I hate beginnings. Not so much beginnings, but starting something. Intros… How are you even supposed to write an intro? Common advice is- don’t start at the start, start in the middle.
Absolute nonsense.
Even if I start in the middle, it’s still a beginning. It still needs to be a launching point that the audience can grab onto. It still needs to be accessible and easy to grab onto.
Then there’s the matter of introducing your characters, especially your main character.
They need to leap off the page immediately, but how do you do that in a few simple sentences? How do you make a main character instantly relatable yet incredibly unique and interesting?
What sort of strange alchemy must be done to create a man that an audience can see themselves in, can place themselves in their shoes, but still is so odd, so special that the reader feels compelled to know everything about them?
How do you write a man who is a total enigma, yet still seems like you’ve known him since grade school?
That’s why I hate beginnings. They make absolutely no sense.
Paradoxical. Top-to-bottom contradictions. And I loathe it when things don’t add up.
Maybe… maybe writing isn’t for me. Maybe these stories in my head should just stay there. Maybe they aren’t nearly as on the tip of my tongue as I thought. Maybe… they aren’t any good. Especially if they’re this hard to begin. Maybe I should just stick to crosswords.
All these negative thoughts were swirling through Matt's mind as his fingers sat idle. Matt groaned, eyes dropping from the blank page of nothing, until he was literally banging his head against the desk. At least the physical pain made sense.
It was night outside, city lights twinkling in from the long bay windows as if to announce all the stories happening out there, real ones he could be living instead of trying to conjure his own.
The view of downtown was remarkable, beautiful, and too high up for Matt to be able to identify any of his favorite hot dog carts or coffee shops on the street level. Of course this wasn’t his home, he was at work, in an office, on the night shift grind, hoping this silence, space, and view would finally be the kick in the pants to be something more than an IT lackey.
That was probably the worst part. There was nothing to blame his writer’s block on this time. No distractions, chores, or dates. It was a Hail-Mary of isolation to will some creative productivity from the ether. He took these shifts after the internal company scare last week completely for this reason. He’d have absolutely no real life to get in the way of his fake one.
And other than monitoring some website traffic here and there (which hadn’t done anything like the event reported last week), it was just him, a cup of half vending machine hot chocolate with half vending machine coffee sludge. Theoretically, there was nothing to get in the way of Matt from finally penning the detective story he had been so eagerly pining to write.
All the twists and turns of a murder mystery that went right up to the top of the food chain were there kicking around his head. He had all the strings in place, ready to be pulled. He had notes upon researched notes of his nefarious organization and how they would plausibly pull off such a caper. All of these notes were at the ready.
But tangibly using his words to make those notes real, to make those events happen, to make gumshoe Beck Redwood a real, living, breathing, stressed and assured person= someone always on the edge of unraveling the whole thing yet two steps behind… It just wasn’t happening. He could have the sheet music, the greatest musicians, and all the instruments in the world, but it was missing that beat that drove it forward. He was a conductor to a silent symphony.
Maybe it was performance anxiety. It wasn’t Matt’s first experience with that either, which is why it wasn’t too hard to cancel that date.
Maybe it was the venue. He thought sitting in the office of some c-suite executive would be the right sort of stimuli to help him get work done. All those unread books on library shelves seemed to be mocking him more than adding any inspiration.
Maybe he had it completely wrong. Instead of holing up and trying to nurse his story to life like some sort of potted plant, he should be out in the daylight letting the world and its stories come to him.
One thing was for sure, his Styrofoam coffee cup was empty. And just like Beck Redwood would have done when left without a clue and the only sense being the quarters in his pocket- he went to get a fresh cup and maybe do some rounds around the block to kick start the old noggin’.
A crash of shattered glass woke him up far better than the glowing espresso button on the vending machine ever could. It sounded much bigger than a vase or mug or anything that Matt would logically assume would break in an office.
His legs carried him towards the noise, but his shoulders seemed to be swinging side to side, searching for anyone else who could inspect it for him instead. It was so weird, in retrospect, how he hadn’t seen a security guard or even janitor on this floor. It was just… him.
