Between the Pages
Tomas stepped into the eerily quiet apartment, alert to
intruders. The door had been kicked in and the desk just inside the door had
been gone through. From the kitchen, a small tomato rolled through the archway.
Tomas grabbed the candlestick which had been knocked over on the desk and was
about to mount the stairs when he heard the shot. It was a pistol, from the
upstairs bedroom; Clara, his daughter. Tomas raced up the stairs and barreled
through Clara’s door. Over her lifeless body stood a man. He immediately looked
up to see Tomas holding the candlestick. The man raised the pistol and aimed it
at Tomas. The hammer was back. He pulled the trigger.
I stopped typing. A noise had startled me from my authorial haze, that feeling a writer gets when so engrossed in whatever it is they’re writing. A thud had came from the kitchen, as if a large sack of flour had been dropped from a short height. A rolled away from my computer and went to investigate. There was nobody home and I wasn’t expecting anyone. When I stepped into the kitchen doorway, it was then that I saw him leaning over the sink. He was about six feet tall with combed back dark brown hair. He was dressed in a nice grey overcoat and black dress pants. I noticed something red dripping down the counter. It was a dark crimson color; blood. I asked the obvious question, the only thing I could think to ask,
“Who are you? Where did you come from?”
He turned and faced me. His white oxford shirt was brilliant save for the spreading dark red stain on the right side of his abdomen. He had been drained of most of his color. He managed only three and a half words before collapsing onto the floor,
“My name is To...”
I struggled getting him into a fireman’s carry but when I finally succeeded, I rushed him out to my car. He came to slightly in the car, enough to ask where we were. After that, he passed out again.
At the hospital, I waved down an emergency nurse who ran hurried to get us a wheelchair. At registration, they asked him for his identification. He pulled his wallet out of his left coat pocket and handed it to them. The nurse at the desk opened it and asked him
“This is a French driver’s license. Your name is Tomas Rougir?”
My mind stopped. This was a dream. I had been writing all day, since morning. It must have been six o’clock in the evening. I had fallen asleep at my desk and this was all a dream. I had been so engrossed in Tomas’ story that I had begun dreaming about it. This wasn’t possible. I turned to walk out of the emergency waiting room. I heard somebody yell ‘Stop him!’ and an armed security guard grabbed my arm. I shrugged it off, assured that it was a dream. The guard wrestled me to the ground and drew his pistol, pointing it at me. I went again to stand and walk out. Another guard struck me in the stomach with his baton and I hit the floor. I wasn’t dreaming.
The police were called since Tomas had a gunshot wound. I told them that I didn’t own a gun but all they could get from Tomas was that his daughter had been murdered. Clara. She had been shot by a burglar who I created. She was as much my daughter as she was Tomas’ daughter and I had allowed her to be killed. Tomas had been hit by a bullet that I created fired from a gun I penned. When they finally got through to him enough to ask if it was me who shot him, he said it wasn’t. He said that the man who did was still in Paris, probably selling whatever he stole from the apartment. The doctors and police wondered how a man with a gunshot wound which had bled as much as it did made it from Paris to Washington without dying. It was improbable. I couldn’t tell them the truth. With the bleeding stopped and Tomas stitched and bandaged, they tried to find out more about him. He had no passport and no record with the French government. Tomas Rougir did not exist. His drivers license was a very well-made fake. With no real and verifiable identity to speak of, nothing could be done with him. He was turned loose as he persistently said that it was not me that shot him. He shambled back to the car. It was then he asked me,
“Who are you?”
I could either tell him who I was and with that, every last detail of his entire life, essentially rendering his pseudo-existence meaningless and me his ultimate creator, or I could lie. I lied.
“I’m Michael Wolf. I’m a writer. You’re...Tomas?”
I knew everything there was to know about Tomas. When I had first written him, he was 17 and a kid without a care. At 22, he married a beautiful girl with dark hair and grey eyes but her lack of care for the relationship was what finally drove it apart after two years. Out of the tumultuous relationship came Tomas’ one reason for living; Clara. And Clara was beautiful. From her mother, she got her dark hair and fair skin. From her father she received her love of reading and an ability to connect with people. Through the occasional unpredictability of genetics, she got violet eyes.
