Later, with coffee, Clare sits. She will, she tells herself, begin. She breathes. Yesterday, she almost wrote. A sentence, she tries to coax herself, just one smooth sentence, please.

Clare checks her email. Her mother sends messages from South Beach where she has descended to muse out the holiday season. Each missive concludes, Love~ Mommy, the tilde a flourish. Clare’s own words, or, rather, the little shuttles she was once pleased to drive among them, dissipate, are sucked back up into the black heaven of her nonsensical mind. Why can she not move? She stares at the latest tiding, a happy Christmas. Something else always comes to pass. This is not writing. There has been no new story.

Compelled to hand something in for her workshop during the semester, Clare surrendered, at the very last moment possible, the first pages of a piece she had begun that dreadful winter before the accident, a time of radical restructuring of the federal government and the spontaneous invention of new police. The story was not her best work, but it seemed, somehow, topical? Perhaps it was even an oracular vision, a warning she had attempted to relay to herself but, subsequently, failed to interpret. It was intended as a gothic tale and had clearly been composed by a terrifyingly industrious version of herself who was thinking about the fun of getting into genre, like how her main bag would be realism but from time to time she might dabble. This thing read:

A Killing

By Clare Elwil

Stefanie Segal was the only daughter of Harvey and Tabitha Grace Segal (now Tabitha Grace Greene). She was born in 1982 and raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In the first week of January 2002 she was nineteen.

Stefanie had returned from school and was staying in the Dorchester on Park and 76th, where her mother resided with a new husband, a bankruptcy lawyer.

The lawyer, Glenn Greene, liked modern. A lot was white, and there were clean lines, minimal pottery, brutalist shelving.

Glenn was short, with a gut. He dressed well and styled his thinning hair unpretentiously. He appeared briefly, made nice.

He was always disguised by mauve corrective lenses and went straight to Stefanie’s mother, caressing her hands.

Stefanie’s mother was enmeshed in a social saga that had occupied her since before the time of Stefanie’s birth. The liberating advent of pagers and cell phones had done little to inspire in this parent a more sanguine view of the outdoors. She stayed in until dinner, in constant dialogue with a BlackBerry. She subsisted on powders.