Hey, This is a short I wrote on my lunch break. It’s rough, raw, and completely unedited. The tone is somewhere between self-loathing, existential crisis, and bourbon-drenched hallucination. The protagonist finds out he’s a character in someone else’s unwritten story—mine—and it pushes him over the edge (again).
It’s not polished. I don’t need praise. I want to know if it punches. I want to know if it lands—or if it’s just noise. Tear it apart if you need to. I won’t flinch.
(Warning: drug use, sex, suicidal thoughts, and harsh language.)
Would love to know what works, what doesn’t, and whether you’d read something else like this. Thanks in advance.
I lay my head on my hand, elbow resting on the hard wood bar top. The yellowish pine staring back at me. My mind drifts as I pick up the small glass of bourbon. The dark liquid burns my throat as I tip my head back and down my drink, but unfortunately not my sorrows.
“Hey, Asher, what’s your problem tonight?” Phil, the bartender asks. “I mean, you always look like someone just finger fucked your cat, but tonight it’s…I don’t know, ya know? You just seem a bit worse than normal.”
“Nothing, man, nothing,” I say as I slam the glass back down on the counter. “Gimme another.”
Phil pours out another shot of the cheap liquor. Worst stuff I’ve ever had, but it gets the job done. And today, I really need it.
I told him nothing, but the truth is, if I tried to explain it to him, he’d just say I’m crazy or brush it off as the ramblings of a drunk.
My name is Asher Cross and I am an author. Or at least, I was an author. I haven’t exactly written anything in awhile. A decade or so. I wrote some great works, my bestselling being an anthology of stories about deals with the devil. I sit in front of my computer screen and it just stares back, mocking me. The little cursor on the screen blink, blink, blinking, laughing. I can always hear that laughter.
After hours of nothing, I’ll come down to this lovely establishment, where my self loathing will overtake me and I’ll drown it all out with a few shots of bourbon, followed by some illicit substances. I end my nights by taking home one of the lovely ladies that hang around outside, usually at a steal of a price. Or sometimes, one of the junkies will hit me up while I’m taking a piss, and I’ll let him suck me in a bathroom stall for a little bit of blow.
But what is it that makes me so sour tonight? What is it that caused Phil, the man who has seen me at my absolute lowest, to raise an eyebrow in concern? The truth, the truth is I’m a character. No, I don’t mean I’m a fucking clown or that I’m a good guy to have at a party. I mean, I’m not real. Phil isn’t real, none of the whores outside are real. The junky that swallowed my load about a half hour ago, so he can go get his fix, he’s not real either. None of us are real.
I don’t know how or why, but when I woke up this morning I was given the knowledge that I live in a fictional world. Tomorrow, I won’t know that shit, but today, for one whole day, I have to know. I’ve tried, several different ways in fact, to end it all today. First I tried to slit my wrists, but the razor I used suddenly turned to rubber. I ate a bottle of sleeping pills and felt nothing. I looked at the bottle and it read Pez. I put a gun in my mouth, the metallic taste being very distinct on my tongue, but it somehow became a plastic toy. The most damage it did was when I pulled it out of my mouth, the orange cap on the end scraped the roof of my mouth. Fuck.
So, I finally did what I always did, I ended up on this very barstool. The same faux leather barstool I sit in every night. The peeling silver duct tape with stray strands covering a massive gash in the seat, from that time I got into that bar fight and I used the seat to block a knife.
Every story I’ve told, every memory I’ve had, none of it is mine. It all comes from the mind of some sad sack who gets his jollies by writing the terrible shit that I go through. My ups and downs. My success and downfall. The spiraling I’ve done, due to the writer’s block I struggle with each and every day. Instead of giving me a happy life of success and a wife with big titties, he gives me perpetual depression and one broken relationship after another. The drowning in disease infested pussy, instead of high class shit that comes from willing participants.
The terrible part is, he hasn’t even written this shit out yet. I live in his mind. He has these stories that are memories for me, and he hasn’t even put pen to page yet. He’s going to simply use me like a little whore on Reddit for a while, developing his technique before turning my life into something more substantial. My knowledge of simply being a character comes as his first story.
More or less, my god is an awful god. And I will sit here and drink this nasty shit until I forget. When I wake up tomorrow this will all have been lost to me. At least he’s showing me mercy in that way.
submitted by /u/WizardryAndWaffles
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