Sarah’s Bio:

Sarah Warburton is a writer, wife, the mother of two, and a knitter (not necessarily in that order) living in Sugar Land, TX. After earning an M.A. in Classics from the University of Georgia and another from Brown University, she spent time working in independent bookstores, reading and writing. She’s studied at the University of New Mexico with Sharon Oard Warner and Julie Shigekuni, at the Taos Writer’s Workshop with Pam Houston, and in Houston with Justin Cronin. Since 2005 she’s been a staff writer for the local monthly magazine, “UpClose” and member of the weekly critique group, Writers Ink. Her short story, “Margaret’s Magnolia,” appeared in the “Southern Arts Journal” and she has finished her first mystery novel, “The Language of the Dead.” 

Find out more about Sarah by visiting her website: http://sarahwarburtonwriter.wordpress.com/.

Life Script

By Sarah Warburton

 

He always wanted to be a writer. Late at night, he wrote fiction based on his favorite television shows. He didn’t tell anyone.

She read on the school bus in the morning. She held books under the laminate surface of her desk at school. She read in bed by the thin light from the hallway.

In his first creative writing course at college, the instructor said, “All criticism must be constructive.” His first story featured a man who kept alternative suits of skin in his walk-in closet. A classmate said, “I found this story’s lack of relevance almost interesting.”

Instead of creative writing courses, she took modern British literature and a seminar on Jane Austin. At the bottom of a paper on Persuasion, her professor wrote, “beautiful, lyrical writing!” Alone in her dorm room, she pulled the paper out, admiring the blaze of red. She wrote elliptically passionate poetry, character sketches, the first page of a thousand stories. She showed them to no one. 

He excused himself from group television marathons and midnight soccer games. He preferred to write on his computer in the dark. He claimed he only wrote one draft, but he really revised as he went. When he did write longhand, he used a thick black pencil. His history professor called him into her office to read his smudged essay exam out loud. He lost points for penmanship. 

He joined the staff of the literary magazine; she rushed a sorority. They passed each other in the halls of the English department. She thought he looked serious, he thought she looked popular. 

Senior year they ended up in the same dorm. On move-in day, their resident advisor stated flatly, “If you lock yourselves out, don’t knock on my door until morning.” When he locked himself out, she brought out a pillow and blanket so he could sleep in the common room.

He dated a sophomore; she dated a fraternity boy. They stayed up late together, making popcorn and watching old sitcoms.

He said, “If you don’t get into Iowa, there’s no point in going to school for writing.” 

He didn’t get in, so he moved to California. He applied for a job reading synopses of screenplays. A thin woman with cats-eye glasses conducted the interview. “Don’t keep putting your synopses into the pile,” she told him. “That’s why we let the last one go.” He told her he didn’t have a screenplay, and she pursed her lips in disbelief. 

She married the fraternity boy and got her teaching certificate. A neighboring marriage fell with a whimper, a nearby business lost its straw foundations, but their life remained untouched. She whispered into the fragrance of her son, “I love you more than all the other babies in all the other rooms in all the rest of the world.” 

Behind him on the California interstate he could feel the silent, hungry boy in thick-rimmed glasses pulling closer, and he pressed the accelerator steadily to stay ahead. He dated a performance artist who wore white tank tops with no bra. Nights, he worked on a novel about Los Angeles as a city powered by luminous ghosts. He got promoted to the development department. “If you have a screenplay, we’ll take a look,” they promised. He wasn’t interested in writing screenplays. They optioned his novel.

She worried about mice; she worried about money; she worried she would wake up the same, but older. Her husband said, “William Carlos Williams wrote poems on his prescription pad.” She put a notebook on the passenger seat of her car and scrawled fragments between the changing lights. She almost forgot the car seat and its sticky occupant behind her, as the taillights of her life pulled away from her in the darkness. 

At their twentieth college reunion, they met again. He wrote screenplays; she had gone back to teaching. He saw her first, and the years unspooled, the story unwrote itself, spiraling off the page. They could have stepped back over the threshold of the past, but the moment shivered and burst.

The next week, he gave an interview to a scriptwriting magazine. “Did you know your whole life you would be a writer?”

He thought of her before he answered.

***