Not fit to print but not fit to burn, Deb's words spilled out like a torrent. It was a once-romantic text, at least in her esteem, but not in theirs. True, she has no data to back that up — no editor has named it abhorrent — but she senses there is a tedious flow to her paragraphs (which speak on their own behalf, "There'll be no need for autographs").

Proud fiction which fell from her fingertips, that prose is inert now and dormant. Her characters move without motives and they lack in sympathy. She took her fingers then off the keys and went to sit by the floor vent. She rested her head on the hardwood, right on the dirty floor, and watched as the clock struck four. The chimes, they did not ignore her.

She crawled to the window to look outside and stopped to wonder what the war meant for the people who passed on the street below, were their voices fleshed out. She moved all the dead fruit into a row on the sill at her home in the Sunset and picked up her palette as the thought came: "I lead a lonely life." She paints, with a putty knife, a Californian still life.

At home, far away, she would have found a way to transcend the bittersweetness of and the dead-beatness of this feeling. Magnetic poetry was astray on the floor. She knew she wrote enough today. Her typewriting hands are sore cause her words ignore their meanings.

At night with her paints and her pens at rest, she still doubted but tried to ignore it. From her bed she reached and turned the last lamp off in her tranquil room. When dawn came she'd rise and she'd write some more, but for now she would rest the discordant voices in her head while she listened to the breeze hit the drapes.

That wind travelled three blocks from the frigid beach to her there in her third floor apartment. As she drifted she reminded herself not to doubt all the love she'd poured out down by the western shore. At least the ocean did not ignore her.