The Writer
By Dana Quell

Today, an ambulance rushes on the highway, sirens wailing, as it carries a man close to death to a hospital, where he might possibly be persuaded to stay in this reality for just a little while longer. The paramedics with him are experienced enough to know that this will not be possible for much more time; he will be D.O.A. if he can not receive more sophisticated care at a better equipped facility. The driver of the ambulance is impatient, as none of the cars in front of him seem eager to move out of their way, despite the flashing lights and the noise that the ambulance rides with.

The road this ambulance takes winds its way out of the heart of town and into the more rural area where farmers try to win their livings with soil as infertile as sand and where wild animals roam, unable to distinguish man's pavement from nature's preserve, and, subsequently become nourishment for the crows. This road is also home to one single residence -- this is the house of David Broeder.

It can hardly be called a house, as it is merely sticks piled up to support a leaky roof of this and that. He could fix it, make it look nicer, but he never has bothered to before. He has always been too busy with his work.

He is a writer. Inside his house are two wall shelves supporting the weight of nearly half a dozen of his books. He writes horror, things that make his readers paranoid with fear and queasy with revulsion. "Too real," his critics rant, their only negative remarks. His grammar is flawless, as his editor always points out, and his plotlines are always suspenseful, full of depth and raw human emotion. But "too real" -- some of his readers are always left wondering exactly how he is able, every single time, to get inside a monster's head so fully, to describe some of the more gruesome scenes in every gory detail.

They shouldn't wonder. After all

He is a writer, and all the books around him are extensions of him, bits of his present-then, little pieces of his soul that have been captured like dead butterflies and preserved for all ever afters. He markets them as fiction; it is only he who knows the truth.

And the truth today is the blare of the sirens as they rush past his little shack on the highway out of town, off to try and save someone from a fire or an accident or a madman just so the man being rescued can later kill himself or have his unfortunate life prolonged by machinery, those cold metallic slaves of the human race and their ideas and ideals of technology and time.

The truth today is nothing but a lie he lives now.