Lighthouse

He hears the thunder roll in, his grumbles quickly harmonizing as he slumps out of bed. “Must be the third storm this week”, he croaks to the still room. Sidling over to the window, he sees cousins which can’t be more than second cousins to the ones he befriended yesterday, coaxing images from their swirling dances. His feet found his slippers, narrowly beating out his yawning jaw, as he stretched and pushed the cramped walls out another few feet. With a shake, twist, and one last grumble (for good measure), he began.

It’d started with counting them as he went. At first a probing wonder, soon a nice mental stretch to start his day, until it took its true pace as the monotonous crawl of his mornings. After he’d exhausted relabeling them as successive primes, multiples of 17, and ever-pitched up musical scales, he’d settled on naming each step. After all, he’d accepted this position to help finally unblock the dam that’d kept his writing career at bay. He’d playfully countered the bemused looks of his friends upon sharing he’d be back in a few months by saying he was born to pull stories from the cold rock. And whereas the stories piled up with each successive trip to the wick at the top, none were the product of his untapped, but definite genius.

He’d just needed some space; a silence that buzzed in anticipation for the world he created instead of the crowded coffee shops that were arguably too full of life. A sprawlingly empty calendar that awaited the mock diary entries of his yet unborn characters. A liberatingly lifeless loneliness that forced him to take up space, to burst with noise and nonsense that readers would tap their foot to one day. Or maybe it was just the necessary struggle of solitude that’d push him back into the world-traveling bedroom of his childhood, an escapism hatch. So, instead, he named all 147 steps.

Thankfully, he’d befriended many an author throughout his quiet childhood and was quite chuffed to realize they could all fit amongst one another in the spiral. Sure, sometimes they were shuffled once he caught Nabokov turning his nose up midway through a conversation with his YA fantasy neighbor, but he was happy to have a new daily hymn accompany his ascent. How he’d always wished to be considered alongside these names and to think his friends back home had worried he’d grow lonely with the passing weeks. None of them understood the sanctity of the author’s nest he’d been invited into, the call of vocation and rigid demand of art. He allowed hubris to join the floor-to-ceiling “bookcase” by leaving the last step unnamed, saved for the title of his eventual breakthrough work.

And how that breakthrough work would come along! Sure, his trunk of notebooks lay a testament to the total amount of dusk which had accrued during his stay, but it must be brewing within him. Why sully a few pages before it was ready to leap out; he did have a finite amount of stationary and could sense that the flood would be overwhelming once he began raining down. He could stomach the tsks he heard beneath his feet from those snooty authors who’d all sold out and written their best, feeling a bit of pity that most of them hadn’t lived long enough to see his meteoric takeoff. They were just grumpy to have been robbed their individuality, reduced to the dusty steps, that must’ve been it. He’d have to bring along paint next season so he could paint the spine of their best work and quiet their incessant grumbling once and for all — it’d drowned out his chance of getting a draft out these past few weeks. Yes, he’d paint them into a contented submission, tucked in their fading splendor so he could shine forth in ultraviolet rays (an apt description for his works which remained invisible to the human eye, he realized.)

Plus, he needed a creative outlet before he got down to writing; it’d be inoffensive, defensible, and sure to brighten up the lives of his faceless co-stewards that he waved hello and goodbye to from his boat. Even better, it’d quietly assert his rightful (write-less) place as the literary genius brewing with the next big thing. Even now, he found he could comfortably curl up in their perception of all he must be accomplishing while they in comparison drank the months away. Maybe he already brought them the giddy tidings of the worlds he’d created, or so they thought. Neither Heaven nor Hell could they be just yet, unsullied by the first footprint his pen would leave.

But land was ho’! How couldn’t it be; just look at how committed he was to this. He needn’t rush and hastily dock the series of novels that needed a large enough island to spawn trilogies. Maybe he should be reserving more steps, as it’d be hard to capture his career in just one title. We’ll do a flight per tour, he concluded, making the mental note to alert his eventual publisher and PR team that he’d need to take a few months off of sold out readings to come back to this fertile crib of a post.

If anything, it was good he sat on his author’s dozen of golden eggs; he’d heard that fame changes a man. It was hard enough easing back into his shifts at the bookstore in the months on the mainland. But even those patrons were given him a good taste of the reverence he’d eventually command. He saw how they coveted the creative prose he crammed on the index cards under his staff picks. If anything, he was grateful they hadn’t been stolen, appreciating his customer’s discretion in the face of sure eBay gold when they auctioned them off in a few years. Perhaps they’d spin the memories into an intimate agreement they’d had when they smugly slipped his name into their dinner parties. He breathed a sigh of relief that by then his name would be known far and wide, sparing them the arduous task of trying to pick which title they used to jog other’s memories. “Here wait, I’m sure he signed a book slip of mine one time.. that’s in the study still, right hon?”