Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. To Quiet the Pen Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

TO QUIET THE PEN

Steve Lester read his legal name three times over. For years, he’d tried to make a subtle change stick: S. Warren Lester. Sometimes it did stick: thirty-two times in magazines and eleven times in short story anthologies. Twice it stood totem on the covers of books all his own. Little publishers chancing their time on horror tales.

Story writing had been a full-time drain on his bank account for two years. The author, S. Warren Lester, had decided to commit himself fully to the art of spinning yarns with the hope that it would eventually lead to the trail of occupational wages. So far, minimum wage was an unattainable carrot dangling before his screen bleary eyes, and yet, his fingers refused to cease tapping.

Two years full-time and three more working around jobs and sleeps, nothing much to show but his name, or rather a version of his name, typed above stories that typically paid him between five and forty bucks apiece. The fallback funds were gone and the line of credit swam deep red fathoms.

It was time to face the trumpets.

He read his name again, took a breath, and continued down the letter he’d written,

Attention Becky Ritz, Baker Housing Inc.

It was tough. Something inside wanted to fight, like a rabid dog. Nonetheless, it was time to put that rabid dog down. Goodbye, Yeller. Eat shit, Cujo.

“No more, attention editor,” Steve whispered and then in a nasally, mocking tone added, “Attention managerial minds, please pay me to do the things that feel beneath you.”

Clean break, the only way he succeeded in hard choices, adhesive bandages, quitting drinking, quitting smoking, and now quitting the hardest of all: the goal of writing wage-earning fiction.

I am contacting you in regards to the opening of a janitorial position recently posted on your website. It has been some time, but I have experience in the field and my work ethic has not changed. In my early twenties, I assisted in cleaning…

“Look how far you’ve come. Turn back the clock to that guy, huh? Roll in reverse and roll up your sleeves, don’t forget to switch off your brain.”

The cover letter was page one of a two-page terror. The résumé, the real cabbage and biscuits, followed. It was necessary to reach more than a decade into the past. Writing wasn’t work experience. It was supposed laziness and an affront to everyone who went to a day job instead of following a dream.

To assume Steve lazy was absurd.

For every short sold, there were six or seven unsold. Long hours, seven days a week, crumpled sheets and lingering responses: It’s not the right voice at this time… We’re sorry to inform you that while you are a talented… Unfortunately, it isn’t a good fit… There were six novels in the trunk and a dozen novellas as well. Several hundred false starts long ago dragged to the trash bin icon on the corner of the screen.

But how does one explain the time and effort when the monetary sums don’t match?

“Don’t explain the insanity of hope. Focus on the paid labor.”

…grew-up on a farm and…sorted packages after hours in college for UPS…good attitude and…

“Good attitude, my ass.” He reread, scrolling the proof of leaving a dream behind.

The résumé was to be the summation of his adult existence, minimalizing the only thing he ever really tried for, the only thing that ever really mattered to him.

Starting with the months after he graduated the broadcast basics course in college:

2007-2010 – London Life – Insurance consultant and financial adviser.

An irritated snort rose from deep down. After college, life had suddenly felt real. The government had piled the student loans on him and he had spent as if his pockets had holes. The college years were thirsty times. Insurance and investments were to be a way to get that money back, and all it demanded was a chunk of his soul.

Steve couldn’t look at that horrible summation of his systematic value anymore. The coffee maker beeped from the kitchen to warn of its impending shutdown.

No time like the present.

Fresh cup, composure realigning, Steve dropped onto his computer chair where in the past he’d penned such gems as Venomous Glass, Toads on Death Parade, and Grace’s Wooden Heart and stared at his résumé.

The résumé stared back at him.

“What the hell?”

Sipping coffee, Steve let the cursor roll to the occupation after shilling investments for humungous corporations that paid him quarter pennies on the hundreds retained. After quitting the world of high finance, wildly overweight, overwrought, and smoking a pack and a half a day, he took a job as a night stocker. It was physically demanding but asked nothing of him mentally.

