Stori 7

rain by nasrin khosrowshahi

She is all rained in, it is quiet here, she drove all over town, in the rain, parked her car near the little cake shop, went there, returned to the car, got soaked and soaked. She now sits at her kitchen table and types away. She wants to write poetry, prose, great, great stuff. Insights, philosophical musings, she wants to find her glasses. It is so very quiet here, she should purchase a printer. Then she would not need to use Kinko’s or the printers in all the different libraries all over town, she would use less gas, would work so much more efficiently. She could blog. Maybe she should stop and start her blog. She is not in blogging mood. She has murdered ten people. Well, she has not, but she wants to liven up her prose. Write a crime novel. She ponders. Usually crime stories are not penned by the murderer, more by the Perry Masons and Colombos of this world. Mystery stories are not usually titled “I, the murderer”. She ponders if she should find something more serious to say then put down accounts of her problems with writing. She should take this laptop to the nearest coffee shop and start writing there. She never did that before, not with a laptop. With a notebook, of course. Then again, not here in this town, only when travelling. She logged in about one thousand words at UBC, in the learning centre there, but for some weird reason the printer did not work, at least not the one in the first floor. These days she writes at least a thousand words, trying to improve her writing by sheer input of time, by sheer volume, by practising her craft, by believing in the “practice makes perfect” maxim. Actually, at this point, practice does anything but, she finds herself reiterating the same slush over and over and over again. Besides, she uses very conventional spelling, very conventional words, no linguistic escapades, no pirouettes with the language, pure boring stuff. She is becoming, ever so gradually, a number, and the spell checker does the rest to put her in line. She uses non-fresh vocabulary,

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rain by nasrin khosrowshahi

she courts tradition, has nothing new to say. She foregoes shock value, sex, violence for regular bla, bla, bla. The brochures on the table clutter the kitchen table, old brochures, magazines, estimate, bank receipts. She should really clean this up, that is why she prefers to go to the library, to write at a non cluttered desk. Where everything is perfectly arranged, where other creatures are typing away, just like her. Other amoebas. She ponders whether she should use terms like creatures and amoebas to describe persons. Her word count is 449, she still has to double that. She looks at the popcorn machine and wonders if it still works. It is about twenty years old. She is out of words and wonders once more what to write about. This Vancouver summer is so very, very boring, nothing is really happening and all she can do is listen to her own typing, her fingers tapping away at the keyboard, trying to pen something, anything. The rain stopped. Birds are flying by, she writes and writes. She will take the Arbutus bus down to Kinko’s on West Broadway and type this out and then come back and put it into her manuscript pile, let the manuscript for her second book grow, so very organically, like a tree in a garden. God knows, it is raining constantly, her stories are like flowers that are watered. She ponders if she is using crystal clear language, she is so very bored. Her writing is utterly repetitive, without any hiccups, without any diversion, far, far away from brilliance; her writing is as dull as the weather, she will read this later on and maybe the words will start dancing and become gorgeous, coherent, fascinating and mesmerizing. Something like that. In Vancouver, on July Fifth, 2008, on a rainy, eventless day here in the city.

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