The more you use your brain, the more brain you will have to use.
George A. Dorsey
What a piece of brain is a man
They knock right when he’s finally got the right word. He lifts his head toward the door. Silence. Good. He takes another pull of the red and goes back to it. The pen moves across the page, presses down, stops. Three decent lines in an hour. Dammit. They knock again. Probably the neighbor looking for her cat.
He drags on his shirt and catches himself in the hallway mirror. Blue eyes, dirty blond hair going every which way, three days’ stubble. He buttons a few. There’s a stain on the right side, over the heart. Looks like somebody put one in him. He licks his fingers and works at it. It fades but spreads.
“To hell with it,” he mutters.
“Good evening. I hope I’m not intruding.”
For a few seconds he looks at the woman standing there. Not the old neighbor after her cat.
“You don’t just walk in,” he says.
“The door was open.”
He shifts his eyes from the shape of her to the doorframe, where the western sky is coming apart in fire.
“Hell, what time is it?”
“Eight in the evening, mister.”
“Where’d the rest of the day go?”
“You got a clock in here?”
“Don’t keep one. Work’s done when it’s done.”
“You should get one.”
He looks her straight in the face this time. She has green eyes. He runs a hand through his hair and fastens the last button.
“So. Who are you?”
“I’ve come to offer you something.”
He’d spent the money on wine. Dammit.
“Agency screwed up. I don’t need company tonight.”
Something in his gut disagrees.
“I’m not with that kind of agency.”
“You lose a cat or something?”
“I have a deal for you.”
“A deal?”
“The work without the working.”
“Come again?”
She walks past him into the house. He watches her move. The way her hips work through the room. Low heels, but tall. Green dress, same green as her eyes. Matching the dress to the eyes. Cheap trick, and he knows it. She plants herself in the center of the room. He sets the bottle down on whatever’s close.
She looks at the pages on the table.
“You’re a writer,” she says.
“I write.”
“Then you’re a writer.”
He stands there in front of her. She’s something, no question. And the neckline... Jesus. The dress does what it does.
“This won’t take long, mister. Let me show you.”
“Look, I got work to do. Tell me what you want and maybe we get somewhere.”
“I have a machine.”
“What kind of machine.”
“For writing.”
“Already got one.”
“This one’s different,” she says, and steps closer. “One button. It does the rest.”
“Meaning what?”
“Would you like to see it?” She looks up at him.
Short black hair, cut close to the jaw.
“Alright. Let’s see this writing machine.”
On the table it looks like a typewriter. He watches her fingers on the keys. The green dress pulls across her hips when she leans in, rides up just enough at the back. He fills in the rest himself. Every time she comes close his body makes a decision he has to deal with and he shifts in the chair.
“You follow?”
“Sure.”
His marriage ended on that word.
“Then I’ll connect the cables.”
“Wait, what cables?”
She pulls out a nest of thin black wires and holds them out to him.
“Hey, those got needles on the end.”
“They need to go beneath the skin.”
“Okay now hold on, back up, explain what exactly you think you’re doing.”
“No one has died from this machine.”
He presses back into the chair but she follows him there. She arranges the wires around his neck and slides the needle home. What he feels now starts somewhere in his spine.
“Jesus, something’s burning under my skin.”
He reaches up to scratch at it but her hand is already there, closing around his wrist.
“Think,” she says.
“About what?”
“A story, just think. Let it go.”
“Okay, okay.”
He breathes. Takes a second. Then something settles in his mind. The typewriter starts up. The keys move fast, one after another, the carriage sliding right, the bell, the snap back. All the way to the bottom of the page. Around the needles the skin has opened up, just a little, a thin line of blood at each entry point. The veins in his neck stand out purple under the white skin, running up toward his skull.
When it stops he slumps over the table.
“Christ,” he says, into the wood.
She reads. Eyes going line to line.
“You were supposed to think about your work. But this shows what it can do.”
She puts the pages in front of him. He reads them. His eyes go to her dress, then away. He clears his throat.
“In my defense…”
“Not your fault, mister. My dress is too tight, I knew that when I chose it, but the color was perfect.”
“I can only agree about the color, I guess. How does it do it? The transcription.”
“Trade secret.”
“I don’t buy what I can’t understand.”
She smiles.
“You can write without stopping. Even in your sleep. Dozens of stories, and at a speed you couldn’t dream of.”
His blood’s up, hot under the skin.
“Okay. What does it cost?”
“No money,” she says, and leans in.
Those big green eyes steady on his face. Her lips are red, candy-red, cherry-glossed.
”What, then?”
“I want a piece of your brain.”
She walks out of the writer’s house carrying a sealed bag. The sky has gone flat, no sun, no clouds, almost dark blue with a bone-white moon inside. She walks to a ‘41 Ford at the curb. Inside, there’s a man in orange. She opens the trunk and sets the container next to the others, all the same size, all labeled by name, and closes it, and gets in.
“Done,” she says.
“That’s a quick kind of done.”
“Not hard when you know what they’re after.”
“Still feels like it should be harder.”
“It should.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Most of them swear it still sounds like them.”
“You think it does?”
“Not really. But they’re faster. He’ll do a book a week now.”
“Work without working.”
“Yeah.”
“Can he still think?”
“He thinks he can. And he won’t know what three good lines cost him. That’s the funny part.”
“Crazy.”
“Mark him done.”
The man in orange draws a line through a name on a long list of names. She puts it in gear and pulls away easy. On the side of the road, an old woman carries her cat. She looks happy.
This one was trouble from the beginning. Very noir-ish. I like it but you'd think one of those writers would know better. Hehe.
"On the side of the road, an old woman carries her cat. She looks happy."
That is a brilliant punchline to such a thematic piece.