Brink

In the continuing, on off, saga of fiction prompted by Luna Nina’s Unconscious Mutterings:

Standing there, gazing down into the water below, Tony felt he was onto something. He just couldn’t figure out what that something was. It tickled his brain. The same sort of feeling you get when that word on the tip of your tongue just won’t come out right. Was this a tip of his epiphany?

He turned away from the cliff’s edge. The constant motion of the sea was comforting. But at the same time it frustrated him. Those waves, crashing on against the rock, seemed to mock the ideas that flooded through his mind, yet never arrived at any conclusion. All he had to show for a lifetime’s work was half-baked plans and notions. Nothing ever finished. Nothing ever developed. Nothing.

A long sigh escaped his lips.

He couldn’t but help this despondency. He knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was on the brink of something. It pushed at him, but every time he tried to figure this thought out, every time he sought to take hold of this idea, it escaped him. A ball caught in the current.

He had even taken to walking around with a tape recorder. Previous attempts with notebooks had been a complete failure. Trying to write down what he didn’t know proved surprisingly difficult. His last hope had been these recordings. And what was the result? Failure. Abject and total failure.

The thread of hope remained. And that almost made things worse. A faint light that served no purpose but to show how dark everything else was.

He paced. Trying to think of nothing. They said that not thinking might produce a stream-of-consciousness process that might help. But really, what did they know? Nothing, was the only answer Tony could come up with, as he tried to empty his mind.

Walking back to the cliff’s edge he stared, not down at the pounding sea below, but at the far off horizon. And came to a decision.

He simply wouldn’t blog today.