Poetry Stories: The Novelist

Chapter 1. The end...

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The Novelist is a book by L.L. Barkat, which combines prose and poetry. A few of the chapters also have audio. (This audio is not public on YouTube, but we’re including the link for you here, to enjoy.)

Chapter 1

THE END.

She typed finality across the center of the page and closed the laptop with a snap.

What would it be this morning? She turned to her tea cabinet and opened it quietly. Maybe a green jasmine. She could tweet about it later and make Megan smile. Megan would have tweeted something about a new Earl Grey, and they would share fantasies about each other’s kitchens and tea cups. Or did Megan use a mug?

This would explain it. Why she typed, “The End.” This lack of attention to detail. Shouldn’t she know by now what Megan took her tea in? Hadn’t she read a few hundred tweets or more, about English Breakfasts and new green blends, a white tea for afternoon, and a cataloging of how many cups Megan had drunk by 9 pm? She had. Over and again, she had.

But she could not recall Megan’s imbibing-receptacle-of-choice. A novelist would remember these things. She would even be willing to research about tea, wouldn’t she? To create a believable character based on Megan? An authentic character who knew her basic pekoes from her golden tippys?

Novelists were like that. The real ones, anyway. The ones that Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa wrote about in Letters to a Young Novelist. Flaubert, Proust, Thomas Wolfe.