Thalath

The author is resting her forehead upon the table, letting her thoughts fumble through the rubble of her broken imagination. So many strange worlds to describe, so many unexpected characters to develop. She could throne the poor, ruin the kings, set babes adrift across stormy seas to let them lead lives of heroes. A multitude of unmentioned mysteries tread water in a grey scale sea of themes, many of which are over-populated by rejected musicals and near-existent plots, etc etc etc.

A girl.

The writer raises her face from the table, revealing a forgetful vestige -- a face suffering from a lack of scrutiny on the world's part.

A girl would hold the main sway of the story, and she would-

An anarchy of parallel worlds and a myriad possibilities clash once more to produce a piece of paper, which floats gradually to the surface of the subconsciousness and reveals what is written upon it.

The girl would smell chaos.
So what does chaos smell like?

Another scrap escapes from the flurried sea and silently whispers a word into the author's vision:

Ink.

The owner of the forgetful vestige mulls this over, noting the subtle irony that a library would smell so strongly of chaos. The girl would have to be a librarian. A pretty one of course, since that was all readers ever really seemed to care for.

Pretty how? the writer asks herself persistently, scouring the room for inspiration.

This time a book bobs to the surface of her mind, struggling to stay above-water in the bubbling sea of entirety. It takes the shape of a small babe, growing quickly at an impossible rate into a fully-clothed teenage girl of eighteen.

She has spiked blue hair, the byproduct of a thriving urge for change that the library can never quite satisfy. The face somewhat resembles the writer's: pale from a lack of sun and in other ways very human. But there is a sharp, almost disturbing feature to the girl's face that leaves the author wondering, some time later, if something had either been amiss or slightly out-of-whack when she'd first seen her. A closer inspection of the green-amber eyes and numerously pierced ears which revealed nothing more than her Irish heritage and the nearly-healed scars on the tops of her ears.

Her clothes consist of a brown long robe over an identical green one, worn over the worldly tee-and-jeans. She kept herself thin so as to slip between the tottering piles of books that occupied the majority of the unused space that she worked in. Her arms were strong from carrying the ridiculously large books she read, her body limber from climbing the old fashioned ladders between the countless aisles that leaned against the shelves of dusty fiction and overlooked truths. Problem was, the aisles couldn't be counted on staying in the library. No section ever stayed the exactly the same in exactly the same place. Sometimes she would have to wait for weeks before she could return a book to its proper place.

Why was the library like that? The writer suddenly became suspicious. She had never written a fiction novel, much less something that defied the laws of physics. Why was she imagining this silly theme? Furthermore, had she really thought up the girl? The cute, daring librarian she was seeing in her mind now would make for a great story, but not what she had been planning when she'd first moved into the wilds of Ireland. The fact that the girl was Irish made sense, she guessed, but what was that small detail about the ears about?

Her mind froze.

She had somehow imagined the perfect character for a fairy-tale elf story. She hadn't even thought about pointed ears when the human form had taken shape, so where had they come from? Surely the scars were leftover from some sort of childhood accident. Yes, that made much more sense. Her parents were probably abusive and burned her ears when they were drunk. These things were always happening in the worked nowadays, it would fit nicely in the story. And there was no need to worry over the library's twerks now, they would be tomorrow when she could get around to it.

The writer mulled over this human girl. An odd character, to be sure. Obviously a result from the writer's lack of sleep. If only they had told her about the frogs before letting her rent their little cottage.

Ah, well. She would love to see how the story continues, but her eyelids are falling heavily and she decides not to sleep with her head on the desk this time. Her face still had the imprints of last night's typed manuscript. She would wash it off in the morning.


To Be Cont'D