- John Patrick Starling
- 3 min read
Nothing Again. Nothing.
By, John Patrick Starling
“The most tragic thing is a man who comes from and ends in nothing.” was the last line of the story, and when he finished reading it, he turned it over in his hand and started again. He was frustrated. It shouldn’t have to end that way.
He was in the living room of his new apartment. The cat box was overflowing with turds and there was nothing to eat. He was combing his hand through his short blonde hair and telling himself he was “looking for a woman now”. How, now more than anything, he wanted to fall asleep in the warm breasts of a brown haired woman and make love in the soft light of the following morning.
He paced the little room, then into the hall to the kitchen. He stared at the piles of dishes, petted the cat, turned on some music and shuffled through the bills. His mind drifted to an ex-girlfriend and he pulled one off on the couch and smoked a cigarette by the window then wrote the story again.
A few days later, he met a girl at the farmers market. She was a psychology student at the University. They were buying vegetables from the same vendor and ended up getting coffee together at the stand across from the Amish family’s fruit truck. He said how he was a teacher on summer break and she said her mom was too. “How about your dad?” he asked.
“Well, he killed himself with a shotgun when I was twelve. I saw the whole thing.”
They moved in together. She got her degree and he kept teaching at the local high school and working on his manuscript. But after a few seasons together it started getting ugly, almost violent, and she had to stop it — he never would have.
It hurt when she left. He’d lay awake every afternoon, too depressed to wipe his own ass, more or less the cats. The box became invisible and the stench horrific, if he’d cared to notice. But the emptiness was a familiar feeling, and that in itself was comforting.
Six months after she left him he lost his job mid-year. A year later she published “Living With The Frustrated Artist” and made a fortune in the self-help section. He did odd jobs, scraped by, ate little, drank often and worked on the manuscript.
He wrote and re-wrote six more of the stories, re-arranged the minor characters, changed every antagonists’ name at least twice, considered using a pseudonym, killed off the significant other in the first page, sent the main character to therapy and prescribed him lithium.
When they found him in his rented room he’d been dead for a week.
He had only dirty clothes and dead flowers, some second-hand paperback editions of the classics and an old typewriter shoved in the corner of the room squatting on a milk crate. Beside the crate were hundreds of pages of short stories, and the young Detective who had handled the case read one every night before he went to bed.
He flipped to the last page of the last one and read: “The most tragic thing is a man who comes from and ends in nothing.” was the last line of the story, and when he finished reading it, he turned it over in his hand and started again. He was frustrated; it shouldn’t have to end that way.
