The meters themselves slotted into each other like pieces of a nesting doll, like sixteenths into eighths into quarters, and so on. Comforting. Predictable.
He scribbled notes into his notebook, savoring the scratch of metal nib on coarse paper.
He felt like he was making progress by taking all those notes, but he knew in his heart that it wasn’t progress—just stalling. He could say he was merely improving his craft, but his actual projects had nothing to do with poetry. Elliott needed to get the article done, and then work on the novel. He’d tried everything to get writing again: skipping over that section of the article and working on another, long baths, free poetry, long walks, writing stream-of-consciousness.
What he needed was a night off.
The Stardrop Saloon always bustled on Friday nights. The young adults shouted in the game room over a game of pool, beer steins clinked as the blue-haired waitress stacked them (Elliott was terrible at names), a rag skipped out of the jukebox… At least it was all predictable.
Leah sat next to him, crunching on her traditional salad. A dribble of creamy salad dressing had settled in the corner of her mouth. He suppressed a gag. “Knotted woods—” she dabbed the dressing off her mouth with a napkin “—really add character to sculpture. Its personality. The tree’s personality. You know?”
“I see,” he said. “Like Galatea.”
“She was marble. But yes, exactly! I see the shape in my mind, echoed in the wood.” She smiled brightly. “I’m not trying to be Pygmalion, though.”
He hoped not. He tried to keep the conversation going, offering “Isn’t Ovid’s prose so luxurious?” This did not work. Leah continued crunching on her salad, her silence forcing Elliott to conclude that she had not read much of the great poets of antiquity.
She continued talking about how wood itself affected the art of sculpture. The sounds of the saloon seemed to grow louder, muffling her voice. ‘I’ll have another’—crack! —‘ha, loser’—'oak wood is so hard to carve’—shoes scuffle! on the dance floor—‘but I think it’s worth it’—coin shoved clink! into the jukebox—
His cheeks grew hot. He took off his jacket.
“Are you okay?” asked Leah.
“No,” he said, truthfully.
fizz! —squeak! of beer tap being shut off—‘what’s wrong?'—crack! (crack crack shlumph)— ‘hell yeah!’—hoot!—‘what kind of whistle was that, bro?’—twangtwang! of dance tune—‘Elliott?’
He got up quickly, neglecting to push in his chair. His brain skipped, and then he was leaning against the brick wall outside. The night air chilled his jacket-less arms. Elliott felt his breathing slow, heart still buzzing in his throat. Better. He worried with his hair, making a loop out of a chestnut lock and pressing its cool smoothness against the skin above his lip. Better still. He looked at the hair-loop in the light of the streetlamp: glossy, streaks of medium brown and lighter. Pretty.
He wanted desperately to go home, but he had left his most favorite woolen jacket hanging on the back of his seat, and Leah would wonder after him. He did not want to have that conversation the next time they saw each other. He formed a fresh hair-loop and again savored its smoothness against his skin, steeling himself to go back inside into the heat and the light and the chatter.
He dropped his hair and smoothed it back, and walked back in through the door, back too rigid and arms too fluid. His head bobbed like those of the pigeons in Zuzu City. The mayor frowned at Elliott—was he trying too hard to look normal? Back at their table, Leah flashed him a smile, and just as quickly lost it.
“I’m going home,” he said abruptly, grabbing his jacket by one sleeve. “Farewell.”
“Um, bye?”
And that was that.
On Saturday morning, a sudden rush hit Elliott while he was rinsing his hair in the shower. His mind raced, electricity shooting through his lower arms. Inspiration! At last, he could write! He turned off the water and hurriedly stepped out, not even bothering to squeeze the water out of his hair. He sat himself at his desk with his towel, dripping onto the floor.
And then the feeling left him.
His mind was blank. Again. Still. His inspiration had run out of his ears and puddled on the rickety floor of his cabin. He felt like banging his head against the desk.
He was never going to finish the damn novel.
Leah’s cabin smelled like wood shavings and, strangely, cat fur. (Like sunshine, his grandmother always said. But he thought a better description was sweet dust.) She did not have a cat, so he supposed it was also the wood shavings. She whittled away at a twisted wooden loop, while he lay on his back on her bed, looking out the window to the river.
“I still cannot bring myself to write,” he said. “My inspiration—the source—it has left me. I can’t even work on my commission for the county Post.”
“That’s awful.” She took a step back from her sculpture, cocking her head like a parrot.
