Scraps & Chum Read Free Page B

and ambled to the living room.
    “ Ow, ” I said to whatever ghosts might reside in my home, and hit the power button on the cable box. I was walking toward the bathroom when I realized I could still hear it. “ Ugh. ” I returned and hit the power button on the television this time. The TV turned on, an annoying talk show, so I shru gged and turned it off again. I headed once aga in to the bathroom, convincing myself the distant high-pitched wail in my ears was actually just my head playing tr icks on me.
    You ’ re hung over, take a shower and you ’ ll feel b etter .
    I did regain a semblance of humanity as the hot water beat into the back of my neck, the pulsing behind my eyes slowly disappearing. I let the water pound my face and head, and drank big gulps of it as well, hopin g it would hydrate me .
    Thoughts of the previous night ’ s writing session came back to me. The story I had been working on was still unfinished, and I was clueless as to where it was going. It seemed I ’ d been writing some version of it for years, though I only had twenty pages to show for it. The story was boring, unimaginative, and stagnant. That I was able to get the twenty pages out of it was a pathetic moral victory. I had not been able to write anything of merit in some time, and my last novel had gotten less than stellar reviews. A review in one of the more notable literary magazines said it felt like McGovern (that ’ s me) had employed a new method of writing while lobotomized .
    It ’ s hard to teach English to high school students when they know you ’ re a joke. Even harder to keep teaching it when you tell them they ’ ll never amount to anything.  The district frowns on such truth.
    After the shower, I dressed myself and sat at my computer, looking over what I had written the night before. It wa s pitiful, so I sighed and deleted the entire thing. “ I ’ ve read better shit on bathroom walls. Read better stuff by that Davidson kid. ”
    I dwelled on Davidson. O ne of my former students who had sold his first story to a magazine I ’ d bee n rejected by repeatedly.  It was infuriating; t he kid couldn ’ t spell his own name. But e ditors stop ped caring about prose l ong ago; nowadays they just want tropes that sell .
    I tell myself that anyway.
    Frustrated, I went to the kitchen and rifled through the cabinets until I found what I was looking for: a bottle of aspirin and some Bagel Bites. I put the coffee pot on and rifled through yesterday ’ s mail. Nothing but bills I couldn ’ t pay now that I ’ d been fired.
    That was when I realized I could still hear the hitch-pitched whine in my ears.
     
                                                                              II

Over the course of the next day I convinced myself not to go on a bender. I wrote a little, hated it all, deleted it, and then watched bad talk shows. T he whine remained. And what ’ s more, it got louder. I checked every electrical component in my apartment but could find no source for the sound. By the second day the whine was making me irritable and I felt like those dogs from my youth, shaking my head to rid myself of the annoyance, sticking my fingers in my ears for a brief reprieve. Unfortunately, my finger s did nothing to block it out.
    On the third day, the sound was too loud, simply grating, and I gave up trying to write or understand the slang and memes on the talk shows, and walked down the road to O ’ Connor ’ s Pub. The sound followed me like a loyal dog , slowly and steadily getting louder, like car brakes squealing across town. I glanced up at the power lines and transformers as I made my way to the pub, but could find nothin g that might betray its origin.
    It was inside the pub that I first realized something was truly amiss .  S everal patrons were pressing their fingers into their ears. I took a tattered stool at the bar and motioned Pat O