Todd reached for his copy of All My Colors. He had it in his head, or so he thought, but every time he tried to focus on it, on the characters, or the story, it slipped away from him. Holding the book down like it was an animal that might otherwise escape his grasp, Todd tried to read it. Passages came back to him, familiar scenes, but he was damned if he could retain anything. In the end, he got out a pencil and started making notes. By early afternoon, Todd had written out—slowly, and with tremendous effort—an outline of most of the story. Now he was on the final stretch (thank God, he thought).

The last mile was, indeed, the hardest mile. Todd struggled to recall characters he’d been following for chapters, and he kept going back to earlier scenes to refresh his memory of major plot developments, but somehow, with a tremendous effort of will, he made it to the final page.

He drank some water, picked up his pencil and began to copy out the last paragraph of All My Colors.

“Helen knew then,” Todd copied down, “that if life were made up of a series of colors, then it was not, as she had believed, a spectrum of feelings ranging from empty, mindless white through bland gray to the darkest, deepest black, but something else entirely. Life, she had learned, was—and she could almost laugh at the simplicity of the idea—a kind of bright rainbow, made of colors that a child would love. Bright blues and garish yellows and furious purples. Greens and browns and, yes, blacks and whites, but all mixed in with magentas and scarlets and golds.

‘This is my life,’ she told herself as she walked out the door, into a new world. ‘And these are all my colors.’

The End.”

Todd put his pencil down. Is that it? he thought. Is that what the critics are going crazy for? It seemed pretty hokey, but then he’d always been what he considered a manly kind of writer. Still, it sold, and he was the guy who’d—well, it had come out of him, hadn’t it? Todd was always reading about writers and painters and musicians who’d said that they were just the conduit for great art, that it just flowed through them. Todd remembered the diaper days.

He looked at All My Colors like an adversary.

“I wrote you once,” he told the book. “I can write you again.”

CHAPTER ONE, Todd spelled out, in large penciled capitals. He missed his typewriter but it was in storage and if he went to the storage place to get it, the storage guys might ask him about the money he owed them. He underlined the words. CHAPTER ONE.