Where the résumé should’ve read Lowe’s – Overnight Inventory – 2011-2012, it read RimRoil – Rig Swamper – 2011-2012.

The cursor dragged blue over the job he’d never had and suddenly, a memory pounded at the doors of his mindscape.

A filthy, greasy, oily world on fire.

Bringing crude up from below the earth’s crust was something, somehow, he knew. There he was, this new memory, Steve doing his stinking duty, coated in a sticky brown film. The guys had made a royal mess of the tools and couplers. Sometimes those braindead jerkoffs did it in spite of the young man with the college education and experience in suit wearing. To them, he was some damned high-minded asshole.

Steve understood trouble before his mind played the message.

Heat crept with ghostly tendrils.

A man named Ronnie Bacon had ordered Steve to clean the drill platform. The drill was out of the way and it was normal. Filth and instruction were typical, expected. The money was good and Steve had lost much of the weight he put on stress eating. If only he could quit smoking and drinking he’d be…

“But I lost it at the gym and at Lowe’s, and I quit smoking right after I took the job at—”

The memory roared over his soft words.

Ronnie Bacon’s silver Zippo lighter landed with a ping on the platform where Steve worked. Rigging was loud business and the sound went unnoticed. The flames travelled the slow burn of muddy crude and Steve screamed as the fire danced up the legs of his coveralls.

“That’s not…” He clicked delete and inserted the easy facts of working at Lowe’s.

The remainder appeared normal.

Best Buy – Seasonal Sales – 2013…

Esso – Desk Attendant – 2013-2014…

Self – Fiction Author – Part-Time 2011-2014 and Full-Time 2014-2016.

Putting an end number on his horror-writing career burned, burned just as the hallucinated memory had burned. Steve hit print, drained his coffee cup, and stepped off to the can while his Brother monochrome sang the song of fans and lasers.

Steve opened his pants to find the edges of scar tissue riding up his thighs and a tight, shiny patch on the side of his shrivelled penis.

Vomit rose up his throat. He gagged. It was impossible. There was no fire because he’d never worked on a rig.

He swooned and nearly fainted, pissing on the floor and into the bathtub. His back fell against the wall before his shaky knees found strength. He refused another glance at the burns that really couldn’t be there, buttoned his jeans, and stormed out of the washroom, back to the computer.

He leaned down.

“Stressed. Or, jarred, the word is jarred.”

Steve picked up the printed cover letter and résumé. He gave a cursory glance to the words thereon, unwilling to read it again, unwilling to relive the laughably meagre successes of his writing career. The résumé was the real trouble and he couldn’t afford to send off the fantasies of a beleaguered mind.

Rig Swamper.

“Never.” Another surprise: Waste Management Worker. “That never—”

A stinking, infested, putrid landscape, heaviness, suffocation.

He’d screamed as he felt the pinch against his chest, cracking of his ribs. It was his first day and nobody explained the steps. They were understaffed and on overtime following a two-month strike. Some of the workers couldn’t wait out the conclusion and took jobs elsewhere. The remaining employees were crotchety and annoyed. None wanted the task of delving out on-site lessons when there was so much trash piled on the streets.

Pay attention and work hard. That was it after the brief in house training offered by a recorded instructor speaking to a video camera.

The rear door had swung open and Steve had no idea, he clung onto the moving truck. It started and stopped all morning and he followed the driver’s lead, always waiting for the man to step around back and join him before he stepped down.

Nobody told him where to go or be and the video only stressed the need to pay attention once back on the yard. Attention he paid. But no one paid attention to him, and the rear gate flung open. Garbage buried him, heavy and suffocating. Refuse, wet and slimy, filled his mouth and throat. It was thick and rancid. He gasped, inhaling a bread bag that carried crumbs of blue dinner rolls and gangrenous green meat.

His knees buckled where he stood next to the computer as he read and he fell into the seat. This time his hand went to his lips. There was a raspy gasp coming from elsewhere. Fingers fell to another memory attaching itself to the waste management burial.

