America’s greatest living writer is a forty-nine year-old management consultant with a shattered moral compass and a cardboard box of unfinished manuscripts in the trunk of his silver Miata. He spends one-third of his waking time on conference calls, smiling grimly at the unblinking eye of the camera. America’s greatest living writer will never publish a single word. He dies three days before his fiftieth birthday and is survived by no one.
The final plague begins as his body flies through the windshield, the night air purpling with autumn. America never gets another chance at a great writer. In the broken headlights, his shadow is briefly ten feet tall. The master arrives as his thoughts are still cartwheeling on the grassy field between life and death. The shredded flesh of his brain doesn’t fully grasp that it’s all over. His heart, pulp on the road, cries out: Could I grow past this breaking point, like a rose through the rot? Could I plead for mercy? Could I make it out? Is there time left? Is there time left?
She scrolls through her phone. A pebble of plastic is slowly dissolving in the center of her chest and dripping down her organs, like painted tears of dew on a golden pear in a white bowl. She’s sitting at the table, chin in her hands, running through plans in her head. She is not America’s greatest living anything. She is a perfectly ordinary girl with her own small, thorn-studded hopes that fracture, then flower, starve, then devour.
America’s greatest manuscript lies in pieces on the freeway. The printed pages take to the wind. In the darkness, before the police cars crowd the scene, they are the wings of a past life.