Short Stories of Unraveled Lives

Procrastination

"Nothing is original. Nothing is original," he says, twirling his pencil around in his hand while he stares at a blank paper in front of him. "So then why can't I get anything down on the page!"

He gets up from his stool and moves away from his desk, itching for space from his work. Pacing around the small room, he tries to think to himself how he can manage this story in the little time he has left. His head lifts towards the clock on the wall above his desk, the tick constantly reminding him exactly how much time is passing him.

He lifts his hand to scratch the back of his head, staring down at the white sheet that has yet to contain a single letter. All this frustration was getting to his head and it wasn't healthy. Not in the slightest.

Letting out a sigh, he let gravity take his hand before throwing himself back to his luxurious spot at the desk. He had one night to manage the task and he was going to see it through. He tapped the pencil against the desk rhythmically, keeping his mouth away from the worn-out eraser. He needed to know how writers were able to do something like this in one day. If they could do it, so could he. With enough knowledge.

He sighs again and drops his head onto the desk, shaking the contents. How was he supposed to force himself to come up with a good enough story by morning? You can't force thoughts into your head. Unless you just write about whatever is around you and throw it onto the page like it's a story that makes sense. He couldn't do that.

He lifts his head from the paper, the sheet sticking to his head for a moment before finding its place again. He was a good kid and an excelling student. He wasn't used to getting bad grades on assignments or anything like that. He was so confident in himself to be able to finish this in one night and yet, here he was. He couldn't understand at all how this was a good idea.

His eyes drift across the objects on his desk. It was now or never. There was nothing he could come up with for a moment that would make for a good story without a bit of help. He would have to write about...a rubber band toy car that finds a rubix cube puzzle on it's way to the mighty water bottle to the east of Markerland. And as dumb it sounded, it was pretty unique, if he did say so himself. What was left was getting it on the page. This was going to be the silliest story he ever wrote, but write, he shall.

That morning, he woke up with an hour of sleep under his belt and grabbed his paper and his belongings to take to school that day. He found his way to the school and turned in what he wrote the night before. He had hoped it was enough. At the end of class, his teacher stopped him on the way out. It couldn't have been good. His paper was hundreds of words behind quota, varying in tenses, altering points of view, and the topic wasn't a free one. It was a creative topic, but one that revolved around events in the past. Historic events.

That was the first and last time Daniel partied instead of doing his work on time.