In my mind, I see a graveyard. On each headstone, the name of a friend or kin. Some are from my youth. Others remain my contemporaries. Nearly everyone I was ever close to, they have a place in this cemetery.

Their unquiet spirits accuse me of abandoning them. I did, I did. I left them, each one. Some when I moved as a child. Others when I graduated from one school and moved to another. Elementary. Junior high. High school.

So many are from college. Best of friends, closer than brothers. Another group from weddings and funerals, where distant members of my family gather and mingle, only to drift away until the next such event.

These are the dead. The graves are not filled with their remains, but with empty promises to write, declarations of being best friends forever. Memories of great times, of tears and guffaws shared. Never again, not with these people.

In my mind, I hold a shovel and approach an unturned plot. I scrunch my brow. The shovel melts, loses definition. It reshapes, hardens.

It is now a pen.

No idea how many words. I just wanted to spit it out. It's late. This idea has been in my head for too long. I think I over-thought it. It's like overcooking an egg. Just right and it's neither runny nor stiff. Too long and it becomes like rubber, with an unappetizing grey dusting over the yolk.

The idea is strong, but ideas don't make stories. Fiction is all about execution. Movies are fictive vehicles, and they are oft-times plainly derivative, embarassingly so. Yet those that win hearts (and wallets) do so with splendid execution. Do that justice, and the consumer seems willing to forgive unoriginality forever.

At any rate, I call myself author, so I must auth (I hope that means 'to write.' It doesn't? Drat.)

Oh, and the title? It's horrible. Help me come up with a bitter one, please. Thanks for the title, RT!