Miss Marlow and Milo

Word count: zero. Now five. Six. The blank page. I prefer the full page. But only after I fill it – my way. If I can imagine the specifics, if I can see the page in my head and the story pieced together perfectly like some bestselling Grisham or Sparks I don’t find much use in transcribing it. Because that’s all it would be – a transcription, a copy, a clone of something that already exists in my mind. I would be old Miss Marlow, the bee-hived court reporter from Gray County, Texas, sitting in her cushioned chair, just taking it all in and typing it out: a morning of opening statements and witnesses, then lunch eating powdered donuts in the smoky break room on the stained beige phone with the twisted cord, talking with her miserable daughter who hates the bureaucracy of Medicare but doesn’t know the word bureaucracy, babies crying in the distance. Back from lunch, more witnesses, then cross examination – day after day, all the dried up and crackling legal proceedings taken down, unedited, faithfully, word for word for word, blah, blah, blah.

The unexplored strings of words and phrases are worth waiting for. They brush off bold and italics. They impassion. They shimmy down my arm in a picket line, demanding their chance on the page. Maybe together they’ll form something new, something that would have been long since aborted in my mind – like the retrospection of Joseph Guillotin, decapitating words like these with the official blade of the French revolution.

The predetermined ending will sprain a story’s soul. I don’t want to be little Milo in the hedge maze, working his way towards the center. He moves from one passage to the next. There is a right way and a wrong way, but he doesn’t know it. He thinks he is free to choose, with his pockets full of little green army men, but the design is set. The shrubbery is stubborn and thick. There is only one way. He wanders in circle after circle, meeting each dead end with increasing frustration, swinging at the shrubs with fury. Little Milo begins to hate the maze. He no longer cares about reaching the center. He throws himself on the ground, pounding his fists in the dirt, his inner animal growling, tears streaking mud down his cheeks. I don’t want to be little Milo in the hedge maze, working my way toward the center, the ending, the reward. I’d rather burn it all down. I’d rather the center of the maze boil blue with heat. I’d shovel away all the ashes and cover the ground with mounds of salt – nothing will ever grow again. No center, no maze, no story, no ending.