Argument with a Muse

“She’s breathing.” A smile crawls across Rachael’s face. She looks at the man. “She’s finally breathing. A limping, lifeless thing... but, she’s finally real.”

“Work quickly now and put her into trouble.” The man rocks back on his toes, balancing with the hind legs of his chair and eyeballs Rachael. Does not have time for her crap. 

“Yes, yes I know.” Rachael chews her lip, eyes scanning the page. 

Plunging forward the chair thumps and the man about to spring over the desk grasps the edge. “If you don’t do it right now she’ll stop breathing! Sick of watching this helter skelter resuscitation everytime. You’re shit for doing this to her. Pure negligence! Get to work! Words on the page! There we go… yes, yes, hands on the keyboard, quit gasping about it and make her fall off the cliff after her sister… or whatever it is you were about to do….” He stops to pick his teeth. “And look at me will you?” He grabs the grayed, frayed ends of his hair. “I’m turning to dust!” With a nimble hop over the desk, he lands eye to eye with Rachael in fiery pleading. “You’re a monster I tell you. A monster to create life and leave it to wither… to die.”

Rachael’s mouth presses into a straight line. “I have other responsibilities. I have a life. A child. A living child.”

“So all your other children waste away inside this cage.” He points around the room, empty aside from the desk, laptop, stacks of real estate papers, and books hiding in the shadows. By the entrance, toys rolled in forgotten earlier that day. He rolls his eyes, and steam leaving him in a sigh, slumps into the chair. “It would be nice to get out of here, just once! Before I wither and become someone else’s.”

“You know as well as I do you cannot leave me. I won’t let it happen.”

“Monster.”

“If I let it happen then I’ll die too.” Rachael's eyes turn back to the screen. “It’s happened before and it was not pleasant. Much harder to breathe life into oneself than into someone else.” Rachael looks over at Aya, translucent and upright, looking around the room at holographic forest trees, refreshed by panic, but slow moving boredom will freeze her limbs. “At least in most cases.” 

Rachael taps the seat next to her. “Now get over here and help me please. You’re right, we need to act quickly. You do look awful. I can’t tell if you’re strung out, pushing sixty and cannot find a working shower, or a post pubescent over-angsty teen. You should be exactly my age.”

He shakes his head at her and clumps of straw hair fall to the floor. “Don’t even. Don’t you even. Monster. You did this.”

Rachael smiles and pats the seat again. “Com’on let’s spruce you up.”

“I think you’re a lunatic.” He sits next to her, ready to leap back across the desk in his next moment of fury.

“At least I take showers.” 

“Promise me you’ll find a way to live and give consistent life. It can’t be that hard.”

“If only you knew. Life is what happens between trying to survive.”

“Or maybe life IS the surviving.” His eyes twinkle, jabbing a nail between his teeth.

“Don’t depress me, neither of us needs that right now.” 

“Make her jump off the cliff right now, goddamnit.” He bites a nail.

“Okay, okay.” Rachael places her hands on the keyboard. “I promise. Just let me...”

The man jumps up on his toes, quickly hunches over, growling. “Her life IS surviving. She’s plopped into a scene and doesn’t know what’s on the next page. At least humans have survived long enough to invent someone who may know what’s on the next page. At least they can try to write it themselves. Show a little mercy to someone whose creator doesn’t know what she is doing and make. something. happen!” His body and voice straighten at the same time. In a soprano grimace, “Anything. So she has something to do. And so she can get on with her life!’ Gesturing wildly around the room, cliffs now in the distance, the overcast sky above them. The man, coming back to baseline, gathers crispy hair shed in his fervence. “Don’t be self centered.” 

“Inspire me.” Rachael whispers.

“No. Your fingers remember what you went through. So write it. Tell the truth in whatever way you can. It’s not just your story, it's the world's truth. You think you’re so special that no one will understand? So unique? Screw you. These stories have been played and played and played and played and sometimes, somewhere, it’s special, but do you know what makes the difference? The way you tell it. The way you tell it is the only way someone else will hear it, and while circumstances keep changing, people stay the same and they. Need. the. Context. Tell them what you know! Tell them what you know from the daze of childhood, tell them what you dreamed, daydreamed, what happened this morning. Dress it up in circumstance. Dress it up in characters. But by the gods that the first literate of you first wrote about, do not let your character die.” Growing to a regular size he now clasped his arms at his back and strode around the room. “Words never die.” 

Rachael smiles. “Tell me your stories.” 

The man stops and looks Rachael dead in the eye, his irises the same she sees in her mirror, gleaming. “My stories? My Stories. My stories are in bodies you’ve never laid eyes on. Hearts that never pumped through you. Battles you never fought. Times you’ve never lived. Arts you never smelled and let breathe over and take you into dreamlands you never dreamed. But. I will tell you my stories. I will tell you my stories. And you write. You write That. shit. Down.” His mouth finally curls at the ends like Rachael's when she smiles.