Tomas had graduated from the University of Paris with a Master’s degree in history, though he had never really done anything with it. He came from a fairly well-off family and had been coasting on a family trust since he turned 18. He picked up substitute teaching jobs now and again but was content to stay home with Clara more often. He and Clara had been together since he received custody of her when she was two years old. That was twelve years ago.
Tomas replied to the question I already knew the answer to,
“Yes. My name is Tomas Rougir. How did I end up in your kitchen?”
“I’m not sure. I was writing when I heard a thud in my kitchen. I went to investigate and found you there bleeding.”
I made the mistake of asking the next question.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
Tomas’ breathing changed. His breath became shallow and spread out.
“I came home. The apartment had been ransacked and...Clara. She was upstairs. That was when I heard the shot. I ran up and burst into her room. That was...when I saw him. Standing over her with the gun. There was blood on the bed and wall and...”
Until then, I hadn’t seen things through Tomas’ eyes. I had envisioned what would make a good story, what would be compelling, not what the result would be if my character was presented to me in living and breathing reality. Tomas continued.
“He turned to me, standing there with a candlestick in my hand, and pointed the gun at me. After that, I barely remember the shot. And then I was in your house.”
Clara was dead. Tomas was not. We had arrived back at the house.
Tomas sat down on the sofa and took his wallet out of his pocket. In it was a small photograph of a girl with a hair the color of black coffee in a pixie cut and eyes like morning glories. He sat staring at the photograph, trembling. I went to the kitchen and used a wet rag on the blood, though there wasn’t much. I pulled a porkchop from the refrigerator and put in in the microwave for a handful of seconds. I went to take it to Tomas but he wasn’t sitting on the sofa anymore. I walked down the hall and checked the bathroom and both guest bedrooms. The last room I checked, the one room I hoped he wouldn’t enter, was where I found him; my office. I hadn’t minimized my work. All the stories about Tomas were in one file, which was still open. Tomas was reading the last line of the latest story:
The man raised the pistol and aimed it at Tomas.
Tomas looked at me. He had read snippets of the other stories. He had read things that only he would know. He knew this because I knew this. Tomas realized who he was, that he was a figment of my imagination. It was the only explanation, logical or not. Tomas had never met me before and I had never met him because he was a literary character.
“You took everything from me.”
I took a notepad and pen from my pocket and wrote:
‘Before the two men, a young girl with short hair and violet eyes materialized. She stood alive and full of health with the sweetest of smiles upon her face. Clara.’
I looked at the floor between us. Nothing happened. Clara didn’t appear. Tomas asked what I was doing and I handed him the notepad.
“I tried...I’m sorry.”
Tomas threw down the notepad and it fluttered to a page where I had drawn a sketch of a daffodil.
“You tried and succeeded at fabricating the existence of a now-very real human being. You tried and succeeded at killing my daughter. Get to your computer and set to rendering me lifeless. Drop me off on the surface of the sun. Whatever it takes, writer, just end my suffering.”
It dawned on me that Tomas was feeling like less than nothing. I had created and destroyed his entire world in a handful of keystrokes.
Tomas stood and walked out of the room. I heard the front door open and close. I looked down at the notepad, open to the doodle of the daffodil. I sat down at my computer and thought of the various ways I could try to bring Clara back. I began typing,
‘Clara awoke, completely unharmed by the burglar. The burglar himself had since fled the apartment. Clara felt herself transported into another world; the world in which the creator of her story world resided. She appeared before him, fully aware of her once fictional life.’
I looked beside myself, awaiting the familiar thud of her arrival. Nothing happened. I went to get Tomas. He was outside, standing beneath a tree in my backyard looking up through the branches at the sky.
“How many stories have you written about me alone? I saw the books on your bookshelf. All of them had to do with me. ‘The Violet Child’ was all about Clara. A New York Times bestseller too. I suppose I should be proud of her but it’s your work. How many other lives have you created? How many people have you killed?”
