"The woodwork is painted a pleasant spring green with a small bit of raw umber added, complimented with a Carl Larsson red-orange trim and doors. The floor is an oiled and worn pine, face nailed with square cut nails that have rusted and interestingly stained the random width boards, all taken from an old milking shed down the road. The ceiling is dark stained pine with exposed rafters painted the red-orange. The room smells of books and linseed oil. The Writer imagined it smelled of a certain dacha.
The Writer lay face up on the floor, his blood congealing around bits of scalp and bone, the pistol still in his mouth. The Complete Stories, Vol. One, Anton Chekhov lay under his chin, open to the story "Vanka," blood slightly running from his mouth, pooling on the back cover. Another book of Chekhov short stories sits, obviously thrown, against the base of an ornate mahogany side table, a lamp fallen across the marble top, the bulb flickering erratically.
The Writer's son, a Silicon Valley engineer, gifted his father, the day before, a volume of recently discovered Chekhov short stories, written in 1891, after a visit to the penal colony in the Sakhalin Islands. The Writer stayed up all night reading the wonderful, beautifully Chekhovian stories. He could not sleep for going over the new golden literature, thinking through each gem, again and again.
Waiting until he knew his son would be having his morning coffee, he called him to thank him and regale him with yet more examples of the pure genius of Chekhov.
The Writer's son listened and then broke out laughing, explaining to his dad that the book was a fraud, it was written, generated by computer, by artificial intelligence. The Writer became silent. The son, continued to laugh, calling out "dad" over and over...." From "The Writer Dies" By Franklin Cincinnatus
