The Burden of the Demiurge (Author's Confession)

 (Pause. The sound of a lighter or a heavy sigh is heard.)

...You ask what it is like? To be a god on paper? It probably sounds flattering. Omnipotence, power over worlds and destinies. If I wanted to—I built a city; if I wanted to—I ground it to dust with a single keystroke of "Delete." I ignited and extinguished stars, changed the course of history, and forced gods to bend the knee. But this coin has a flip side that you likely do not know about. The one that comes at night, when the monitor goes dark, and the silence in the room becomes too loud.

You know, people often say: "It is just a character. It didn't happen." For the reader—yes. For the reader, a hero's death is an emotion, a couple of tears, a closed book, and a return to reality. But for me... For me, it is premeditated murder.

Take that boy from the last story. Do you remember him? The one from the hospice. The one who had no limbs. You read it and, perhaps, pitied him. And I? I knew he would die even before I told you his story.

I created him that way. I took away his arms and legs, leaving him not even a chance to hug his mother goodbye. I placed him in that ward, filled it with the smell of medicine and hopelessness. I scripted his every breath, every thought of pain. And the scariest part isn't that I wrote it. The scariest part is that I could have saved him.

Everything was in my power. I could have written a miracle. A new technology, a sudden remission, or just a wrong diagnosis! I could have given him life, damn it! But I didn't do it.

Why? Because dramaturgy demanded a sacrifice? Because a happy ending would have seemed fake? It turns out I sacrificed a child to "artistic truth." I killed him for the sake of catharsis, so that the reader would feel something.

I sat at the table, drinking cold coffee, and methodically, word by word, led him to the line. I felt his heart stopping because it was I who was stopping it with my fingers on the keyboard.

And now I look at my hands. Ordinary hands. Not the hands of a surgeon who failed to save a life, not the hands of a soldier. A writer's hands. But on them is the invisible blood of those I did not spare. Those whom I created only to suffer and die for the sake of a beautiful finale.

You ask, is there any justification for me? No. I am not just a storyteller. I am an executioner who first makes you (the readers) fall in love with the victim, and then reads out the sentence.

And this boy... he will now always stand somewhere here, in the shadow of the bookcase. A silent reproach to my "omnipotence."

(Long pause)

Don't say that it is just literature. If it were only literature, we wouldn't be writing with blood from our own veins.