“I simply don’t know what to do. If I cannot write—I will have to move. I can’t live in the valley for too much longer without an income.” He paused. “And I’m too young for a pension!”
“Have you tried…something different? When I’m stuck, I’ll go camping alone, without my art supplies, go into a trance state…”
He curled himself up in frustration. “No—but I do not want to.” He did not like camping—too many twigs in his hair and rips in his favorite clothes, and it was autumn to boot. Elliott did not desire to shiver in a tent all night, listening to the odd night-sounds of Cindersap Forest.
Leah sighed, turning to face him with a forlorn smile writ on her face. “Find something. I don’t want to be alone.”
He nearly mentioned the photograph of her and the blonde woman above the bed but thought better of it in the nick of time. She wouldn’t be alone if he moved out. He couldn’t think exactly why it was best not to mention this, but at least he knew not to.
“What do you do to get into a trance state?” he asked, after a lengthy pause.
“Oh! Um, I usually stay up all night and turn on some quiet music. No caffeine allowed.” She laughed shakily.
“Maybe, no, I shall use that as a last resort.” He held caffeine dear—the inside of his favorite teacup was stained with months of tannins.
That night, Elliott ended up trying Leah’s method. After midnight, he dressed in his warmest clothes: long underwear, two sweaters, a winter coat, and a blanket. He headed outside and sat on the dock.
The waves lapped gently at the dock’s pilings. It was a clear, windless night, moonlight revealing the contours of waves further away from shore. He looked out to sea, braiding and unbraiding his hair for what felt like hours. He was little drawn to his notebook: feeling the ever-present burning need to write, but without words to put down on the page. There was no point in reaching for it if he had nothing to add. His eyelids began to feel as if they were weighted down.
At long last, the sun began to rise, first lightening the horizon from blue-black to blue, and then pink, and then the scintillating edge of the sun was visible. Elliott was starting to feel remarkably light. It wouldn’t matter if he jumped into the sea, he’d just float back up to the surface like a piece of driftwood.
Was he in a trance? He didn’t know. He certainly couldn’t think of anything to write, or even a theme to develop for the novel.
He was exhausted. His eyes burned. He was sick of this, the never-ending slog of words. Nowadays, writing was like trying to wring water out of a dry washcloth. No matter how hard you tried, nothing would work. You couldn’t wash the dish, you couldn’t sell the script. He needed a break, but he had no way of getting one. A warm tear worked its way down his face, running in the gutter where the bridge of his nose met his cheek. By the time it had reached his jaw, it was cold.
He untucked his foot from underneath his leg and hung it from the dock, tapping the ocean’s surface with a tiny splash. He thought for a split second, and then stuck his whole foot in, not caring for the leather his shoes were made of. The cold shocked him back to sort-of consciousness. The water tugged at his ankle, threatening to pull the rest of him in on one of the stronger waves.
It brought him back to when he was a child, playing in the fountain. The whole of coastal Ferngill was a cool place. Even in summer, the water came out of the pipes ice-cold. He’d stand at the edge of the town fountain, balancing on the smooth rocks embedded in the concrete. (They were large for a small child.) Then he’d dart quick into the water and come right back out, goosebumps pilling on his arms. He’d gasp, lungs reflexively filling with cool sunset air, right down into every little crevice of his chest, every alveoli sparking in unison. He would do this several times, to the amazement of his mother, who said she felt cold just watching him. On the car ride home, he’d whisper stories to himself, imagining figures running on the side of the road. Once there was a ghost who loved the sun, once there was a wizard who lived in a tower…
His lungs heaved. He waited. He waited. Nothing.
There was nothing in his mind but the sensation of his numb-cold foot. He jerked it out of the water and slowly stood up, all of his muscles stiff from sitting out in the cold all night. The drowned foot prickled as he hobbled the short walk back up to his cabin, nearly tripping over washed-up bands of seaweed.
It’s a wonder you didn’t freeze sitting outside all night, he thought as he thawed himself in the shower. He noticed, getting out, that he was free of frustration. He could see hope in the distance. He could breathe freer, but not quite free.
Today he would write something. He sank into his bed and fell asleep.
Elliott woke up past noon and stumbled through the cabin like a drunkard, still groggy from sleep. It had been more of a protracted nap, anyway. He made a cup of tea and breathed in the steam, willing himself to sit at his desk and check his commission letter.
