On that terrible Saturday, Gerardo found himself at home with the house oddly quiet. His family had left to visit the countryside, not out of neglect, but to give him a rare window of solitude—time alone to think, to breathe, to let ideas simmer without the usual bustle of everyone’s needs tugging at him. Yet the moment of peace did not settle comfortably. Instead, it sharpened the edge of restlessness that had lived inside him for years, a restless ache that grew louder as minutes stretched into hours. What to do with himself over the weekend that stretched before his mind? An idea began to form, tentative at first, then clear. He imagined writing a novel. He had carried that notion for exactly twenty years, a stubborn dream that his wife and children seemed to expect him to set aside whenever life demanded his attention elsewhere. And so they left—occasionally, deliberately—so he could have the space he needed to pursue something larger than daily routines. Yet the act of starting a novel on a Saturday afternoon felt almost ridiculous to him now. Real writers, he thought, wrote during the ordinary, everyday rhythm of life: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and somehow the rest of the week would fill in around it.
But he opened the computer and allowed the keyboard to wake up the room. He wrote thousands and thousands of initial sentences, then dismissed them one by one, discarding them into a growing pile like leaves in the wind. If he could stitch all of those first lines together, perhaps he could publish a book that felt complete, whole, and true, a real bestseller. He believed the secret lay in discovering the first sentence that could unfold a map for the rest of the story, a doorway through which the reader would want to wander. So he tried: “One terrible Saturday, I was home alone.” He stepped back, read the sentence aloud, and tasted that peculiar thrill of potential. It had a rhythm, a cadence, even with only two syllables, and a content that teased at something shadowy and urgent. He wondered what made that particular Saturday feel terrible, and why the imagined Saturday in his novel might become something unforgettable too. The thought filled him with a peculiar sense of satisfaction, a hope that he could coax a meaningful path from a page that had merely stood still for so long.
To celebrate the moment, or perhaps to reward himself for recognizing what the sentence promised, he poured a glass of wine and reached for a cigarette. He had gone months without smoking, but this felt like a moment that deserved a small ritual, a way to mark the crossing from idea to intention. He kept a pack in the drawer, just in case a desperate or happy impulse ever rose again, and this time both felt perfectly suitable. The wine warmed his throat; the cigarette carried a quiet, steady burn that matched the glow of the monitor’s pale light. The sentence—“One terrible Saturday, I was home alone”—reverberated through the room, echoing in the steady hum of the computer and the slow tick of the clock on the wall.
Hours drifted by. The first glass emptied, the second followed, and with each sip and each inhale, the scene in his mind grew more vivid. He walked the length of the hall, from one end to the other, letting the cadence of the words slide between his thoughts and the sounds of the house. The sentence itself lingered, strengthening with every repetition as if it had become a thread linking the mind’s eye to the page. He could feel the weight of the moment—how a single Saturday could hold a lifetime of questions, memories, regrets, and small mercies—yet also how a story might emerge from that weight and give it form. The room grew warmer, the air a touch redolent with the scent of wine and smoke, and he found himself slipping deeper into a mood that felt both dangerous and delicious, like stepping closer to a doorway he knew he should not cross but could not resist.
As the hour stretched into what felt like a private horizon, his thoughts turned toward the impending Sunday. He imagined another day that could arrive with the same unspoken pressure, another chance to fade into the walls of the home and vanish into the act of writing. He picked up the phone, then paused, listening to the faint creak of the floorboards as if the house itself urged him to wait. He dialed his wife, only to return to the quiet after the call ended in a gentle, resolute note. He asked for her return soon, not because he doubted the value of his own project, but because the thought of sharing the moment with someone else—their shared history, their laughter, the small rituals of everyday life—felt essential to the kind of truth he wanted to capture on the page. He hoped the family would come back with all their usual chaos intact, for even that may be part of the story he wanted to tell, the way a home heartbeat could both comfort and complicate a writer’s journey.