text: “You can do this...” Kleo self-encourages as he stares at the blank word document practically wasting time waiting for one of his three papers to write itself. His schedule for the next 24 hours includes three papers: one due at midnight, the next due in the morning, and the last due tomorrow evening. The paper due for midnight he’s already completed, but only needs to comb through and refine; the one for tomorrow morning he’d already made it halfway through the page limit; and this one he can only pray that he musters the willpower to start. “You can do this..” After procrastinating and telling himself that he could finish all 3 three days before their respective deadlines, he finds himself struggling and suffering the ramifications of his arrogance. Kleo, a semi-humble aspiring fiction writer, is experiencing the bane of many writers’ existences-- inspirational block. Up until this point he jumped between the other two papers until he was slapped with the inspiration for his third. The First and most important paper, due at midnight, is a 12 page research paper on the magical influences on the Italian Renaissance. Every student’s sweet dream and succulent nightmare. The second, an 8 page Essay on a philosophical debate on some discourse he could barely comprehend in class, and doesn’t care to recap now. Finally, the third paper is a work of fiction, a 6 page paper completely within in his control, subject to his imagination. However, he has no clue how to handle it. “Come on... come on brain, just one more. You can do it!! Don’t fail me now!” His hands claw at his face, dragging his weary eyelids past their normal stretch-limit. “I’ll just start typing and see where that takes me, see how you like that.” His hands take their battle stance above the keyboard without a clear purpose, his muscles tense as he tries to regurgitate random sentences, but his hands stall and fail to make a move. The paralysis spreads from his hands to his arms, then from his arms to his eyes and finally to his brain. His vision blurs and his mind seemingly shuts down, not a single flare of electricity fires from the creative neutrons of his brain as he dissociates from reality. He hears his thoughts more clearly, they’re screaming, but not all of the screaming is his, strangely enough. An array of voices, the sound of an emergency siren, and other soft, yet excruciatingly loud noises rampage about his head. The sounds strangely bring Kleo back to consciousness slowly as opposed to intensely shocking him back to lucidity. “I’ve Got it!” He shouts, his hands, now knowing what they should, start typing. “I’ve got it!! That’s actually an interesting theme! I’m gonna have fun with this..” Kleo begins to write and carry out the newfound contents of his heart. His hands, dancing spicily over the phonetic dance floor, orchestrate the story of a man madly in love and overcome with the emotions he feels for his partner, a fellow Brooklyn paramedic. The emotions drive him mad and tear up the wining bits of his heart again and again until he’s just a bruised man still returning to a crush that may never see him the way he wants. A forbidden love, perhaps not to the standards of Shakespeare’s compositions, but socially forbidden none the less. The words beat in his chest as he pulls pieces of his own experience, making the work feel more alive, more birthed than mixed together in a tube. “Write what you know. Turn your troubles to words, and express what you could never show.” Kleo Quotes his 9 th grade English teacher, “It’s fiction after all, at least that’s all everyone else needs to believe.” The truth behind the story, behind the thickness of the plot, remains a part of Kleo’s early life that he’d happily locked away. Although, he was never a paramedic and the other guy wasn’t at all lost, he only needed to embellish and shift the story to suit the forbidden love requirements for the paper. In reality, forbidden isn’t a word, Kleo cares to even acknowledge. Except, when he wants to laugh at the futility of it being compared on aspects of his life. The word is merely a challenge gladly accepted. Somehow he manages already to reach 4 pages effortlessly. He, himself, doesn’t quite understand how he manages to achieve this but he doesn’t question it immediately. He allows his brain to pour the flesh onto the bones of the story and his heart to draw the stringy sinews together. It’s magical. It’s a miracle!!! He thinks, Calliope is surely on my side on this one!! Maybe if I’d invoked this particular muse days ago I would have already finished, but better late than not at all!! He finishes the work of fiction, and pleased with his concluded work, he looks it over. However, his veins are still overflowing with ambient inspiration. It is still too soon to call it quits and wrap it up. He presses the save button for this document and while it slowly goes through the saving process he works on the one he’s nearly finished. Suddenly the discourse seems interesting. He still isn’t fully capable of comprehending it but he manages to take what he has written and turns flips it around in the second half, making an explication of this nightmare. He works in questions of his own to add a personal flavour and attempts to see them into the natural flow of the paper. Even if the paper isn’t the best it could be, it becomes the best that it could be under the circumstances. This is why procrastination still prevails, his mind hums, It never ceases to amaze me, and it definitely doesn’t let me down when I need it. After finishing and beginning the save process on that paper he moves to the editing process of the bigger paper, the one he’s already completed. He feels as though it would be alright to just send it in without over looking it, but as he glances at it he immediately notices at least five sickening typos and he feels the intense urge to comb through the rest. Luckily he has just enough energy and divine inspiration to complete this task. As he combs through the last paper, he refines it making it infinitely better than whatever it was before. “The number of typos was..... astonishing...” he teases himself, “It wasn’t the worst paper I’ve ever read.” Oh, really?? That’s grand!! And to think I wrote it in a matter of two hours!! “ I..... could tell.” Kleo presses the save button and it moves faster than the rest. It completes and presents a successfully saved message. He hoots into the still night with vibrant rejoice! He’s finished. . . At least that’s how he’d wished it happened. Quickly 3 messages flash mockingly on the screen of his laptop. “Failure to save documents.” They read. The Joy and intense pride he once felt immediately transmigrated to Ashes beneath his tongue. It intensifies as he the word documents quickly erase sentence by sentence until each one has been removed. In sheer panic he abuses his mouse and keyboard trying to stop this catastrophe, but to no avail. All he can do now is watch as everything rots and draws out his devils. In distress he drops his head to the keyboard, then picks it back up and drops it again. He repeats steps one and two, again and again until he sees the God of Abraham and Isaac. The Clunk, Clunk, Clunk of his head raises in pitch each time. Until it’s a radiantly horrid ringing. He stops and opens his eyes. He’s washed in depression and sadness when he’s looking at a ceiling instead of the top of his desk, and the high pitch sound continues, exposing its true nature. He looks over at his screaming alarm clock and begins to cry. He never started any of the papers, yet instead fell asleep 17 hours ago. At least he’s well rested, and ready to brave the-- “Please....” He choke on his tears, “SHUT. . . . UP.”