American Genocide

11:00:03

The clock on the wall continued its merciless ticking, moving relentlessly toward the start of the witching hour, an end, and a new beginning.

The woman wrote furiously, words flying from her dull pencil tip across the sheet of paper, only to be replaced with another sheet, and yet another, as each previous one was filled. There was a pile to her right, face down, of hundreds of sheets. To her left, a smaller pile of unused paper, ruled, stacked neatly. There were a few pencils on the desk, and a single, manual, pencil sharpener.

11:09:12pm

“No, no, no!” The woman spoke only to herself, as there were no others around. Dissatisfied, she crumpled up the current sheet which was half filled out and flung it across the room where it struck the concrete wall, then landed unceremoniously on the floor, joining perhaps two dozen other discarded thoughts.

The woman took another sheet and, glancing up at the clock, scowled and got back to writing. After a moment, and with a paragraph and a half written on the new sheet, she dropped the pencil and began massaging her right hand, her writing hand, with her left. Her expression was one of puzzlement, of contemplation. Then, enlightenment, and she took hold of the stack of paper to the right and flipped it over. She quickly searched through the stack, pausing when she thought she had found what she needed, then continuing her search when she realized she hadn’t. Finally, she found success, read for a half moment, and then reassembled the papers and flipped them once again upside down.

Picking up the pencil, she began writing furiously once more, knowing full well that time was her enemy.

11:17:53pm

She took the food off the tray and fed it to her mouth with her left hand as her right was busy applying graphite lines to the paper, her eyes moving back and forth in sync with her right hand.

Pressing slightly too hard, the pencil tip broke, startling her. Wasting no time, she set it down and quickly grabbed another, picking up where she left off. The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, with the crust removed and the remains cut into triangles, tasted great, but she only let that thought remain in her head for a few seconds before dismissing it and focusing on the task at hand.

Glancing up at the clock once again, she quickly calculated in her head and realized that it was, at this pace, going to be very close.

She wrote faster.

11:41:09

She fought the urge to write yet even faster because she was aware that her handwriting was getting slightly worse over this past hour, and her hand was cramping in direct correlation to the speed at which was writing. Pain had set in several moment ago.