“I tried again to bring her back but nothing happened. Don’t make it seem like I don’t care. I never expected any of this to happen. This isn’t even possible but look where we are. I feel just as bad as you. In a way, Clara was my daughter too. Read ‘The Violet Child’ and you’ll see. I poured a year and a half into making her the sweetest person on earth and three hundred million people fell in love with her.”
Tomas looked at me with what almost looked like a smile.
“That’s not what I asked you writer. I asked you how many people you’ve killed.”
I didn’t want to answer. A lot of the stories I had written in my free time, just for fun involved nuclear war and the earth being destroyed by alien lifeforms. I couldn’t tell him an exact number and I didn’t want to give him an estimate.
“B-billions. If every single person in your world was alive then...”
“They were. Adalbert Grumman was a brilliant man until he was assassinated.”
Adalbert Grumman was a college professor turned senate candidate. He had taught at the University of Paris when Tomas was there, but in none of my stories had they ever interacted, they merely existed in the same fictional universe.
“So billions. How many of them that you killed did you give consideration to, like you did Clara and Adalbert? How was I going to die?”
I had never planned to kill Tomas. He was my flagship character though in a number of occasions he had faced death.
“Several. Maybe six counting Adalbert and Clara. And you. Remember when the building collapsed with you in it? And you made it out alright.”
“I made it out alright but twelve other people didn’t. Twelve people died. And my ex wife. What about her? Were you going to kill her too?”
Compared to Clara and Tomas, Fabienne received little development. Hardly any really; she was only in one book and that began with her and Tomas meeting and ended with their divorce. She was apparently still alive.
“No. Her part in the story ended and...”
“Did it? Did it ever occur to you that perhaps Clara would have liked to see her mother? That she may have wanted to spend more time with her? It didn’t because if I were just some regular family man, my life wouldn’t have made you rich, would it?”
Tomas picked up a piece of a tree branch which had broken into an eight-inch piece and threw it at me. I was absorbing what he had said when one of its ends hit me in the chest. It knocked me back, and as I realized what had happened, Tomas had the front of my shirt in his hands. He had lifted me eight inches in the air and threw me to the ground. His voice lost its sadness and gained in anger.
“Your wordcraft has real-world implications, writer. Do something about it.”
It was then that Tomas grabbed his abdomen where he had been shot. His stitches ripped and a new patch of red was spreading on his shirt. I stood up and held my hand out to him, wanting to guide him back to the car and hospital. He at first refused, but then looked down at his wound and took my hand. We walked through the side yard and down the hill to the car. Tomas was still wearing the blood-stained shirt he arrived in.
When we arrived at the hospital, they were quick to stitch Tomas back up. I again handed the financial spokesperson my credit card and signed away some bewildering amount of money. Tomas hadn’t seen me do this the first time but he saw it this time.
“You just...why?”
Even in his story world, he was aware that American healthcare costs were high. That may or may not have been in one of the stories, I can’t recall.
“You’re what’s kept me alive for the past sixteen years. If you die, I die. It’s only fair.”
That was true as well. The advances and royalties I had received for the books I’d written about Tomas were what had put me in the economic standing I was currently in. What I had told Tomas about Clara was true. Her feature book, The Violet Child, had spent 14 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list and sold something like 250 million copies. It flew off of the shelves and got passed around among friends. An hour in an emergency room and Tomas was re-stitched and bandaged. I looked at him. He was a wreck. His once-stark white shirt had a roughly circular bloodstain on it that, if he were to lay the shirt flat, would have been two feet in diameter. His overcoat had a similar stain though not as dark or wide. His slacks also had lines of stained blood on them as well. His dark hair had become tousled from its original combed-back style.
We drove back toward the house but instead of going back home, I pulled into the mall. Tomas at first refused to go in, citing his dirty appearance, but he relented and followed me in. It was then I realized it was essentially me who had dressed him since his creation. He had always been wearing smart clothing: button-down shirts, nice slacks, and good shoes. Inside one of the clothing stores, he saw theme t-shirts and jeans. He looked down at his attire.
