Tunnel Vision

Tunnel Vision

Tom had just bought a house. It was a relatively small brick house built sometime in the early 1960s. It had no particular visual appeal in any of its mundane features, and had only a one car garage. It did possess, however, a roomy backyard surrounded by mid-sized trees at the furthest end. Most of them were maple, a few were white ash. All of them coddled at least one nest in its outstretched branches. Tom felt that he knew them, like familiar figures in a story. Most of the rest of the yard was covered with grass, except for a rectangular patch extending lengthwise from the house. There must have been a garden there at one time. There was no more. It was just covered with earth, nothing living that could be seen or imagined.

Still Tom was quite happy that he was able to purchase this particular house. It was all about who the previous owner was.  He was so eager to buy it, that he made his winning bid, a few thousand dollars over the asking price, without actually going inside the house and looking around it. The realtor thought that strange, but figured that all writers were strange, and this client had said that he planned to put “a lot of fingers to keyboard” in this house. The new homeowner would also be putting pen and pencil to paper, as that was how he always started his stories, but he liked the sound of the phrase that he spoke to the realtor, and he enjoyed the look he received in response.

Most of the old furniture was to remain in the house too, as that was what Tom wanted, especially one of the chairs and the writing desk that it faced. Pens, pencils, a laptop computer and a hopefully-reliable printer would all take up residence there as well.

The Previous Owner

The previous owner had been a writer, a long time master of the art of short storytelling. His compilations of stories always sold well, never lasting long enough to gather any dust on bookstore shelves. He was famous for the originality of his ideas. You never knew what he was going to write about next. His writing was full of surprises.

Tom owned and had read, sometimes more than once, every collection of short stories that the famous author had written, all 20 of them. So when he had retired from his 35 years of teaching Introduction to English Literature to first year university students, he wanted to begin writing short stories like his hero had done. That had been his plan when he was a first year English major himself, but writing papers and working part time during the fall and winter semesters and full time during the summer made that too difficult.

He had similar plans when he was first hired as a fresh young university prof. But developing actually interesting classes, marking and having generous office hours all dimmed the lights of that particular plan. And his summers ‘off’ were spent, not writing literature, but writing about literature, a subject that required a lot of creative thought and mental sweat to forge originality in. Publish or perish did not include writing short stories.

The years spilled out like sawdust from a handsaw. By the time he had finally achieved tenure, he had also moved up the academic ladder into lower level administration, which took time and more energy than he had thought when he applied for the position. The short stories just did not happen. Neither did marriage and children.

But now that he was retired, he could live his dream. There was nothing to steal time, energy and creativity from his short story writing.

Tom’s First Days in the New House

So it was with great excitement and expectation that Tom sat down at the desk to begin his writing. He had a few ideas, but he soon discovered that they weren’t going anywhere. He appealed to the picture of the former owner and successful writer that looked down upon him from an artist’s portrait that graced the wall behind the desk. That didn’t work.

His next move was to go outside, sit at the picnic table underneath one of the maple trees, and write. He knew that his hero had done this because this very scene had been described in one of Tom’s favourite stories. But that didn’t work either. And more and more he couldn’t even get a story started, no sparks to start the fire.

Maybe the Basement

Tom wondered one night whether the basement would be a good place to be inspired by his hero. A couple of his stories were about a haunted basement, so maybe it was a good place to at least start a story. He decided to give it a try.

So the next morning, Tom took a few pens and a couple of sheets of paper with him down the creaking steps to the basement. He had never been there before, so he did not know what he might expect to see or hear. 

It was more ordinary looking that he had hoped. A furnace, an old kitty litter box, and boxes that appeared to be filled with contents unknown all occupied space there. The room was filled with dust and dirt. Even the exposed light bulb was dirty. Maybe this was a bad idea. It was so dirty that he could see his footprints on the floor. All he needed was to start sneezing when he was trying to write. At this point he worried somewhat obsessively about distractions.

There was no table and no chair to be found, so he realized that he would have to go back to the main floor and get a lawn chair and a fold-up table from the garage. His car was still parked in the driveway, as he had to do some work, which he was putting off, to take some of the junk out of the garage before he could comfortably drive his car in.

A Discovery

As he went to go up the steps, he saw something strange. There were marks of footsteps going to and from a wall. When he walked over to the wall, the outlines of a door could be seen. But there was no knob or handle. He solved that problem by pushing on the door. It opened up and led to a dark tunnel. As he walked down the tunnel he saw that it led to another door without a knob or handle. He confidently pushed that door open. He was in for a big surprise. There was another room that he had previously been unaware of. Tom reckoned that it must be under where the garden had been.

This room was very different from the basement room he had just left. It was clean, and well kept. There was a table against a wall and a very comfy chair in front of it. No computer was there, only more primitive writing tools.

 His eyes soon spotted something that he could barely believe. There were many pieces of paper taped to the wall behind the table. On it were written one or two sentence passages. They were prompts for stories!

As Tom looked at the prompts from left to right he recognized them as beginnings for stories that he knew well, stories that were in the author’s last collection, that was published shortly after the author died. This is where those stories began. 

Then he read some prompts that he knew had never been used for a published collection. He carefully and thoroughly investigated the papers that covered the table. He slowly became aware that the author hadn’t lived long enough to develop the later prompts on the wall. 

He took the first undeveloped prompt off of the wall. Then he sat down, and began writing. Ideas began to flow. A rough draft of a story was completed before the morning had ended. Within weeks it was published. It would be the initial story of what would become a published collection. To the right of the title of each story in that collection were written the words “inspired from a prompt provided by”, followed by the author’s name.