The lamp had been on for hours, the bulb was hot, the few unlucky moths found out too late. It was dying, flickering, dimming as the minutes passed. But she didn�t care. She shook and shook it with her writing. The failing light illuminated page after page as the writer reached their capacity and moved onto the next. The stack grew larger, the night grew darker. The whole room seemed to pitch with the movement of her pen. A strange looking thing, it scratched and scratched cramped characters with every movement of her white hands. Those hands shook harder as the light grew weaker, frenzied, possessed. The strange red script pouring out of her right hand almost faster than she could form each letter, each word. All through the night page after page she wrote, the lamp grew still dimmer and the writer grew whiter and all followed the order of exhaustion. But day wouldn�t let the night steal forever and soon dawn broke, the silver light even made it into the corner window of the attic where the writer lay, collapsed atop a thick stack of paper. A corner of the top sheet fluttered in the cold November draft.

It was three days before they found her. Probably would have been more had the cats not meowed so loudly that the landlady came up. She balked and called the police without coming within 15 feet of her. The city took care of the rest. Lifted her, cold and white, off of her papers. Removed the hollow hypodermic needle from her wrist, pried it from her fingers, still poised mid-letter. Buried her in the cemetery outside of town. Boxed up the epic of a her small life. A blurb in the journal and all was forgotten. The landlady took a new tenant, kept the previous owner�s history quiet. New furniture came in, the draft was stopped up, the light bulb replaced, and new Novembers passed as uneventfully as the writer.

my blood flows black with ink and pixel, and with every word, every character, I drain myself onto the page. It�s all I have, it�s all I keep. but i am nearly empty.