SCHEHERAZADE
Written on October 9, 2024 (♎︎︎)
Author's Notes: Written for Whumptober 2024 for prompt No. 10: Blow to the Head ("I can't think straight").
"Amnesia" was not the correct word, in truth. The memories were not absent. As with everything else in life, Pablo was always sinking, drifting... drowning in them. His existence was suffused in memory. Was it not so with every author? The past never stopped intruding. So many sandwich and coffee stained notebooks attested to its features: a conversation by the sea, a coil of cigarette smoke, a widening green eye. All parts came to him in clarity but refused to resolve into anything larger than a headache.
And the headaches, much like their precursors, hardly seemed worth mentioning.
Pablo tried to take it in stride; he was new made upon the shore, he reckoned. These remnants could be repurposed–padding when his agent pressed a deadline, little enticements to keep his Shahryar returning for tea.
He wondered if they would last a thousand and one nights thus. He doubted it. She certainly carried herself like a creature willing to behead him–and Pablo confessed himself a rather cut-rate Scheherazade.
Sometimes he even wondered if he hadn’t already run his tales through–if the throb in his temples were not some deathblow already struck, with Simone a recording angel tsk-tsking him away from paradise.
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