The Last Decade
By Jude Trail
Elwood Gunter had been preparing for greatness for twenty-three years, four months, and sixteen days. Not that he was counting, mind you, but a man tends to remember when he starts paying twenty-one dollars and ninety-nine cents a month for something that nobody reads.
His apartment on Oak Street had witnessed this preparation with the patience of old furniture. The same desk, scarred by coffee rings and bleached by the odd splash of scotch had been used with enthusiasm from a thousand midnight inspirations. The same chair, molded to accommodate a writer’s particular brand of restless sitting. The same two cats, Dickens and Twain, who had replaced their predecessors (Poe and Hawthorne) when old age claimed them. That cats and writers must both eventually claim eternity as their home, Elwood had no doubts.
But more importantly, Elwood’s wife, Margaret, who had watched this ritual unfold over the last two decades with the bemused affection of someone who understands that great artists require great patience, even when they’re taking an uncommonly long time to become great.
Elwood’s theory was simple, elegant, and completely untested: he would save his best work for his final decade. The masterpieces, five or six novels he’d been saving back in his fireproof safe like literary wine, would emerge when he was ready to stake his entire reputation on their excellence. Until then, he would bide his time and practice. He would build his audience and his connections. Everything, these days, dangled on the whimsy of timing.
The practice took the form of a weekly publication through his website www.fictionweekly.com, where he published stories under the pen name L. Wood Gunter. The stories were nothing fancy, just exercises to keep his hand steady and his imagination limber. Short seven to ten-minute reads about everything and anything he was thinking about that day. A conversation overheard at the grovery store, a meditation on the particular loneliness of Tuesday afternoons, a fairy tale about a man who collected expired car tags and hung them around his coffee shop.
“Daily throwaways,” he called them. The way a pianist would go through scales or how a boxer might knock off an hour working speed bag exercises. Necessary work, but not art.
Margaret had learned, over the course of their twenty-year and more relationship, that certain conversations with Elwood required the delicate touch of a diplomat. Talking to him about money was nearer to negotiating a ceasefire and any direct suggestions toward his writing was oft to land like criticism. But, that didn’t stop her from helping him steer his career. She used environmental influences and because she was just as, or probably more, smarter than him, they were all subtle as morning light. She used them to guide his mind toward conclusions that when he realized them they felt entirely his own.
Which is why, on the third Tuesday of September, when the bill was deducted from their bank account with a surprisingly high number, she paused her coffee cup halfway to her lips. Margaret knew she was holding something more than a simple invoice. She was holding the end of an era.
Instead of going straight to Elwood, she called the provider. “The bill is wrong,” she insisted when she finally got a human on the phone.
He explained that there was two million, three hundred thousand unique visitors in the month of September.
Margaret thanked him and set her coffee down on the kitchen breakfast nook. She logged in and read the numbers for herself. Nearly 2800 dollars to pay the bill. It was bad, but she knew it could be good. Very good, indeed.
She walked into Elwood’s study, where he sat in his customary position: hunched over his keyboard, wrestling with what he assumed was another throwaway piece about the psychology of people who return their shopping carts and the dementia od those who couldn’t remember to.
“Elwood, dear,” she said, setting the bill on his desk with the casual precision of someone placing a chess piece. “I think there might be an error with our hosting account.”
Elwood glanced at the paper the way he might notice a bird landing on the windowsill. He was present in mind, but not immediately attentive to anything not relevant to the serious business of writing.
“Hmm?” he murmured, still typing.
“It says we had over two million visitors last month.”
His fingers stopped. Not dramatically, because Elwood was not given to dramatic gestures, but with the careful stillness of a man who has just heard something that doesn’t make sense in any universe he recognizes.
“That’s impossible,” he said, finally looking at the bill. “My little blog gets maybe sixty readers on a good week.”
But the number sat there, stubborn as mathematics, impossible to argue with or explain away.
What followed was the kind of investigation a man conducts when his entire understanding of reality requires urgent revision. Elwood discovered that his “little blog” had been mentioned on seventeen different book sites, shared forty-three thousand times on social media, and quoted in three academic papers about contemporary American fiction.
His story about the woman who collected lost buttons had been translated into seven languages. His piece about the man who measured rainfall with coffee cans had inspired an upcoming documentary about backwoods weather prediction. His throwaway tale about a library that stayed open just for insomniacs had prompted two cities to actually create such programs.
“But these aren’t good stories,” Elwood told Margaret that evening, staring at his laptop screen with the expression of a man watching his shadow develop opinions of its own.
“I know, dear,” Margaret said, in the tone she reserved for truths that needed to arrive gently.
“They’re not my real work.”
“Of course not.”
“The novels, in the safe, those are what I’ve been…”
“Naturally, dear.”
Margaret had read those novels. All seven of them, painstakingly crafted over two decades. They were technically proficient, literarily ambitious, and utterly bloodless. Written by a man trying so hard to create Art that he’d forgotten to create characters with a life.
The blog stories, on the other hand, bubbled with the kind of humanity that comes from not trying to be important. They were written by a man who thought no one was watching, so he could afford to be himself. “Write like no one is reading,” she thought, would be a great title of a short story collection.
