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Excerpt from Monster Rules—

Within minutes, only Saul and the funeral director were left in the room.

And a dead body.

Saul wanted to see it. He’d only seen the body bag before, so he’d never actually saw for himself that Walter was really dead. Now out of his folding seat and in the carpeted aisle, Saul glanced from the casket and to the funeral director. The quiet man nodded his head, as if answering Saul’s unspoken request to walk up to the front. Then he drifted out of the room, leaving Saul alone beside the casket, with an audience of empty metal chairs.

He took that last step forward and looked inside. Walter lay there appearing as he’d never appeared when he was alive, not that Saul could remember. There were no lines in his brow, there was no flush to his face, his hands weren’t clenched in fists at his side, and instead they were folded neatly across his stomach. He seemed almost at peace. He seemed smaller. He seemed not to be the monster Saul had met day after day. He seemed like the normal sort of man Saul had wished he were when he’d been alive.

Suddenly, Saul knew why he was sad. He hadn’t wished just for Walter to go away forever. He’d wished Walter the monster would go away forever and Walter his father would somehow appear and stay in place of the monster. And now it would never happen, Walter had never allowed that to happen, and he was dead, and there were no second chances after that. And now as he looked at what he knew to be Walter’s dead body, he knew he was looking at what he glimpsed only a few times when he lived with Walter. Then he saw the last time his father had smiled at him, as he’d slid down the ladder off the flying bridge of the Lady B. Grey. In his mind, he took that memory and packed it safely away, the one memory of Walter he wanted to keep. The memory of what Walter could have been but never was.

So today (okay, now technically yesterday) I finished the ginormous task of fixing the hugely rushed ending of Monster Rules. I think I’m fairly pleased with it. It’s certainly heaps better than it was and no longer rips off the reader from the having payoff of reading the previous 350 pages to get there. The part I excerpted above was one that was a struggle to write because of the emotions involved on my end. Sometimes, I think, even when we don’t intend it, what we write can cut very close to real life, especially our own.

Categories: writing