“Oxfords and khakis. That’s all I’ve ever worn isn’t it? And these shoes. These incredibly uncomfortable shoes.”
It was all he had ever worn. It never occurred to me to change his appearance every so often but now I knew how he felt. He took a dark purple shirt with a white screen-printed dragon on the front off of a rack and handed it to me. Then he went to the wall of jeans and took a pair of faded stonewashed down. He then walked over to a table full of shoes. He looked down at his faded and worn black leather dress shoes. They looked as if they were fifteen years old by the wear on the soles, though the uppers were still in fair condition. He grabbed a pair of bright blue Converse All-Stars.
When we got back to the car, Tomas looked at me and then looked down and away. He turned his face back to mine and told me,
“You didn’t know. How could you have known? You were doing your job. And like you said, at least she brought joy to millions of people. It’s what she would have wanted.”
We got back to the house and Tomas made it inside before I did. I had stopped because of something I hadn’t seen when we left. In the yard by the sidewalk leading to the front door was a single daisy, the flower of purity and innocence; the flower of Clara. Inside, Tomas had settled down. He was flipping through The Violet Child. Within was most of Clara’s life and a slice-of-life view of her and her father’s daily doings. Tomas let out a soft chuckle.
I stopped typing. A noise had startled me from my authorial haze, that feeling a writer gets when so engrossed in whatever it is they’re writing. A thud had came from the kitchen, as if a large sack of flour had been dropped from a short height. A rolled away from my computer and went to investigate. There was nobody home and I wasn’t expecting anyone. When I stepped into the kitchen doorway, it was then that I saw him leaning over the sink. He was about six feet tall with combed back dark brown hair. He was dressed in a nice grey overcoat and black dress pants. I noticed something red dripping down the counter. It was a dark crimson color; blood. I asked the obvious question, the only thing I could think to ask,
“Who are you? Where did you come from?”
He turned and faced me. His white oxford shirt was brilliant save for the spreading dark red stain on the right side of his abdomen. He had been drained of most of his color. He managed only three and a half words before collapsing onto the floor,
“My name is To...”
I struggled getting him into a fireman’s carry but when I finally succeeded, I rushed him out to my car. He came to slightly in the car, enough to ask where we were. After that, he passed out again.
At the hospital, I waved down an emergency nurse who ran hurried to get us a wheelchair. At registration, they asked him for his identification. He pulled his wallet out of his left coat pocket and handed it to them. The nurse at the desk opened it and asked him
“This is a French driver’s license. Your name is Tomas Rougir?”
My mind stopped. This was a dream. I had been writing all day, since morning. It must have been six o’clock in the evening. I had fallen asleep at my desk and this was all a dream. I had been so engrossed in Tomas’ story that I had begun dreaming about it. This wasn’t possible. I turned to walk out of the emergency waiting room. I heard somebody yell ‘Stop him!’ and an armed security guard grabbed my arm. I shrugged it off, assured that it was a dream. The guard wrestled me to the ground and drew his pistol, pointing it at me. I went again to stand and walk out. Another guard struck me in the stomach with his baton and I hit the floor. I wasn’t dreaming.
The police were called since Tomas had a gunshot wound. I told them that I didn’t own a gun but all they could get from Tomas was that his daughter had been murdered. Clara. She had been shot by a burglar who I created. She was as much my daughter as she was Tomas’ daughter and I had allowed her to be killed. Tomas had been hit by a bullet that I created fired from a gun I penned. When they finally got through to him enough to ask if it was me who shot him, he said it wasn’t. He said that the man who did was still in Paris, probably selling whatever he stole from the apartment. The doctors and police wondered how a man with a gunshot wound which had bled as much as it did made it from Paris to Washington without dying. It was improbable. I couldn’t tell them the truth. With the bleeding stopped and Tomas stitched and bandaged, they tried to find out more about him. He had no passport and no record with the French government. Tomas Rougir did not exist. His drivers license was a very well-made fake. With no real and verifiable identity to speak of, nothing could be done with him. He was turned loose as he persistently said that it was not me that shot him. He shambled back to the car. It was then he asked me,
“Who are you?”