Matt’s assumption was indeed correct, a lot more glass was shattered than a trinket. One of the large, floor-to-ceiling windows had been caved in, broken just enough to allow a man to fit through, but not without its jagged edges carving up whoever might try to pass through it.
And there was a man, not moving much, lying face down in a pool of his own blood that was making his dark, tactical outfit even darker. He didn’t seem to be moving. Whatever force it took to fling him in through that window should have been enough to kill him.
Matt’s feet took him trepidatiously toward the bloodied, balled up mass of dark haired man on the floor, not fully sure what he was doing. He reasoned that it was some instinct of his, urging him to check on the man. In reality, it was his curiosity, some selfish desire to see and understand something that every bit of logic in his brain was screaming to let be.
It didn’t make sense. Weren’t those windows basically bulletproof-
Just as quickly as the thought had occurred, when Matt’s eyes returned from the shattered window to the man on the floor, the stranger had pulled a pistol on him.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Matt through his hands up in shock that this dreamlike strangeness was becoming dangerously real, and quick. “I’m unarmed, I’m unarmed!” he plead. “I heard the noise and wanted to see-”
“See what?” the stranger coughed, a bit of blood coming down his chin. “Come to verify your kill?”
“No, I’m freelance,” Matt offered, only realizing how loaded that term could be when the stranger pulled the hammer back on his weapon. “Freelance IT,” he corrected in a panic. “Just, don’t shoot. I want to help you.”
“Why? If you only knew what schemes I’ve been involved in, you’d realize how merely chatting with me might put you on a list.”
British, Matt gathered from his accent. “Well, a bit too late for that now. C’mon, just put the gun down and let me help you stop the bleeding. If you’re involved with what I think you’re involved in, I kinda need you to pull through. Pretty sure they’ll lock me away in the tower of London if your bosses find me by your corpse.:
“Funny,” replied the spy, smiling and showing a trace of charm the stress of death had mostly erased. “I’ve fired all my bullets anyhow and I’m wounded rather deeply in the stomach. No amount of pressure is going to keep me from my maker for long.”
“Well, with that attitude…” As Matt got closer, he stripped his button down, ripping it apart to create a make shift tourniquet.
“You seem rather poised through all this. Are you former military?” poised the spy through clenched and gritted teeth, his skin glimmering from the shards of broken glass stuck within.
“No, just watch a lot of Youtube. I also did scouts one summer. It wasn’t boy scouts though, I forget what the British equivalent was,” Matt offered back, trying to distract himself with small talk through the horror of nursing a rather gruesome, open wound.
“Scout’s Association?”
“That’s the one.”
“Say, friend, I’m sorry I haven’t properly introduced myself and this may be a bit forward,” the spy began to compose himself, his manners returning, “but you don’t happen to be a subject of the Queen’s by any chance?”
“No,” Matt said while applying pressure. “American through and through. “But my grandfather was born and raised in the U.K. So I guess at least a quarter British as if that matters.”
“Fascinating,” cheered up the spy.
“How so?” Matt didn’t need to look up to feel the spy eyeing him up like a piece of meat. He was getting delusional as he was dying, taking this British countryman thing a step too far in his opinion.
The spy laughed. “Fortune is such a humorous lady. I can’t tell if she loves me or hates you.”
“Hates me, how? I’m not the one bleeding out.”
“Would you be interested in doing a great duty for Her Majesty’s Secret Service?”
Matt couldn’t believe what was coming from this dying man’s lips. Was he offering him a job? The final part of his mission he couldn’t complete? Was this the spice his story needed- no, his life needed? Maybe this was a gift. “Sure, what-”
And before he could even start to go off on how ridiculous the situation was, Matt had been stabbed. The spy pulled a medal with the Queen’s adoring, loving face on one side, and a long, sharp needle on the other from his vest and stuck it sharply into Matt’s chest. If it had been on the other side, it would have surely gone through his heart.
“Hey! What the hell!” Matt stumbled back, his body screaming in pain as he released the open wound of the insane, dying man.
“Like I said, I can be rather lucky at times. I’ve had more than a few games of Baccarat go my way. But you, to be here, on this night, right where I needed you… Would you say you’re naturally unfortunate or is this just a banner night of bad luck for you?” The spy seemed to be regaining his strength, pulling himself to his knees.