“Dear Sir: We have noticed your narrative prowess, as present in your previous submissions, and would like you to write a think piece on water infrastructure workers as part of a series on the people behind the systems that run our nation. The remaining works in the series will be created by our other writers. Please provide at least 3,000 words, excluding interview quotes.”
He had gotten the factual meat of the article down. All he had to do was get a ride to the next town over, stumble through an interview with their water operator and a plumber, and walk through a sewer with his nose pinched shut. (Elliott had tried to speak to the water operator of Stardew Valley, but there didn’t appear to be one.) It was the intro he struggled with. One had to start with a personal one, for there was no cold start of “The Ferngill Republic is widely known for its municipal water systems, but who exactly runs them?” allowed.
He formed a loop of hair and toyed with it. He had no personal connection to something as mundane as water infrastructure. He couldn’t even think of something vaguely related to weave into the beginning. He couldn’t tell if he was still suffering from writer’s block or brain-fogged from sleep deprivation.
Elliott looked out the far window. There lay his beloved shipwreck, as he called it, the dinghy that had come with the cabin. Its repair job was almost done, only needing a new seat to be nailed into it. Perhaps he’d take the whole day (what remained of it) off to finish fixing it, and then take his notebooks for a nice sunset boat trip.
He got up from his desk, slurped down the remainder of his tea, and got to work. He had all the supplies: nails in the junk drawer, a hammer in the cabinet, and a long piece of driftwood leaning against the side of his cabin. He took the wood, running his hand down the length to check for splinters. There were none. The ocean had done its job of sanding down the edges with years of waves. It had traveled from who knows where (Gotoro? Farther?), and now Elliott nailed it into an old little dinghy by the shore of the Gem Sea.
His boat shipshape once more, Elliott packed his knapsack with his writing supplies and a piece of cheese, and set out. The sounds of the oars slipping into the water and pushing it up with a splash formed a nice ⁴⁄₄ rhythm to think to. He stopped when his arm muscles burned too much to continue. The ocean was as calm as it had been that morning, but he still dropped anchor.
He sat there, bobbing with the waves. His hair blew in the faint breeze, tickling his neck. Here, on a boat in the ocean, he could be himself. Alone. Deadlines seemed as far away as the Fern Islands. He thought and thought, listening to the burble of water against the hull. In his mind, he narrated the day, and dipped back into his memories of the past. He couldn’t keep a smile off his face, or his hands still.
He thought of going to the library with his father in the city: riding the bus, small hand in large, eating hotdogs downtown, running his fingers over the spines of the picture books in the big library. He thought of the day he met his favorite author as a child, thinking, I want to be like her one day. And then he remembered the fountain. The fountain. Something run by a city water system. A personal intro for the article!
He began drafting in his head:
When I was a child, I spent my summers jumping in and out of a city water feature like so many of us did, whether a fountain in a square like myself, or a fire hydrant in Zuzu City. But I never stopped to consider the people behind the fountain. Was there someone pulling levers in a predetermined pattern to make the streams of water leap in the air? Was it mechanized? Who, exactly, authorized a child such as myself to enjoy the fountain? As an adult, I sought answers to these questions, and more. The people behind our municipal water systems are as unique and vibrant as you and I, and here is what they have to say about their work.
Elliott scribbled frantically in his notebook, scratching out words he garbled in his haste. He was done. He was done. He was free. He had gotten the article finished. All that remained was to type it up, edit it, and fax it to the Post. He would get his check, and then he’d be free for a short while. It wasn’t—sustainable to work like this. But he’d gotten it done. Another article commission or three, and then he could quit contractual narrative journalism entirely (for a time, at least) to focus on his novel.
He rowed to shore, threw his notebook onto his bed, and hurried to the spot upriver in the town where Leah liked to stand. There she was, sitting on a picnic blanket with a piece of canvas board on her lap. There was a smudge of orange paint on her nose.
“I’ve done it! I’ve done it!” he cried.
“Done what?” She looked startled.
“Finished the article! I can stay here after all!”
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “I don’t think it’s good to stress out over it though. You’ve looked haggard for weeks.”
“I need money.” He squatted on the fallen leaves, crunching one between his fingers.
“Don’t we all. The curse of modern life.”
“For now I’m free,” he said happily.
“Please be more careful. You look awful. Have you slept at all?”
“No.”
She rolled her eyes, and laughed. “The things we do for art. And money, I suppose.”
“Indeed.”
He was going to sleep well tonight.