A frustrated writer comes home from his dull dayjob to check his mail, finding only another dehumanizing letter from New York. He tears the envelope open, the “Dear Author” opening the letter confirming the dehumanization. Entering his house, he surveys the walls. They are covered in rejection letters save one small space in the lower right-hand corner of the kitchen. He affixes the letter to the empty space and decides he is now officially a failed writer. He has waited for this day, it just came a little sooner than expected.
Upstairs, his office is filled with manuscripts, none of them accepted by a major publisher. The room smells of paper. Reams of failure. He has an overwhelming urge to set the room on fire but knows he won’t do that. It’s just not like him. He is a sober, forward-thinking individual. It just wouldn’t do to burn down the office and, probably, the entire house. If he destroys his house and himself then he has failed as a human being also. Now that he no longer considers himself a writer, being a human is the only thing he has left. But, he can’t see himself as a human. Not yet. Perhaps over time. For now, he can only see himself as a failed writer. He has no wife, no children. This was to be his legacy. No longer. He’ll use the manuscripts for kindling come winter. He gathers up his typewriter and stamps. The envelopes he’ll use for kindling along with the manuscripts since they are, in a sense, the vessels of his failure.
He takes his typewriter to a pawnshop downtown. A bearded man with rickets tells him he’ll give him a dollar for it. “No one uses typewriters anymore,” he says. The failed writer chuffs and storms out of the shop, leaving both the typewriter and the dollar behind. He takes the stamps to the post office. The postal clerk, a dapper man with, inexplicably, a parrot on his shoulder, tells him they do not take returns on stamps. The failed writer tries to explain his situation to the clerk. “I don’t need them anymore. I’ll no longer be sending out any manuscripts.” The clerk only shakes his head and tells him maybe he can use them for bills or something. The failed writer also shakes his head while the clerk explains this to him, peeling off the stamps and sticking them all over the counter, muttering, “Yeah,” and “There you go,” under his breath. Eventually, he is escorted out by a burly carrier just coming off her route.
The failed writer returns home and sits on his couch. He wishes he had a television. The room of books no longer holds any appeal for him. He realizes he only read as some form of study and requirement anyway. It was only his goal to surpass those writers he had read and, now that he no longer writes, there is no one to surpass. He takes a deep breath and looks at all the rejections papering the walls.
The time passes, the paper yellows, his days grind on. The stack of manuscripts in the office, over many winters, slowly dwindles. Eventually the failed writer becomes an old man, leaving behind his job for whole days of staring at his yellowing, peeling wallpaper. Then, one day, the failed writer becomes a corpse. Although he never got around to living, never really became a human, death accepted him.
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