"Ernie." A mustached man sulked over to the booth, looking similar to the man already seated there.

"Bill, you louse! Where the heck have you been? My bourbon's getting cold, dammit!" Bill fell into the slot opposite his drinking partner. "Since you were late, I thought I'd order ahead of you," said Ernie. A Shirley Temple sweated in front of Bill. "Hope you don't mind."

"Hnh."

"What's the matter? Pansy drink not good enough for you?" Ernie tossed back another shot of liquor. The bottle would find itself parched before the night was through. Smoke filtered over from the middle of the bar, where some youth yelled, "Dig that bartender and his dirty apron!"

"How's your story coming along?" asked Ernie, trying to get his perpetually dismal friend to open up.

Bill looked up from his sugary glass. "Why can't I write anything happy?"

His drinking companion smiled. "Because you don't know from happy. I don't know from happy, either. Heck, I don't think anyone ever will. We're not naturally contented people, Bill. We're writers. Writers aren't meant to be happy."

"My characters," Bill started, "my characters, they have a soul. A dark soul. Every one of them."

"Yeah, we're all like that, in a way. We've got this stuff inside," Ernie gestured, with his hands, "causes us to lash out, become violent. I try to examine that sometimes. Not really violence itself, but what drives us to become violent. What is it, you think? That makes us violent, I mean. A person, an image, a memory? What?"

Bill slurped his drink. The taste of the grenadine tried resurrecting some childhood glee, but it stopped after moments afterward, as sugar fixes tend to do. "It's the soul, I tell you. We hear it calling out to us, but should we answer it? We have no choice. It's not a matter of morality or depravity, social injustice or blueberries --"

"Just a minute there, my psychotically dismal friend. Say what you like about blueberries, but if a man doesn't have his morals, he doesn't have a thing!" Ernie banged his left fist down on the table.

"Oh, this is priceless," said Bill, talking up to the heavens. "You're a funny one to talk about morals, you misogynist swine."

"I resent being called a swine," joked Ernie.

"A wino, then."

"Better."

The two men lowered their heads, slightly distraught over their exchange. They sat there quietly for a moment, before Ernie poured himself another shot. "What I'm saying is, Bill, is that when you have a character, doesn't matter if it's a woman, a man, or a sheep, they've gotta have morals."

"A sheep?"

"Just hold on, okay? Let's say you've got a hunter. He hunts deer. Now, he's been hunting deer all his life, and he knows the ins and outs of a gun, the mating habits of deer, where deer go to the can..." Ernie coughs roughly, then wags a pointed finger in the air. "But he won't shoot a fawn. Why...? Because the hunter has morals."

Bill choked on Shirley, for no good reason. "Alright. But what if it was a doe, a deer, a female deer?"

"Oh, he'd probably shoot her."

"Figures."

"Would you shut the hell up?" retorted Ernie. "Women are nice."

"I'm sure they are, not that you'd know," Bill snickered. Ernie turned away in disgust. "That's another thing you're so hung up on. What's with all these pithy, useless sentences of yours?" Ernie turned back, blankly. "There's hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, and you make it simple enough for a kid to read sometimes! I mean, really, Ernie!"

"It just means I'll have that many more readers than you will." He laughed. "I don't need all that fancy crap. A good writer should know how to search for the perfect line, the ideal word. That's what I do. I make my narrative succinct." Ernie tapped his shotglass on the table. "Why do you think we have all those thousands of words? Because we run out of things to say? No, certainly not! It's because we're so lost in the insanity of that galaxy of diction that we're afraid to say anything simple. I get at the heart of emotion, because my words are easy to understand."

He took a breath, then continued. "If you can't write something that reads easily when you say it out loud, you shouldn't be writing at all."

Bill hunched over the table, glaring. "So you're saying all of my novels are worthless? Please... I invoke the spirit of humanity! I attack, I examine, I redirect what people are, and why they act the way they do! I give my readers a taste of madness...but they have to work for it. They might even find my pages so incomprehensible that they themselves become mad! That's when you know that words on a page are more than just words. And that's why discovering the right combination of those innumerably patterned bits of knowledge captivates, enraptures, and entertains the audience, making them want to read more."

"I would never write down what you just told me. Too bulky. Smaller better. Quick. Tiny. Sentence."

Bill stirred the orange juice and grenadine around in his glass, mixing them together. "You know, you've just made me think of something." He blinked up from the drink. "Something we can agree on."

"Really, now?"

"Yes. Subtlety."

"Yeah... Yeah, I think you're onto something there."

The faintest hint of a smile traced Bill's lips. "Writing about bullfights or suicide...it's not worth anything if you can't do it subtly."

"Say it like it is, Bill. Say it like it is."

"Like I said before, readers have to work for their story. We can't simply hand it to them. Writers allow readers to explore and solve the language, to appropriate thoughts that aren't their own. We shouldn't hit them over the head with things. We have to allow them to make the connection for themselves." A youngish waitress walks by, temporarily taking Bill from his thoughts. "There's just one thing, though. Our problem is trying to determine what not to say, and when not to say it."

"That's it exactly," admitted Ernie. "Now, I know it sounds funny, but that's one of my biggest problems. I'm so selective with my language that I don't know if I'm saying enough - if I'm getting the image across, I mean. If I make the reader work too hard for the image, the meaning might be lost on them."

"You just have to know when enough is enough, eh?" said Bill. "You have to know when to stop."

"When do you stop?"

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