Free Bag of Bones by Stephen King

said.
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    That was hands down the best holiday since Johanna died. The only good holiday, I guess. For four days I was an honorary Arlen. I drank too much, toasted Johanna’s memory too many times . . . and knew, somehow, that she’d be pleased to know I was doing it. Two babies spit up on me, one dog got into bed with me in the middle of the night, and Nicky Arlen’s sister-in-law made a bleary pass at me on the night after Christmas, when she caught me alone in the kitchen making a turkey sandwich. I kissed her because she clearly wanted to be kissed, and an adventurous (or perhaps “mischievous” is the word I want) hand groped me for a moment in a place where no one other than myself had groped in almost three and a half years. It was a shock, but not an entirely unpleasant one.
    It went no further—in a houseful of Arlens and with Susy Donahue not quite officially divorced yet (like me, she was an honorary Arlen that Christmas), it hardly could have done—but I decided it was time to leave . . . unless, that was, I wanted to go driving at high speed down a narrow street that most likelyended in a brick wall. I left on the twenty-seventh, very glad that I had come, and I gave Frank a fierce goodbye hug as we stood by my car. For four days I hadn’t thought at all about how there was now only dust in my safe-deposit box at Fidelity Union, and for four nights I had slept straight through until eight in the morning, sometimes waking up with a sour stomach and a hangover headache, but never once in the middle of the night with the thought Manderley, I have dreamt again of Manderley going through my mind. I got back to Derry feeling refreshed and renewed.
    The first day of 1998 dawned clear and cold and still and beautiful. I got up, showered, then stood at the bedroom window, drinking coffee. It suddenly occurred to me—with all the simple, powerful reality of ideas like up is over your head and down is under your feet—that I could write now. It was a new year, something had changed, and I could write now if I wanted to. The rock had rolled away.
    I went into the study, sat down at the computer, and turned it on. My heart was beating normally, there was no sweat on my forehead or the back of my neck, and my hands were warm. I pulled down the main menu, the one you get when you click on the apple, and there was my old pal Word Six. I clicked on it. The pen-and-parchment logo came up, and when it did I suddenly couldn’t breathe. It was as if iron bands had been clamped around my chest.
    I pushed back from the desk, gagging and clawing at the round neck of the sweatshirt I was wearing. The wheels of my office chair caught on a little throwrug—one of Jo’s finds in the last year of her life—and I tipped right over backward. My head banged the floor and I saw a fountain of bright sparks go whizzing across my field of vision. I suppose I was lucky not to black out, but I think my real luck on New Year’s Morning of 1998 was that I tipped over the way I did. If I’d only pushed back from the desk so that I was still looking at the logo—and at the hideous blank screen which followed it—I think I might have choked to death.
    When I staggered to my feet, I was at least able to breathe. My throat felt the size of a straw, and each inhale made a weird screaming sound, but I was breathing. I lurched into the bathroom and threw up in the basin with such force that vomit splashed the mirror. I grayed out and my knees buckled. This time it was my brow I struck, thunking it against the lip of the basin, and although the back of my head didn’t bleed (there was a very respectable lump there by noon, though), my forehead did, a little. This latter bump also left a purple mark, which I of course lied about, telling folks who asked that I’d run into the bathroom door in the middle of the night, silly me, that’ll