Tangents and Tribulations

Arthur Penhaligon, a man whose natural habitat was a state of mild panic punctuated by the occasional existential dread, found himself once again in the hallowed, or perhaps more accurately, the haunted, halls of his study. The Blank Page, that colossal, unyielding adversary, lay before him, its stark whiteness a taunt to his very soul. He’d tried everything, from chanting to the muses (who, he suspected, had retired to a quiet beach somewhere and were thoroughly enjoying their pina coladas) to sniffing old library books in the faint hope of absorbing literary genius through osmosis. Nothing. The page remained stubbornly, defiantly, gloriously empty.

He’d even resorted to the ancient art of ‘writing about writing,’ a meta-fictional ouroboros that usually ended with him staring at a page filled with sentences that began with “The writer…,” trailed off into a sigh, and ended with ellipses. Today, however, something had shifted. A tiny, almost imperceptible tremor in the fabric of his writer’s block had occurred. It had started, as most cataclysmic events in Arthur’s life seemed to, with his own clumsy anatomy.

He’d been pacing, a frantic, caged tiger of literary aspiration, muttering about the existential angst of a particularly stubborn semicolon. His foot, in its customary pursuit of minor self-inflicted injury, had connected with the unforgiving corner of his desk with a resounding *thwack*. Pain, sharp and immediate, shot up his leg, momentarily eclipsing the intellectual agony of the Blank Page. As he hopped on one foot, clutching his throbbing appendage, a thought, as bizarre and unexpected as a squirrel wearing a tiny top hat, wormed its way into his consciousness.