Wild Fiction

‘And you can get out as well,’ she shouted at Miracle who had leapt onto the desk and placed one paw tentatively on the keyboard. She raised her hand at the cat. Miracle jumped onto the edge of a bookcase and ran along it. He hopped onto the windowsill, out the window, and onto the roof and disappeared from sight.
The computer screen read Microsoft Word - Wild Fiction.doc at the top. Apart from the random letters that Miracle had inadvertently typed the, document remained intact and the story up to that point was indelible. Rebecca knew that she could not change what had happened. She could not erase the past and bring James and Conrad back to life. All she could do now was finish this business and make it count. She typed. One word after another it came to her. Sentence built on sentence and paragraph on paragraph. She felt each word leave her brain and pump through her arteries to her fingertips. Her fingers punched at the keyboard, darting little arrows transferring the ephemeral brain synapses into equally tenuous words hanging in the memory of a computer. Equally tenuous, until she pressed Control-S, forcing them from RAM to hard disk.

Chapter 66

At three the following morning, Rebecca could smell her breath bouncing off the monitor. She had not brushed her teeth since the previous morning. She clicked on the save button and walked into the author’s bedroom. He was lying on his back, his mouth open, snoring. In the bathroom she switched on the small light over the mirror and picked up Genevieve’s toothbrush. Flipping the lid of the toothpaste open she squeezed a generous dollop onto the toothbrush. After dropping the unclosed tube onto the shelf, she brushed her teeth until it felt like her gums were bleeding.
At four o’clock her tongue felt like it needed a shave. Void of moisture and taste. A trip to the kitchen and a small tub of vanilla flavoured yoghurt partly solved the problem.
The sun rose at five. Her red lined eyes stung each time she blinked. Her wrists and fingers felt numb. A dull throb in the back of her head kept time with the blinking cursor on the screen. She clicked on the print button and jumped when the laser printer sitting behind her whirred and clicked. For the last time she clicked on the save button before moving the mouse pointer up to the top right hand corner of the screen and clicking the X to close down Microsoft® Word.