Being a Writer

I know I can write because my mother told me so when I was twenty-two. Leaving home that day I bought a tweed jacket, one with leather elbow patches. Soon I became an effete cognac drinker and had several children with my third wife. Selling a kidney afforded me to rent a small shack on an unpaved lane in nineteen-thirties Limerick, Ireland.

            I sit in the attic now, empty bottles of cognac stand like pawns around my desk and typewriter. Looking out the window with a wine-tipped cigar at my lips I see a crow fly by with a chicken carcass; it lands on a once functional latrine. It’s quarter after four, deep autumn. I finish my current thought, cross the room and lift up a floorboard. I pour a cognac, and then remove my jacket, roll up my sleeves. I return to my desk, set down the tumbler beside my copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

            My wife and children are downstairs preparing dinner. What to make with one tomato and half an onion? A fire burns in an oil drum on the back steps, the wood retrieved by my oldest son from a condemned building a few blocks away. My wife says he needs new shoes. I say, “What would Dickens think?”

            The cigar rests in the ashtray I took from the Artbar in Berlin. I went there to collect material, experience. It was a good trip, the inheritance well spent. Smoke plumes rise, twist towards the rotting roof. Staring at the blank page I cross my legs, recline, hold my chin with my hand. My posture alone could win literary awards.

            The dampness of the room gives me a shiver as I light a candle. From a case I remove a violin. I play Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E minor though I’ve never heard it before.

            It begins to rain, its patter in time with a faucet that leaks and the rhythm of domestic arguments from below that echo up the stairs, these the sounds of my accompanying orchestra.

            To live life you must become the life. William Farrant said that. To quote the French, I am “Je ne sais quoi.” Surrounded by the misery of others and my conception of my own brilliance I am the part. Success is so close. I can smell it.

William Farrant is a writer from Victoria, BC. His most recent work can be read at the Montreal Review and as the Reader's Choice winner of the 6th Annual Geist Post Card Story Contest.