I could either tell him who I was and with that, every last detail of his entire life, essentially rendering his pseudo-existence meaningless and me his ultimate creator, or I could lie. I lied.
“I’m Michael Wolf. I’m a writer. You’re...Tomas?”
I knew everything there was to know about Tomas. When I had first written him, he was 17 and a kid without a care. At 22, he married a beautiful girl with dark hair and grey eyes but her lack of care for the relationship was what finally drove it apart after two years. Out of the tumultuous relationship came Tomas’ one reason for living; Clara. And Clara was beautiful. From her mother, she got her dark hair and fair skin. From her father she received her love of reading and an ability to connect with people. Through the occasional unpredictability of genetics, she got violet eyes.
Tomas had graduated from the University of Paris with a Master’s degree in history, though he had never really done anything with it. He came from a fairly well-off family and had been coasting on a family trust since he turned 18. He picked up substitute teaching jobs now and again but was content to stay home with Clara more often. He and Clara had been together since he received custody of her when she was two years old. That was twelve years ago.
Tomas replied to the question I already knew the answer to,
“Yes. My name is Tomas Rougir. How did I end up in your kitchen?”
“I’m not sure. I was writing when I heard a thud in my kitchen. I went to investigate and found you there bleeding.”
I made the mistake of asking the next question.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
Tomas’ breathing changed. His breath became shallow and spread out.
“I came home. The apartment had been ransacked and...Clara. She was upstairs. That was when I heard the shot. I ran up and burst into her room. That was...when I saw him. Standing over her with the gun. There was blood on the bed and wall and...”
Until then, I hadn’t seen things through Tomas’ eyes. I had envisioned what would make a good story, what would be compelling, not what the result would be if my character was presented to me in living and breathing reality. Tomas continued.
“He turned to me, standing there with a candlestick in my hand, and pointed the gun at me. After that, I barely remember the shot. And then I was in your house.”
Clara was dead. Tomas was not. We had arrived back at the house.
Tomas sat down on the sofa and took his wallet out of his pocket. In it was a small photograph of a girl with a hair the color of black coffee in a pixie cut and eyes like morning glories. He sat staring at the photograph, trembling. I went to the kitchen and used a wet rag on the blood, though there wasn’t much. I pulled a porkchop from the refrigerator and put in in the microwave for a handful of seconds. I went to take it to Tomas but he wasn’t sitting on the sofa anymore. I walked down the hall and checked the bathroom and both guest bedrooms. The last room I checked, the one room I hoped he wouldn’t enter, was where I found him; my office. I hadn’t minimized my work. All the stories about Tomas were in one file, which was still open. Tomas was reading the last line of the latest story:
The man raised the pistol and aimed it at Tomas.
Tomas looked at me. He had read snippets of the other stories. He had read things that only he would know. He knew this because I knew this. Tomas realized who he was, that he was a figment of my imagination. It was the only explanation, logical or not. Tomas had never met me before and I had never met him because he was a literary character.
“You took everything from me.”
I took a notepad and pen from my pocket and wrote:
‘Before the two men, a young girl with short hair and violet eyes materialized. She stood alive and full of health with the sweetest of smiles upon her face. Clara.’
I looked at the floor between us. Nothing happened. Clara didn’t appear. Tomas asked what I was doing and I handed him the notepad.
“I tried...I’m sorry.”
Tomas threw down the notepad and it fluttered to a page where I had drawn a sketch of a daffodil.
“You tried and succeeded at fabricating the existence of a now-very real human being. You tried and succeeded at killing my daughter. Get to your computer and set to rendering me lifeless. Drop me off on the surface of the sun. Whatever it takes, writer, just end my suffering.”
It dawned on me that Tomas was feeling like less than nothing. I had created and destroyed his entire world in a handful of keystrokes.
Tomas stood and walked out of the room. I heard the front door open and close. I looked down at the notepad, open to the doodle of the daffodil. I sat down at my computer and thought of the various ways I could try to bring Clara back. I began typing,
‘Clara awoke, completely unharmed by the burglar. The burglar himself had since fled the apartment. Clara felt herself transported into another world; the world in which the creator of her story world resided. She appeared before him, fully aware of her once fictional life.’
