He'd been rummaging through trash cans behind an abandoned log cabin in the middle of the forest, lost, again, and wondering why he was rummaging through the trashcans. It was not the sort of thing he normally did. Get lost, sure. Come upon abandoned log cabins, you bet. But rummage through trash cans? Jason Edwards was the sort of person who believed he was the sort of person who did things specifically because he wasn't the sort of person who did those sorts of things. Like piercing his tongue. Drinking hard liquor. Telling old men at symphonies to shut their goddamn traps. Inspiration was the key. And he knew it. For example, mostly he was afraid of spiders because he was afraid it would occur to him to eat one, and then he would have to. So there he'd been, behind yet another log cabin, and the trash cans, and it occurred to him to rummage through them, and so he had to.

Nothing. Then the werewolf jumped out. It was a huge beast, half man half wolf of course, standing on its hind legs, eight and half feet tall, enormous muscular chest thrust out, shoulders back, slightly crouched as it (howled? screamed? yelled? "emitted a sound at great volume"?) tore into the drums of his hears with a guttural hungry enraged sound that split the night. Jason doesn't have enough self-esteem to be afraid of much, and found himself fascinated by the huge amount of saliva that splashed out of the werewolf's mouth and coated the ground thickly. Its bright yellow eyes tried to bore into his own over the black snout, wrinkled back to reveal bloody red fangs thick with hunger and rage and terror and tragedy and fear and hurt and chase and kill and ooh and scary and oh my and golly. Jason decided he'd better run away, since he didn't want to be killed, not just yet, at least not here. So he ran.

They'd been running for about twelve miles now, through the forest, out onto highway 7, down into the city. Here the city was not quite bright enough to ruin the stars, nor traffic too thick to distract the werewolf for long. Occasionally a car would pass, the werewolf would pounce, rip off the roof, dismember the occupants, jump back on the road, and chase Jason some more.

Jason was a writer. Still is, in some respects. For him this meant that nothing existed which he could not imagine and put into words. In fact, nothing existed which he had not already formed into words. More specifically, he was a short-story writer. In the pantheon of writers, the short-story writer is the most arrogant, the most self-aware, the one most likely doomed. The poet concentrates on the image, on the feeling, on the thing. The novelist is concerned with life, in one way or another. But the short-story writer is dedicated to the idea, the epiphany, the moment of change. Conceited bastards the lot of them.

At the junction highway 7 and Old Mill, the werewolf got close enough to swipe at the back of Jason's head. Jason fell down. Jason was too self-centered to bleed when he was wounded. Instead he just rolled and ran some more. The werewolf threw back its head and howled a howl that made women in the city below suddenly hungry to kill and eat their mates. Jason managed 6:01, which would be half a minute's difference at the end of a marathon, the difference between fifth and eighth place in Boston.

Jason found he was always talking about himself, one way or another, always thinking about himself, in short, always being chased by monsters. Once it had been a vampire, a big one, pale, foul, evil, ancient, pissed, hungry, smelly, a real pain in the neck. When it latched on and tried to feed, the vampire had found that Jason didn't have enough self-esteem to support a heart beat, and so the vampire, depressed, left. Jason called the story "What We Talk about When We Talk about Muffins in the Oven." Another time before that it had been a mummy, wrapped in rotting gauze, shuffling inexorably into view no matter which place Jason went to write. But when it tried to crush his head between its cursed hands, it discovered that without a brain the crush wasn't worth leaving a swell sarcophagus for, and it left him alone. That story was called "A Rose for Amelia Bedelia." And now the werewolf wanted to rip out his guts. But a man can only be brave if he faces his fears: if he has no fears, he is not brave. Jason didn't have enough self-esteem to be brave, so he had not guts.

His girlfriend was a cute blond cheerleader with big boobs and no brains: a novelist. She went to the football games, and she cheered her little heart out, and if the team won, she said, hooray! And if the team lost, she said, too bad! But she never left out the exclamation point! And when the game was over, she put on her regular clothes and lived life. She wasn't very smart; for example, she believed oregano came from Oregon. Because he told her. During sex. It had gone like this: "Oh my god oh my god oh my god." "Hey, guess what." "Oh my god. What." It's called oregano because it comes from Oregon." "Oh my god I'm cumming. Really?" "Yeah." "Oh my god."

Jason sometimes asked her, why did she let him go on like that? Always talking about himself, lecturing her on his most recent revelations, complaining to her bitterly about the injustice in the intelligent man's world. Existentialist-horse pucky. Why did she put up with it? And since she wasn't very smart, she always said the same thing. "I just love you cause you are." She wrote novels about people roaming the desert, inventing Jesus, overcoming paranoia, solving crimes.

Well he was tired of it, all this self-awereness. It made him feel asinine. Jason didn't want to be chased by werewolves, or vampires or mummies. He wanted to be a novelist. He didn't want to talk all the time, to analyze everything, to always be thinking about where he was and what he was doing and why and what it meant and the nature of time and the nature of knowledge. He didn't want to be the sort of person who does the sort of thing that he believes the sort of person he is wouldn't do. He wanted to think about how great his girlfriends boobs were. He wanted to take off his cheerleading skirt after the game and live life. He wanted to be able to deal with this werewolf the way a novelist would; not with some pithy cool insightful linguistic twist. He wanted build-up, climax, conclusion. That was a life worth living.

He decided to give it a shot, in exactly one hundred words:

"Jason screamed and ran off the road and into the trees. He could hear the werewolf crashing behind him, snarling, howling. Suddenly Jason stumbled on a root, and cried out as he fell. He rolled over. He wanted to see death coming. Wanted to die aware. The werewolf stood above him, blocking the starlight, spit dripping from its enormous fangs. He should have listened to his parents, should have listened to his friends, should have never wandered alone into the haunted forest at night. The werewolf inhaled his terror with hunger for a moment, and then it fell on him."