The Empty Heart: A Collection by Derek Murphy

Author:Derek Murphy [Murphy, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Derek A. Murphy
Published: 2011-04-07T04:30:00+00:00

Repetitions

He wasn’t anything like any kind of Hollywood hero that you see on the movie screen but he wasn’t bad looking, either. Rod Hayden was just an average kind of guy, interested in cars, guns, hunting and fishing. Oh, and writing. He loved to write. Anything. Everything. His efforts at poetry amounted to so much drivel and once he was finished with one, it went into a stack of other papers and promptly disappeared from his memory. Short stories were a different animal and he felt they contained more of a punch than his novels. Just at the moment, he sat in front of his computer screen, perplexed and disappointed. What some people called ‘the Muse’, had deserted him. He didn’t indulge in any kind of artsy-fartsy description of what inspired him; he just called it an urge to write.

What currently bothered him was the feeling that no matter what he did, no matter how well he wrote, he would never enjoy any kind of success in the field. Success in anything had always eluded him while others managed to take his work, stolen actually, and turn handsome profits from it. No matter how many ways, or how many times he revealed that he was the author of one piece or another, all recognition and any measure of success continued to slip from his grasp. He supposed that he was as inept at defending his authorship as he was at marketing his work. Agents and publishers just weren’t interested in his work unless someone else ‘filed off the serial number’ and presented it as their own with an expertise garnered from ‘working the system’.

Picking up the bottle of pills he had secretly collected for months from some of his friends who indulged in ‘pharmaceutical recreation’, he hoped they would be enough. He didn’t want to wake up in the hospital and have some doctor stand over him, telling him that the courts had ordered him held for psychiatric evaluation. That would be just the latest in a long line of disappointing failures.

He upended the bottle into his mouth and followed it with a long pull at the bottle of whiskey he had been nursing for the past hour. Maybe one of his few friends would find him in a few days. Before the whiskey and pills began to tell on him, he set about writing the obligatory suicide note. By the time he was finished, he was sure that there were a couple of run-on sentences in it and drunkenly shook his head at what an editor would think.

* * *

The deck slanted at such an angle that he was sure he wouldn’t be able to keep his feet and held onto the rail with a desperate grip. The lifeboat he had watched Mary step into was just settling into the water, only half-full of women and children. The crewmen shoved with their oars against the side of the huge ship, pushing away from it and in a few minutes, pulled strongly, moving toward the small group of boats that had left the stricken ship earlier.

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