His fingers tapped a steady rhythm on the keys. It was the only sound in the black silence of the morning. A single bulb gave off limp light above the table before being swallowed by the darkness.
They thought he was crazy to wake so early, but no one understood the burning need to record this story. It was a competition of a sort, trying to get the words on the page before the memory of the events disappeared or his time ran out.
That was what concerned him most. The story was burned into his brain, some of the details changed, but he knew the gist of what needed telling. It was time that concerned him.
He could feel it encroaching, as though someone were following him. He felt its presence throughout each day as he sat in his cubicle staring at a computer screen and work that did not matter.
He felt it in the pain that coursed through his fingers, through his wrists, up his forearms to his elbows every time he typed a word.
He felt it in the stiffness in his lower back and the knots in his upper back, and the sciatica that forced him to get up and move every few minutes instead of focusing on the telling.
His family told him he was crazy. His friends shook their heads in disbelief. They all wished he would stop torturing himself with the memory and the telling. They all felt no story was so important enough to cause him this pain, but he knew different.
And so he woke up well before the dawn each day, brewed a cup of coffee and curled into the pain to tell the story. His fingers pummeled the keys, his words bled in black lines across the page.
