Plot:
You're sitting in New York City (the not so good part) in your agent's ratty office surrounded by stacks and stacks of paper, dusty furniture, and Taco Bell cups. She's smoking and speaking to you in that condescending accent of hers. She peeks up at you over the top of her half-framed glasses, ashes fall onto her desk from her Marlboro, and she says, "I know, I know, you told me they're in love, but it's a video game, this Second World whatever thingy of yours. You tell me right h'yere on page seven how two avatahs go about falling in love. But sweethawt, I need to know WHY they're in love." Why why why. You have your characters, you have a sense of what happens to them, but tell us about the bottom of the iceberg. Why are these things important? What is at stake?
The Plot
Sitting alone in the tiny cemetary listening to the trees groan and crack seemed like the best way to ...
Saving Energy
Have you started installing these fancy new lightbulbs in your house? How do you like them? What do you have that is really old and way better than something modern? What makes you feel holier?
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The Plot by Wolfgang Glinka
It is unusual to be given a burial plot by a stranger.
All he had done was what he had always done - visit the cemetery on fine evenings to sit under the trees and hope to find some tranquillity.
It was a morbid impulse possibly but when he sat under the deep green umbrellas of the yew trees, he was not thinking about his death, it was his life that haunted him.
He was an average guy, well that is how he saw himself. Nothing remarkable really: thirtysomething, no unusual features or body markings except for the incongruous ring through his nose.
He wore black, certainly, but that was part of his testosterone fueled, rock music inspired adolescence.
He was not giving up on that, no matter what else he was forced to jettison.
He had lost many things but not his sense of his own style.
He was a badass, a guitar man, an introvert with a bleak sense of humour.
He smiled - bitterness mixed with mirth. So why did this man pick me?
"You are looking beyond those graves, my friend," the strange man had said when he first sat down next to him.
"I am just looking, man," he replied quickly and too easily.
"What do you see?"
"Not a lot."
The stranger was probably an old man. He had silver gray hair but his face, his skin, or something about him, had a translucence, almost a transparency which made it difficult to register his features.
Or that was how it seemed on that peculiar evening.
He wore a black suit, white shirt, black tie and shining black shoes.
He looked like an undertaker or maybe a priest.
"Keep looking," the stranger said in a muffled and kindly voice.
"You are a man like any other and you will suffer before you find calm. Keep looking my friend."
"I find calm here," the younger man replied. He was uncomfortable, confused and tried to repress a rising sense of fear.
"Yes my friend, I can see that you are looking for calm. One day you will find it in this very place. As you know, it waits for you here under these trees that you love so well."
"Who are you? How do you know me?"
"I have been watching you. Day by day you sit here, yearning for something you will not find in this world."
"Here, take this. It will comfort you and give you hope."
He passed over a document and then he was gone.
The young man sat for some time, trembling, filled with fear, frightened even to look down at the paper in his hand.
When he did, he saw, yes, it was a deed certificate for a burial plot which was right under his feet.
The evening light struggled to illuminate the melancholy scene and the man could stay there no more.
Back to the town, to his room above a shop, huddled in his bed under a shabby soiled blanket, his body shook, his teeth chattered until he could move no more.
All night long he lay there, paralysed in his terror with only a repeated mantra holding him from despair.
"I don't want to die. I don't want to die. Oh please don't let me die."
Who was he praying to? His God, himself or the stranger who had penetrated to the depth of his soul?
In the morning he felt better. Embarrassed by distant, troubled memories of the night before.
Then he remembered the document, that he had hugged so superstitiously through his hours of torment.
"Jesus loves you, " the Christian newssheet read. "Seek and ye shall find."
He was converted.
Converted to life and to hope.
Determined to kick his habit.
Wolfgang Glinka
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