Over the following weeks, as offers began arriving in their modest mailbox like lottery tickets, Margaret watched Elwood grapple with a success that felt suspiciously like failure. Publishers wanted more of his “casual style.” Literary agents praised his “effortless voice.” Book reviewers called his work “refreshingly unself-conscious.”
All of which sounded, to Elwood’s ears, like elaborate ways of saying his practice work was accidentally better than his real work, which suggested that everything he thought he knew about writing was wrong.
“Maybe,” Margaret suggested one morning, while ostensibly reading the newspaper, “it’s worth considering that your practice pieces aren’t practice at all. Maybe they’re just… great pieces.”
Elwood looked up from his oatmeal and two sausage patties with the expression of a man who has just been told that his morning routine might be the actual purpose of his life.
The phone call came on a Thursday.
“Mr. Gunter,” the voice belonged to someone whose time was clearly worth more per minute than most people made in a day. “I represent a consortium of media companies. We’d like to make you an offer.”
The offer was ten million dollars. Cash. For the complete rights to his blog and the stories published on it. They would own his pen name and his agreement to never write fiction under the name again.
“We see tremendous potential in the L. Wood Gunter brand,” the voice continued. “But we’d need complete control. New stories, written by our team, published under the pen name. A content library that we can expand and monetize without the… uhhh… without the unpredictability of an individual’s artistic vision.”
Elwood held the phone with the careful grip of a man holding a snake had already bitten him once.
“You want to buy my stories and my name,” he said slowly, “in a way that would prevent me from writing more stories under that name.”
“Exactly. It’s really quite generous, Mr. Gunter. Most writers never see this kind of money.”
That evening, Elwood sat in his study, staring at the fireproof safe that contained his life’s serious work. Twenty-three years of preparation. Seven novels that demonstrated his complete mastery of the craft. Characters who behaved exactly as literary theory suggested they should. Plots that resolved with the precision of mathematical equations.
None of it had ever made anyone laugh, or cry, or stay up past their bedtime reading. Stories that no one ever thought of or wished there was just one more page left.
Margaret found him there, after midnight, staring at the safe.
“They want to erase me,” he said.
“I know.”
“Ten million dollars to become a ghost writer for my own stories.”
“I heard.”
“But, the stories? They aren’t throwaways, are they, Margaret?”
She sat down in her reading chair beside his desk. The same chair they’d found at the dump and she’d occupied for more than twenty years of conversations about his writing, his dreams, his elaborate theories about time travel and science and the importance of artistic timing.
“Elwood,” she said, “do you know what I think about when I read your blog stories?”
He shook his head.
“I think about the scholarship fund we could endow to students for decades to come. The ‘L. Wood Gunter Grant for Young Fiction Writers.’ I think about students fifty years from now, reading your stories in literature classes. I think about the literary paper at the high school we could sponsor, filled with stories by students who’d never got the chance you’ve been given.”
Elwood turned to look at her. He really looked at her for the first time in a week.
“You’ve been planning this,” he said. “The way you mentioned the hosting costs, the way you left those articles about writers’ estates on my desk. You’ve been managing me toward this moment.”
Margaret smiled with the satisfaction of someone whose twenty-year investment in patience was finally paying dividends.
“Elwood Gunter,” she said, “you have spent two decades preparing to be worthy of recognition. And now you’ve discovered, what I’ve known all along, that you were worthy the whole time. You were just looking in the wrong place.”
The cats, Dickens and Twain, chose this moment to pad into the study and settle themselves on either side of Elwood’s chair, as if they too understood that this was a moment requiring the full attention of the household.
“But what if I’m wrong?” Elwood asked. “What if these stories really are just accidents? What if I can’t do it again?”
“Then you’ll have been wrong while remaining yourself,” Margaret said. “Which is better than being rich while becoming nobody. We’ve never wanted to be rich. You’ve never wanted it. But, you are a writer and that’s been proven.”
Elwood looked again at the safe, then at his computer screen, where his latest “throwaway” story was half-finished. It was about a man who spent so much time preparing for his life that he nearly missed living it.
He picked up the phone and dialed the number that would make him poor and famous instead of rich and forgotten.
“About your offer,” he told the voice worth more per minute than most people made in a day. “I’m going to have to decline.”
“Mr. Gunter, I don’t think you understand the magnitude of—”
“Oh, I understand perfectly,” Elwood said, watching Margaret smile from her chair. “You want to buy my stories because they’re worth something. But if they’re worth buying, they’re worth keeping.”
After he hung up, Elwood sat quietly for a moment, contemplating the ruins of his elaborate theories about artistic timing and creative preparation.
Then he opened a new document on his computer and began typing:
“There once was a man who spent twenty-three years preparing for greatness, only to discover that greatness had been quietly happening every Thursday while he wasn’t paying attention…”
Margaret leaned over to read the opening sentence, then kissed the top of his head.
“That’s not a throwaway story,” she said.
“No,” Elwood agreed, typing steadily. “I don’t think it is.”
Outside their window, the October night settled around their small apartment like a comfortable blanket. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell chimed midnight, marking the end of another day and the beginning of whatever came next.
But inside, under the warm light of a desk lamp that had illuminated twenty-three years of preparation, Elwood Gunter finally began his real work: the business of being exactly who he’d always been, only with the confidence to admit it.
The cats purred their approval. Margaret returned to her book. And the story continued, one unplanned, unpracticed, completely authentic word at a time.