I looked beside myself, awaiting the familiar thud of her arrival. Nothing happened. I went to get Tomas. He was outside, standing beneath a tree in my backyard looking up through the branches at the sky.
“How many stories have you written about me alone? I saw the books on your bookshelf. All of them had to do with me. ‘The Violet Child’ was all about Clara. A New York Times bestseller too. I suppose I should be proud of her but it’s your work. How many other lives have you created? How many people have you killed?”
“I tried again to bring her back but nothing happened. Don’t make it seem like I don’t care. I never expected any of this to happen. This isn’t even possible but look where we are. I feel just as bad as you. In a way, Clara was my daughter too. Read ‘The Violet Child’ and you’ll see. I poured a year and a half into making her the sweetest person on earth and three hundred million people fell in love with her.”
Tomas looked at me with what almost looked like a smile.
“That’s not what I asked you writer. I asked you how many people you’ve killed.”
I didn’t want to answer. A lot of the stories I had written in my free time, just for fun involved nuclear war and the earth being destroyed by alien lifeforms. I couldn’t tell him an exact number and I didn’t want to give him an estimate.
“B-billions. If every single person in your world was alive then...”
“They were. Adalbert Grumman was a brilliant man until he was assassinated.”
Adalbert Grumman was a college professor turned senate candidate. He had taught at the University of Paris when Tomas was there, but in none of my stories had they ever interacted, they merely existed in the same fictional universe.
“So billions. How many of them that you killed did you give consideration to, like you did Clara and Adalbert? How was I going to die?”
I had never planned to kill Tomas. He was my flagship character though in a number of occasions he had faced death.
“Several. Maybe six counting Adalbert and Clara. And you. Remember when the building collapsed with you in it? And you made it out alright.”
“I made it out alright but twelve other people didn’t. Twelve people died. And my ex wife. What about her? Were you going to kill her too?”
Compared to Clara and Tomas, Fabienne received little development. Hardly any really; she was only in one book and that began with her and Tomas meeting and ended with their divorce. She was apparently still alive.
“No. Her part in the story ended and...”
“Did it? Did it ever occur to you that perhaps Clara would have liked to see her mother? That she may have wanted to spend more time with her? It didn’t because if I were just some regular family man, my life wouldn’t have made you rich, would it?”
Tomas picked up a piece of a tree branch which had broken into an eight-inch piece and threw it at me. I was absorbing what he had said when one of its ends hit me in the chest. It knocked me back, and as I realized what had happened, Tomas had the front of my shirt in his hands. He had lifted me eight inches in the air and threw me to the ground. His voice lost its sadness and gained in anger.
“Your wordcraft has real-world implications, writer. Do something about it.”
It was then that Tomas grabbed his abdomen where he had been shot. His stitches ripped and a new patch of red was spreading on his shirt. I stood up and held my hand out to him, wanting to guide him back to the car and hospital. He at first refused, but then looked down at his wound and took my hand. We walked through the side yard and down the hill to the car. Tomas was still wearing the blood-stained shirt he arrived in.
When we arrived at the hospital, they were quick to stitch Tomas back up. I again handed the financial spokesperson my credit card and signed away some bewildering amount of money. Tomas hadn’t seen me do this the first time but he saw it this time.
“You just...why?”
Even in his story world, he was aware that American healthcare costs were high. That may or may not have been in one of the stories, I can’t recall.
“You’re what’s kept me alive for the past sixteen years. If you die, I die. It’s only fair.”
That was true as well. The advances and royalties I had received for the books I’d written about Tomas were what had put me in the economic standing I was currently in. What I had told Tomas about Clara was true. Her feature book, The Violet Child, had spent 14 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list and sold something like 250 million copies. It flew off of the shelves and got passed around among friends. An hour in an emergency room and Tomas was re-stitched and bandaged. I looked at him. He was a wreck. His once-stark white shirt had a roughly circular bloodstain on it that, if he were to lay the shirt flat, would have been two feet in diameter. His overcoat had a similar stain though not as dark or wide. His slacks also had lines of stained blood on them as well. His dark hair had become tousled from its original combed-back style.
