CREEPYPASTA VOL 2

How Does It End

Eric listened to the clacking of keys on the computer. Each minute made him more anxious. The nervousness coiled up in his stomach and twisted something deep inside him. He wanted to get up and interrupt Jessica, but he knew that doing that would only set her back. He tried to focus on other things, but each pause in the cadence piqued his attention. He wondered if Jessica had finished writing for the night or if something worse had happened, that she had hit that familiar wall known as writer’s block. He tried to wait patiently, but it eventually became too much.

Eric sat up from the couch and stretched. He had been on that couch for hours waiting for her to finish writing for the day. He snuffed out the fifth cigarette he had had that day in the already overloaded ashtray. He slowly moved over to her and asked, “How’s it coming along?”

Jessica blew out a sigh that told him everything he needed to know in that moment. It was not going well. The computer screen confirmed that for him. She had been at the computer for most of Saturday and she had barely written more than a paragraph. She would write a paragraph, pause to read it to herself, and then delete it. She would inch through, but nothing was satisfactory to her.

When Jessica started writing months ago and asked for his opinion, he had just humored her and thumbed through the pages of her manuscript that she had printed out, not really reading them. He offered her platitudes and over-generalized advice to keep her from realizing that he wasn’t actually reading them, but something changed about a month ago. He couldn’t even begin to explain what turn of phrase or play on words first caught his attention, but once it had him, it didn’t let go. He plowed through fifty pages in a single day. He had to find out what happened next.

It became a process for them, Eric would pick her up from work each day and fish to see if she had come up with anything new for the story while they were apart. They would eat dinner and discuss ideas for the plot. It quickly became all that they ever talked about. They stopped visiting with their friends and going out entirely other than to pick up food and go to their respective jobs. Every night he would wait for her to finish so he could hungrily tear through the new plot developments and character progressions she had come up with.

At first progress was quick, Jessica was about one hundred pages into the novel and it always seemed like she had new ideas and things for characters to say. It wasn’t until two weeks ago that her progress began to slow. She was suddenly more reserved about her ideas and the ones she did pitch to him seemed pretty generic. The sudden influx of five pages a day trickled down to three, then to one, and now he was lucky if she could even finish a paragraph in one sitting. With nothing else to talk about, they stopped talking altogether.

It didn’t take an insightful person to see that they were not good as a couple. Jessica was not really his type anymore and Eric knew that anything he gave her was skin-deep. She had a tendency to needle him with comments and he tended to overlook her feelings when they were weighed against his. Even their love making was a perfunctory and romance-less process. It was once comfortable, but now it was only worn-out. They had started dating after college and either never really found the motivation to break it off. With these conditions, their toxic relationship persevered and shambled on. Jessica poked holes in him and Eric neglected her emotions.

He tried his best to sound convincing, “Keep writing. You just have to plow through.”

“I’m tired, can’t we just go to bed?”

A spark of frustration flared up inside him. They had gone to bed without any real progress for a few days now and that was something he didn’t want to become a habit. He wanted her to finish it and give the novel a satisfying conclusion for all the characters.

“Keep going. We can go to bed once you’re finished with that chapter, I want to see how this section ends.”

“I’m just not feeling in the mood to write right now. Let’s take a break.”