All This I Will Give to You

by Dolores Redondo

He looked into the mirror. His face was ashen, the aftermath of the insomnia that had kept him writing until dawn. He looked over his shoulder at the closely scribbled pages that covered the desktop. Others had slid to the floor, so that an avalanche of paper now presented a snowy track across the room to the bed. He gazed stupidly at them for a couple of moments. When he turned back to the mirror his eyes were as clouded as the early-morning sky of Galicia, masked by a film of pallid sadness. He rubbed a hand across his face in an effort to shake off his fatigue. He raked his fingers through his short dark hair and noticed there was much more gray at his temples than just a few days before. His cheeks were dark with what was now a salt-and-pepper morning shadow. His lips were as bright and red as those of a sad clown. When he tried to smile, no more than a mild tremor crossed the mask his face had become, as rigid as if a drunken dentist had injected him with too much novocaine or his face were paralyzed with Botox. “You can’t keep this up,” he told the man in the mirror.

Description of character - sadness