“Hey mate, this sounds like a fun idea. ive had a rough week of it, failed a big exam, and i could really use a pickmeup. what about just writing a story where the MC wins at most things? A little vicarious success sounds like just the tonic right about now” -Posted by JimmyTheSlow, 16 hours ago

Ralph scratched at his chin, re-reading the one and only comment his post had received. It wasn’t exactly the story start he’d been hoping for—talk about a vague outline to begin with—but his writers-block-addled mind offered no alternatives. He’d committed himself to this game, and so he’d weave the man’s tale of success straight to order like a fast-food sandwich.

A man named Jimmy, Ralph thought. A tale of success. He let the ideas tumble and bounce in his mind like the clothes in a dryer, waiting for something to snag. He could see probable plot directions and discrete scenes, but no compelling-enough whole, no big picture that justified the story’s existence.

Finally, with a shrug, Ralph set to work. He laid out the scene: Jimmy, a boy of 19 years, attending a state college his family could barely afford. His grades were poor, and if they didn’t improve, Jimmy would have to drop out of school, abandon his dreams.

Ralph’s fingers flew as he drew himself deeper into the narrative, deftly spinning plot threads like spider’s silk. Jimmy was at a gas station, now, taking shelter from an unexpected hailstorm—did it even hail ever around here? Ralph made a mental note to investigate how often it hailed in the valley, maybe to update the plot hook later.

So anyways, hail or not, on a whim Jimmy can’t quite explain, he feels compelled to spend the last five bucks he’s got in his pocket on a lotto ticket. It’s a final, desperate lifeline for a man treading water… and then it happens: he hits it big, raking in a $210 million jackpot—his days of barely affording school are over.

Life turns around for our main character. Jimmy gets his degree, gets the girl, opens a trendy start-up, and eventually retires to a private cabin somewhere out in the Colorado mountains. Six chapters, 8,000 words, 100% wish fulfillment… 0% interesting conflict or character development. It was the type of story that younger-Ralph would’ve chucked straight to the recycling bin… but that Ralph was from a time period when writing came easily. Newer-Ralph couldn’t afford to be quite so picky, and maybe JimmyTheSlow wasn’t quite so harsh a critic as Ralph himself.

With a shrug and a smile that sat half-way between pride and embarrassment, Ralph pressed the ‘submit story’ button. He sighed wistfully… it had been a long time since he’d been so caught up in writing like that. Sure, the story was garbage, but it at least was heartening to know that he could slip back into—

with a start, Ralph’s eyes boggled at the time: 4:03 PM. Not only was Ralph going to be late for his shift, but he’d somehow missed the proper time for his medication. Had Ralph been so caught up in the typing that he failed to feel his wristwatch’s vibration?

He swallowed another chalky white tablet as he threw on his coat and stumbled out the door, noting the pale-blue skies overhead souring to milky thunderclouds. In minutes, his junkyard jalopy puttered towards the post office as fast as its little engine could manage—which, admittedly, was barely faster than a spirited jog.

Cardstock punch card met clock at 4:32 PM; his boss would have words on “the value of punctuality,” Ralph was sure. The screech of unoiled wheels announced the arrival of the first cart, and then Ralph began his tedium in earnest. A beige package was lifted, and its label, appraised. Its zip code was punched into the handheld scanner, which beeped its confirmation, and then it told him which shelf to place it in. This one, tube E11B. Ralph set it into the tube, which pulled the package in with a greedy vacuum’s thwump.

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A new cartful soon came, its wheels like nails on chalkboard. Yet another package was lifted; this one was browner than the last set, flatter, with a waxy paper wrapping. Its zip code was cataloged, the scanner, beeped, and off to tube 6AF2 it went. Thwump.

“Oh, well aren’t you colorful,” Ralph said to the next, emblazoned with a splash of red ink on its cardboard. In minutes, Ralph shuffled over to tube 11A2… he would miss the red color for the rest of his 6-hour shift. With its processing, there would be only more unadorned cardboard ahead, more sepia-tinted brown, a color that followed him more closely than his own shadow.

Screech. Crinkle. Beep. Thwump. Screech. Crinkle. Beep. Thwump. Screech. Crinkle. Beep. Thwump.

10:30 PM arrived, but Ralph hardly noticed, so hypnotized by the steady labor of mindless work. It was only when his night-shift replacement put a hand on Ralph’s shoulder that he realized it was time to go home… “Thanks,” was all Ralph could find the energy to say to the man relieving him.

With dragging footsteps and hunched posture, Ralph walked his way through the parking lot. Then, with a furrowing brow, he paused in front of his car. Sure, the thing had always been a beater with more dent than metal, but something was wrong. The surface of his car was pocked all to hell, like someone had stood out there with a hammer and beat at the hood in some mad rampage.

“Hell of a thing,” said a voice behind him. Ralph turned to see a woman also standing in the lot, appraising similar damage to her own car.

“What the hell happened?” Ralph asked. “Who did this?”

“Not who at all,” she said. “Hailstorm, if you could believe it. First one to hit the valley in a five decades, they’re saying.”

Ralph stared at her blankly. “In the middle of the summer?”

The woman shrugged in the dark of the parking lot, gesturing at their damaged cars with her chin.

“Lady, you’re crazy,” Ralph said, the irony not lost on him. He then pulled open the barely-still-hinged door and sidled into his car—it was ruined enough already for the hammer’s damage to hardly matter. He drove off without another word to the woman, and as he wound his way down the twisting roads, his hands drummed on the wheel impatiently. “Hail, my ass,” he said, wondering who he’d angered enough to inspire an act of vandalism like this.

Ralph’s writing teacher had told him about flow, that magical state when the story seemed to write itself. Despite Mr. Simpson’s weird analogies to urination, that quasi-magical state he described was a real thing, and it was the place that Ralph used to spend most of his time writing, had spent this morning in. In flow, decisions somehow made themselves. In flow, details spawned out of thin air and materialized into the story like dew onto grass. They weren’t choices… facts were merely discovered and recorded as fast as the fingers could fly.

It was because of that flow, because of the lack of intentionality, that the word hailstorm never even registered with Ralph. Sure, his little story had involved a man taking shelter from a freak hailstorm, but that detail had left Ralph’s mind the moment the typing cursor had left its paragraph. And now, as he drove home, he passed a fleet of news vans with their bright TV lights swarming a local gas station. Smart-dressed anchors spoke into dozens of lenses, but Ralph could hear none of them as he whizzed by on the road… if he’d rolled down the window, he might have heard them saying things like “this is the store where that fateful ticket was sold” and “little is known about the jackpot winner, beyond the fact that he’s a local college student recognized by the cashier.”

But Ralph rolled down no windows, heard no news announcements. He instead pulled his rusting car into his dark garage, climbed his way on aching legs into his sagging bed with its oily bedsheets, pulled out his phone, and noted with a pang of weariness that his story had received but one comment, posted 5 hours ago, and by a commenter that wasn’t even JimmyTheSlow. The only acknowledgement of the labors of Ralph’s miserable day was that single, baffling comment: “Squeeeeeeeeee!”

Ralph rolled over, letting the ennui wrap him tighter than his bedsheets, and he stared at the beige walls until sleep somehow found him.