Is There a Writer in the House?
By: Craig Allen Heath
Tags: Humor, Satire, Writers Block, Fiction, Writing

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

The descriptions of the room gave out first. Tight but detailed sentences imparting the tactile feel of the long mahogany bar, its intricate wood grain deeply etched with the hopes, the dreams, the pains, and the pleasures of an untold number of people who had ordered drinks there over the last century, were suddenly missing from the narrative. The dozen-or-so patrons on this late Friday night in an unspecified season did not at first notice the textual mise en scène was missing, but the barroom they inhabited was fading quickly. The author of the short story found herself blocked.

The red brick walls, preserved for decades to provide an old-world ambiance lost color, began to fade, then blurred into flat, grey, amorphous material lacking vivid, descriptive under-painting. The floorboards, hundred-year-old oak planks, lost their patina and gave no distinctive feel to the key location of the story. The people went on murmuring general small-talk, oblivious to their plight. After a time that the author could have mentioned but didn’t, the bartender raised up from serving a bourbon and a white wine to a distinctly generic couple who would have no significant parts in this story and said, “Hey folks, everything okay?”

What caused his unease was the very lack of any reason he should feel so. The author wrote nothing to give a segue into such a turn of events. His question brought all conversation to a halt as every character in the scene affected some vague look of confusion, befuddlement, or simple surprise. Everything was most definitely not okay. Something was very wrong, but no one could quite say what or how.

The bartender realized that his unease would be much more interesting given better explication, perhaps several paragraphs, but he had nothing to offer. Given a new prompt from the author, he inexplicably knew he owned this establishment. He learned he had worked countless years as dishwasher, busboy, waiter, bartender. He found out that he parlayed his lifelong experience and life savings of an unknown currency into buying and running the most popular bar in this city/ town/ village/ starship, but he had no further back-story, no web of relationships, no ethnicity or even a name.

For all he lacked, however, his strength lay in his being the cliché of a wise, older man. He knew what to do. “Is there a writer in the house?” he shouted.

The rock/ blues/ folk/ pop/ generically alien music that was, for the first time in the story, said to be blasting from the jukebox/ playlist/ hologram in the bar drowned out his strong and authoritative voice, so he pressed the button or flipped the switch or waved his hand or did whatever task would stop the music in whatever time period and technology level the story was set, and repeated his question loudly.

“Is there a writer in the house?”

“I’m a writer” came a voice from the back of the room. All the patrons turned, predictably, toward the voice. All, that is, except one man, — the man everyone called Phil. He remained hunched over his whiskey at the bar and would not look into the bar back-mirror, even though this might provide a plot twist and heighten the excitement of the story. The author left this character behind earlier and had no idea of his importance. She was unprepared for the idea that he could become a great vehicle for an interesting turn, so he remained a mere passing mention.

“We’re stuck”, the bartender said. “Can you help us?” The nondescript patrons of the still vaguely sketched barroom hummed with muddled but hopeful approval of the bartender’s question.

The voice hesitated a second before answering. “Yes, I can” it said. It was at this point the author decided that the voice was female, so the answer “Yes, I can” was described as low, strong, and feminine, like a steam-engine burning honey as fuel. The author liked that terrible phrase but knew it would have to go in the next edit. She decided to let it stand until she could, she hoped, come back later, and write something better.

The bartender merely nodded. The room fell silent, or more accurately the still undefined characters stopped saying the lines the author had not yet penned.

A woman walked forward from the shadows of the tables in the darkened back of the barroom. People still without the slightest hint of their place in this scene moved back to make way for the stranger. She walked into the dim light near the long, ancient, grooved and deeply stained mahogany bar (the author made a note here to revisit this description), and leaned against the corner nearest the bartender’s station.

She was harshly beautiful and full of life but carried the scars of some loss no one spoke of and no one knew about except Phil, who would prove to be more important in this story now that the author saw a way to put them together. She was brunette with inexplicable blonde and red highlights, blessed with a muscular build softened with womanly curves so as to be every feminine characteristic at once until the author could sort out what to emphasize.

“I can help” the woman said simply, gravely, or some other adjective, emphasizing the word “can”. “But you will all need to trust me.”

After a moment of poignant silence, the mutterings of the still amorphous crowd registered their acceptance of the vague terms the mysterious woman asked.

“Very well” she said quietly. “Let’s begin.”

A blackness overtook the bar, the patrons, the bartender, Phil, and the woman.

The author closed the document file and opened another, saving it with the title ‘Is There a Writer in the House — 2’.

She typed the first line, a brief opening naming the bar and the bartender, then leaned back in her chair. She wondered who the writer was, and if she knew Phil.