Inkwell

Norton sat in his favorite armchair, lazily trailing his thoughts in the rain on the window pane. He was searching for something to write. He wanted something to come. Something grand. Some inspiration that would send his heart flying. He thought it might be there beyond the bubbling, busy black, but… empty, empty, empty. Then. A brief, exquisite thought flashed in his mind, smoothing out the black. It was crisp, rhythmic, and true. He grabbed his pen and brought it down upon the page to carve out the first word, but the pen failed. He scratched it on the paper, small, fast spirals of empty ink. He kept the line alive inside his head as he grabbed his second pen and set it down, but this one, too, was dry and useless against the blank page. The thought was slipping away into something disastrous and forced. He grumbled, grabbed his notebook, and rushed over to his desk; pulled a pen from the cup on the corner, but it was a dud. He pulled another, then another, and another until the cup was empty.

The thought was crumbling, and there was no pen to save it. He tore through the empty page with the void pens. He disgruntled the desk drawers, flinging anything that wasn’t a pen onto the ground. Papers, clips, envelopes. Frustration was disintegrating the wonderful thought. The words were jumping around, rearranging themselves into disagreeable combinations. There was a fountain pen in the bottom drawer that someone had gifted to him for some accolade tossed his way, Best Junior Professor of Shit. He pressed the pen down until the gold nib broke. There was no glorious outpouring of ink, no miserable drool. The inkwell was, in fact, bone dry. He grabbed the handful of discarded pens off the desk, opening them one by one. Every pen was empty. The page was worn, soft, and torn. His beautiful, simple truth gone jumbled. Broken like the bodies of living beings upon the bank of a toxic lake. It belongs to the beyond now. Beyond the words, live and grow, but here, now, there is only decay and dry ink. A deadhead emptied of its grace and goodness.