Matt was his mirror opposite, struggling to even take a breath, his legs feeling rubbery and his body generally feeling less put together as he slunked to the ground. “What’d you… Why’d you…” Each word was a struggle, his voice sounding lighter with each syllable like his lungs were shrinking by the second. Even his eyes betrayed him, his vision doubled and blurry being only a part of it.
If he didn’t know better, he could have sworn the agent’s wound was sewing itself up, healing itself in front of his eyes. And that from the pin in his chest he had been decorated with, which he couldn’t pull free, there seemed to be this colored red mist emanating off of if. Like a vapor trail from a cartoon steaming off his stabbing and being inhaled deeply by his new nemesis.
“You see, it takes about a lifetime of training to become a serviceable Double 0. It’s honestly not practical to put in so much effort and time into a field agent, just to have them only to serve for about a decade. That’s why they give us those medals, so we can ‘refresh’ ourselves, start anew with a new face, to be ready for the demands of a new age.”
Unsure if he was being incepted by his comments or if the spy’s face was changing too. It seemed like it was, his hard cheekbones and crooked nose straightening up before his eyes. Even his hair was changing color from the short blonde to something darker. It was just hard to tell from his own vision being obstructed by all his… hair?
Matt’s hands took a break from prying at the trinket lodged in his chest to run them through his quickly growing locks, having enough to actually brush and pull behind and let drop. But those weren’t the only changes he noticed, spotting through all the running and tress grabbing that his fingers had completely reshaped as well. His big, bullworky digits having completely softened and taken on a very delicate profile.
He couldn’t examine them for long because soon his hand were rushing to his midsection once the burning and churning began, feeling like his insides had become a blender set to puree.
“All we need is a descendant of a royal citizen, male of course, and we are permitted to acquire their machismo and nationalité. So now you can see my luck, running into you with your Londoner grandfather and-”
“Welsh,” Matt squeaked through the pain, trembling at the sound coming from his burning lips. “He was born in—ahhhh!” He struggled to get the words out amid the pain and noise of his cracking bones. “Oh my god my hips!” Matt’s hands raced to stop the pain, feeling like a peanut shell being cracked open.
“You cheeky! You never said he was Welsh! You said you visited him in England!”
“Yeah, Western Englaaaaaaaahhh!” Matt’s cries changing as the pain of reshaping seemed to be more concentrated on the way his soft flesh seemed to bubble and fill out. “I don’t know what you call it, but he lived in Cardiff.”
“You call it Wales! Cardiff is in Wales! The whole island isn’t England, it’s… Ah! You Americans and your lack of history. I can’t believe I’m turning Welsh! No wonder it feels like I have sheep’s wool in the back of my throat. Oh, if I weren’t so grateful about being alive, we’d be having a very cross discussion about your geographic education.”
“If you’re turning Welsh than what’s ahhhhappening to me?” Matt begged, scared what the burning in his chest implied. Would he be getting his wounds.
“Relax now little dove. It’ll all make sense in a bit. Like I said, I needed your machismo. Your male-ness. Whatever you want to call it, us spies run on it. As for the quarter of family genetics you’re now missing is a bit more complicated. Once you’re in a state-”
“Freeze! FBI!” A stairwell door kicked open, revealing a blonde haired, gigantic man… No, was he a giant or was Matt just getting shorter? It was hard to tell, his vision getting blurrier by the moment, but he could make out he had a loaded weapon trained on the spy. “Step away from the girl and show me your hands!”
Girl?
“Sorry dove, I would love to stay and explain, but you really have put on a generational display of bad fortune,” the spy cracked his jaw, the vowels in his sentences getting longer and more mushed up. “Is this really my accent now?”
“Stay where you are! Hands where I can see them!” For being such an imposing man, the FBI agent seemed agitated and nervous. It was also weird that he was alone. There was a lot weird about the situation, too many weird things happening every second for Matt to process.
He did see one thing clearly though before the weight of his eyelids became far too unbearable. Matt’s agent friend, hands up, negotiating, calmly talking before swiftly punching the FBI man in the throat, dropping him, and running down the opened stairwell route.
What the hell...
