This was originally going to be a longer piece (or at least have more ‘story’). Only I didn’t really know where it was going, what the reason for the alterations was.
Was it actually an external entity interfering with our protagonist? If so, to what end? Or was he losing control of his faculties, and, as he puts it, falling into paranoia? All the questions he asks (and keeps asking) himself would be answered!
But as I carried on adding pages to the narrative trying to land on an ending, they all felt …less somehow. That each of them diminished the story by making it all too neat and tidy (a trait I find myself having to consciously work against in my writing – probably a hangover from my day job, where explaining things to the nth degree is a very big part of what I do!)
Aliens? A ‘Matrix’-like world? Paranoia and insanity?
It was only as I reached (what I was beginning to worry was looking like the halfway point when our hero asks himself these questions with a view to whether he wants answers to them, did I realise I had my ending.
Now, this may seem like a cop-out on my part, but I knew the moment I had written the protagonist’s final sentence (or is it..?) that that was the end of the narrative.
End of the story? No. Who knows what he discovers? Not me. And if I do know, I’m not telling 🙂
So its over to you to read and decide how our hero’s story ends, and what, or who is the root of his ills.
That I suppose is the beauty of fiction. A writer thinks they are saying one thing, the reader sees something else, something different. Sometimes even something hidden, even from the author!
Anyway, here it is.
Oh, and yes, I did have the ‘tomato moment’ a few years back – the situation was different but the feelings and thoughts were exactly the same. After 40 odd years of absolutely loathing the things, one day my brain went ‘You like tomatoes, have one.’
I still have to test myself periodically to make sure that switch hasn’t flipped back.
rd – 2020
Beckbridge - sometime scribbler 