At Last

     [A short story for you today, from my friend F. James Dagg. James has a gift I lack: the ability to grab you by the heart and squeeze with a bare few hundred words. The following is a fine example of his prowess. — FWP]

     His heart shivered when he saw the return address: Manhattan—not one of the largest publishers, but one whose notice any young writer would be thrilled to have. She wouldn’t mind if he opened it. Oh my…this kind of money buys a lot of time to write. He couldn’t wait to tell her.
     A year and a half earlier she had published her first novel—a tender and evocative fantasy that wove the rough cords of this world with the luminous filaments of a finer one into a tapestry of surpassing beauty. He had stood beside her the whole year of writing—reading drafts, making the occasional, modest suggestion and, most important, saying, you can when she needed to hear it. His pride had been nearly as great as hers when she finished.
     Then, the harder part: the countless queries, the many submissions, the few replies—letters that resembled, on the outside, the one he now held in his hand—the slight droop of her shoulders each time she opened a letter and read the first lines.
     But one day, as so often happened, an idea struck them both at the same time: Independence! Many independent filmmakers had escaped Hollywood’s deceptive rigidity, hadn’t they? And hadn’t many independent musicians made their names on the internet without help from the big studios? Why not an independent novelist?
     She designed a cover—an image as fine and lovely as her prose—while he studied hard to learn to make the pages look altogether professional. After weeks—and many late nights—they scraped together enough money for a print-on-demand account and a website—and launched her novel. He warned her not to expect too much at first, and he had been right—her receipts were modest for the first half-year, and again his heart broke to see that slight dip of her shoulders when the statements came each month. There had been times he had almost wished she would weep as he held her. The final half of that year brought some improvement, but not enough to matter.
     The six months just past, however, had been like the arrival of a belated, if muted, spring. The monthly statements showed a steady upturn, but more important, her novel was mentioned more and more on the internet, and just lately had begun to be discussed in print. A tipping point had been reached. A conversation had begun. The world was beginning to notice. He tucked the envelope in his pocket, closed the door behind him and set off to tell her.
     He turned off the road and walked up the path. When he stopped, he wondered yet again how it was that a half-year could encompass an eternity of sorrow, and as he knelt on the nearly healed earth, for what seemed the thousandth time the paired impressions assaulted him: the words of Robert Burns’s widow, Oh, Robbie, you asked for bread, and they gave you a stone, and the hot, suffocating fumes that had poured over him, that day, when he had opened the garage door. He laid the letter beside her stone and, bending lower, whispered, “It came at last, love.”

Copyright © 2010 by F.J. Dagg. All rights reserved.