He screamed, nearly soundlessly. No more than a click surfaced from his mouth.

Suddenly knowing, the new memories connected with sparks.

Your cassette is out, dummy!

There was a laryngectomy to top off the repairs to his chest, hips, and legs.

“Didn’t happen!” he wheezed a wordless breeze, his tongue clicking again. And, obviously, that’s how it was without the cassette prosthesis pushed tight against the stoma.

This never happened!

Steve shot to his feet from his chair, pain stinging in his hips. He deleted the paragraph and tore the physical copy to pieces. The panic was exhausting, and the healed, though not whole, man stumbled to the living room/bedroom. He fell onto his mattress and stared deep into the yellowed cotton of his pillowcase.

His breathing slowed.

The ache in his chest departed.

“You’re losing it, Steve,” he mumbled and then cried out, “Losing it! La-la-la!”

His voice was back. It was the stress again. The pain of giving up on his stories. That was it, he had to stop letting his overactive imagination run his life.

He stomped to the office and retrieved his résumé from the trash bin icon.

He read through.

Lowe’s

Best Buy

Esso

Self

“Got you now, you sonofabit—No!”

The cursor jumped over his Esso experience, eating one letter at a time. Steve tapped on the keyboard, swung the mouse. The résumé had a mind of its own, master of the computer, master of the past.

Wiped clean, Steve sat back and read as the words appeared,

Piermont Fishery – Deckhand – 2013-2014

This was an especially challenging and rewarding position. Duties included cleaning, de-icing, sorting fish, and general maintenance. Shifts ran seventeen hours a day, seven days a week for two-month stints. If it was not for the accident, I would probably…

Steve quit reading. His lips and tongue dried. He wanted nothing of the suggested accident. He’d erase it without reading and it would never come to be.

“Delete.”

Eyes closed.

Lifting phantom limbs.

His eyes reopened. The scarred nubs stopped just above missing elbows. “That’s not…no, it can’t…”

A whine left his mouth as he gazed at the two active nubs, still feeling the missing parts, his ghost hands.

Balance lost when a storm had hit and the ground shifted beneath him. His arms caught in the trolling net bars as he slipped and nearly went overboard, pinning him for hours while the others worked to save the catch. The blood pooled away, no longer finding a route to the invaluable extremities. It was days in the hospital and after that, he’d tried dictating fiction to the little box affixed to his laptop.

The mental price tag of losing limbs was almost as much as the physical price tag, but the ability to go on making up horrors was like hot cocoa in a blizzard. Those stories…and he’d sold better than a few dozen, but still, it was time to face the world.

Hands or no hands.

The cursor blinked on the screen, as if challenging him.

Steve shook his head, sneered. Two prosthetic limbs sat on his desk next to the six printed and red-pen-marred manuscripts—novels that would never be.

This was life, not a fantasy. Those stories were nothing to his future. It was time to move on. He needed to face the facts of capitalism and skill for pay. Live to work, not to fulfil goals. Live to make money for the capitalist machine and be a successful somebody with a checking account and a line of credit, credit cards, and an overdraft resting on par.

“Microsoft Word,” Steve said to the microphone in the little box, “print résumé!”

The Brother monochrome came to life. Steve closed his eyes to the sound. That was it, he’d given up fully and there was no turning back. No more stories, time to face the real world. Dreams were for wealthy people.

The printer’s exhaust had an almost sweet scent, fresh and clean.

A new memory hit as he breathed deeply through his nose.

That scent.

Not the printer.

It was the scent of recognition. The last job…

Life was hard and sometimes the abilities necessary to love what work a body did, didn’t match reality. He’d given up writing and worked as a…

Birds chirped.

Steve opened his eyes to read the printout, but instead peered at the shiny, engraved stone, and read his legal name again one last time:

Steve Warren Lester

Lived for his stories

August 29, 1984 – August 28, 2016

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