Inner Stage

The Teakettle is whistling on the stove. I manage to tear myself away from 
my book, walk over and turn it off. Steep the tea bag, though I know I'll 
most likely forget it when I go back to writing. It's so hard to keep these 
snippets of reality held together; rather like juggling chain-saws in an 
attempt to keep the moments glued into the thin web that makes up the 
fabric of my existence. I decide not to go back to the book. Not because I 
don't want to, but because I force myself not to. It's too easy to give 
into the pull of the written word. To easy to let the world lose all 
meaning. A suicide of reality.
 I'm a writer. Not by trade, of course. I work as a cashier in a bookstore 
to earn my keep, but in my heart I'm a writer. I go back to my little 
apartment of rough brick and spin my tales. Love, treachery, honor, tragedy, 
I write it all. My favorites though, my favorites are the tales that are so 
dark it sends a shiver up your spine. Tales of madness, torture, painful 
confrontation. These are my specialties. 
Everyone needs a hobby.
 I've sold a few of my works. Always the classic type of fairy tales. Brave 
hero, evil villain, damsel in distress. Clear cut. Good wins, evil is 
destroyed. I write these to help pay the bills. My other stories sit on the 
shelves. I've many of them, all stacked neatly. No one wants these stories. 
They don't like it when I blur the lines between good and evil. In these 
stories, there is no clear right and wrong. There is no black and white. 
There is only grey.
 Here, the one I'm writing now, the damsel in distress is quite mad. A sort 
of Juliet given over, not to the sways of suicide, but to the seductive 
call of lunacy. She watches over her dead lover's body. She's killed to 
protect him. You see, she thinks he's only asleep. Too shattered by grief 
to remember he's dead. Nothing but a husk of a girl driven on by what's 
left of her mind. My publisher shakes his head. "The public doesn't want 
this, Leda. They don't want a mad Juliet. They want to believe Romeo and 
Juliet are happy together."

"Romeo and Juliet are dead. Romeo and Juliet have rotted away. Rats gnaw on 
their bones." This is a metaphor, really. He doesn't see how clever I've 
been with my wording. Romeo and Juliet are the ultimate in romance and 
tragedy. What the public wants is a mockery of this ideal. They're gnawing 
on the bones. He can't see that.

"Write another Grassland." He tells me. Grassland is one of my more 
successful books. I hate it. But I'll write another. Because the public 
wants it. Because I need the money. But in my mind, in my heart, Juliet is 
still wailing, the devils are still taunting some innocent youth, the 
madman kills his family in a blind rage. These are the actors on my inner 
stage, and they're all calling for me to come join them.