The Warning.

Leonard Laufland was, quite possibly, the least skilled writer in existence.

However, as the man was in possession of a somewhat functional brain, a laptop computer, and a renown publisher’s hand in marriage, this did not deter him whatsoever from topping the bestseller charts week after week.

“My next novel,” he announced one morning to a fairly rabid crowd of fans, “will center around the question: Why Oxygen?”

The applause was deafening.

Some called him a prophet, others, a demi-god, sent to grace the planet Earth with concepts so simple and standard that they must have waltzed into our world from beyond.

Others called him what he truly was.

“Leonard Laufland is an inarticulate perpetrator of literary injustice,” the bohemian writing majors would cry from the rooftops, balled fist thrown skyward and shaking with overcaffeinated rage.
”His newest action novel features a main character named ‘Brawn’. No surname, no nickname, just- ‘brawn’.” A critical young woman stated in a sidewalk interview.

“I’m sorry,” Leonard Laufland responded when the report graced his 103-inch plasma screen. “I can’t hear you over the wild exultations of my four million fans.” With that, he turned the television off and made for the enormous house’s colossal kitchen, in hopes of acquiring yet another fancy beverage.

He never reached the room’s heated stone floors.

Something very solid and swift hit him in the back, knocking him clean off his velvet-slippered feet. Laufland crashed into the wood floor and had only a moment, which he used to divulge a very sincere groan of pain, before the same object crushed down upon his chest, knocking the wind out of him.

When he cracked his eyes open, there were two figures standing over him.

“Leonard Laufland,” one said, addressing him from behind a black ski-mask, and brandishing the crowbar that had so damaged his morning routine, “We are here to carry out the punishment elicited by your heinous crimes against modern fiction.”

“Crimes?” He laughed heartily from the floor, still a bit too fearful to move to his feet. “I am modern fiction, my dear. Have you even seen the responses for the preview of my upcoming novel-“

“Steeled Brawn, we know,” the other intruder replied. She was obviously female. “In fact, that’s the reason we’re here. There comes a certain point in a criminal’s life when his crimes begin to outweigh the tolerance of normal people, and in that moment, normal people become exceptional.”

“’Steeled Brawn’, as a title for a book in which the main character, still called ‘Brawn’ is kidnapped? Really?”

“It’s a pun. You’re a little young to understand, I think-“

The male intruder let out a strangled cry of frustration and raised the crowbar.

Laufland shut his eyes, but the blow never came.

The female had stopped her partner’s arm, and when Laufland looked upon them next, she was restraining his would-be killer with significant effort.

“We can no longer stand idly by and allow you to ‘fill the pristine river of our souls with the slick, oily corruption of your darkest intentions, smothering out the dear, fuzzy aquatic mammals that house our innocence’.”

Laufland paused, staring at the girl. “That’s- that’s really good.”

The boy let out another strangled cry, and nearly succeeded in breaking from the girl’s grip and bashing in the man’s head.

“No,” the girl replied through her teeth, still keeping the boy back, “It’s not, Mr. Laufland,  because you wrote it. Dead and Brawn, published last November-“

“You’re clearly readers of my work,” Laufland said, holding his hands up in piteous defense. “What if we could strike a bargain- what if I wrote a couple of characters into Steeled Brawn, and we call it even?”

The girl was nearly speechless in incredulousness. “You honestly think that’s what we’d want?”

“Well, it’s not too difficult. Writing is, indeed, just a portal into the ever-changing mind of a great individual- and writing two more characters into the novel shouldn’t be too hard. Characters are just the frosting atop the luscious confection of a scintillating plot of unmatched intrig-“

The girl could either no longer restrain her partner, or lost all will to defend his victim. At any rate, the crowbar came down on Laufland’s chest with monstrous result. He coughed, sputtering several times before finally breaking into sobs.

“You’re going to kill me for offering the world an expression of unmatched creativity?”

“We’re not going to kill you,” the boy snapped, throwing the crowbar aside. “But we are going to ensure that you never, ever create such a corrupting, vomit-induced excuse for a novel again.”

“I’m not sure a string of threats and an overblown heart-to-heart can stop me from producing what I feel; I am but a vessel for the-“

“That’s why we’re not just having a heart-to-heart.” The girl snapped. She was holding a serrated hunting knife in her hand. “More like a ‘metal-to-muscle’, as Brawn might say.”

Before he could scramble away, the boy had dropped a knee to Laufland’s chest, pressing him into the ground and obliterating any hop of escape. He seized the man’s wrists, and pressed one forward against the wood floor, in the girl’s direction.

“Please,” Laufland sneered, rolling his eyes. “This is overly cliché.”

“Than I suppose it’s a fitting end for a career such as yours,” the girl said, before setting the knife to the man’s hands.

It took Laufland three weeks to be discharged from the hospital. The wounds on his hands were bandaged and cleaned within the first two hours of his visit, but the constant hounding with which the author tortured the nurses was so severe that he was called in for not one, but five separate information sessions on the unfixable nature of his mutilation. Fingers, once severed and disposed of, could not be reattached; another’s hands could not be used to replace the missing parts of his own. After this finally sank in, Laufland claimed he had fallen into a deep depression, and committed himself the hospital’s psych ward.

He was, in reality, not depressed, but more terrified than he had been for some time.

If the loss of his fingers had not deterred him from ever setting words upon a page, the unshakeable memory of the intruders would have done much to silence his creativity forever.

Despite his constant attempts to communicate his ideas for fiction in an auditory manner, Laufland found his prose haunted by themes of dismemberment, and the constant reoccurrence of two very distinct characters, masked and partnered, severe and focused.

For all his loss of creativity, only one idea truly stayed with him, corrupting his mind with hypothetical questions and ragtag attempts at fictionalized answers.

What had they done with his severed fingers?

Miles away, the now unmasked couple celebrated their achievement, and the arrival of their newest household decoration. Upon their dining room table now restest a cast bronze centerpiece, featuring the truncated forms of ten upright, outstretched fingers.
The bronze placard beneath the sculpture had been engraved with only two words, but every time the couple looked upon them, they couldn’t help but smile.

It read: “The Warning”.

For James Patterson,
Love, Stephanie