We drove back toward the house but instead of going back home, I pulled into the mall. Tomas at first refused to go in, citing his dirty appearance, but he relented and followed me in. It was then I realized it was essentially me who had dressed him since his creation. He had always been wearing smart clothing: button-down shirts, nice slacks, and good shoes. Inside one of the clothing stores, he saw theme t-shirts and jeans. He looked down at his attire.
“Oxfords and khakis. That’s all I’ve ever worn isn’t it? And these shoes. These incredibly uncomfortable shoes.”
It was all he had ever worn. It never occurred to me to change his appearance every so often but now I knew how he felt. He took a dark purple shirt with a white screen-printed dragon on the front off of a rack and handed it to me. Then he went to the wall of jeans and took a pair of faded stonewashed down. He then walked over to a table full of shoes. He looked down at his faded and worn black leather dress shoes. They looked as if they were fifteen years old by the wear on the soles, though the uppers were still in fair condition. He grabbed a pair of bright blue Converse All-Stars.
When we got back to the car, Tomas looked at me and then looked down and away. He turned his face back to mine and told me,
“You didn’t know. How could you have known? You were doing your job. And like you said, at least she brought joy to millions of people. It’s what she would have wanted.”
We got back to the house and Tomas made it inside before I did. I had stopped because of something I hadn’t seen when we left. In the yard by the sidewalk leading to the front door was a single daisy, the flower of purity and innocence; the flower of Clara. Inside, Tomas had settled down. He was flipping through The Violet Child. Within was most of Clara’s life and a slice-of-life view of her and her father’s daily doings. Tomas let out a soft chuckle.
‘Clara ran to Tomas with a look of both shock and sadness
on her face. He asked her what was wrong and she replied “They stuck to the
ceiling! I’m so sorry!” Tomas smiled and knelt down to talk to her. “Now dear
Clara, what happened?” She guided him into the kitchen and pointed to the stove
which had a skillet on it and a pancake which was now cooking on its other
side. Tomas took the spatula and turned the pancake over. The other side was
also cooked to perfection. It was then that Tomas looked at the ceiling above
the stove. There he saw a circular ring of batter. Clara had tried to flip the
pancake by twitching the skillet but used too much power, flinging the pancake
batter-end up to the ceiling. Tomas smiled and poured more batter into the
skillet.
“Now watch. It’s all in the wrist.”
Tomas waited a moment for the
bottom of the second pancake to cook and then, after loosening it with the
spatula, flipped it. It made one rotation and landed batter-side down in the
skillet. They spent the rest of the morning making pancakes with Clara flipping
most of them herself.’
Tomas looked at me and smiled.
“It took the longest time to get that batter off of the ceiling. By the time we were finished making and eating them, it had dried. Those were good times, and they may not have happened without you Michael. Thank you.”
“And what little happiness I’ve found in my life wouldn’t have been possible without you either.
Tomas sat there for a while before getting up and walking down the hallway. It was then that I heard the clacking of a keyboard. I went to my office and saw him sitting at a computer, typing in a new blank word document. I only saw the bottom.
‘And Clara, a single flower among weeds, stood beside her father once again.’
Tomas said to me,
“If what is written is true, maybe somewhere out there, we are standing together. In another world perhaps.”
We both left my office and returned to the living room where we sat in silence. Tomas sat with a smile on his face, consoled in the fact that somewhere, Clara was OK. I got up to take Tomas’ new clothes into the guest bedroom and after placing them on the bed, I turned around and was face to face with a pair of violet eyes. These eyes were peeking out from behind small oval-rimmed glasses set just below dark bangs. Clara. I did all I could think to do. I yelled and Clara scrambled down beside the bed.
“Tomas!”
Tomas didn’t come running as I expected him to so I returned to the living room where he was still sitting and smiling. I pulled on his arm and he stood, then I guided him back to the room. Clara was gone. I ran to search the other rooms and Tomas began walking lackadaisically to the living room. It was then that I heard the softest squeak as if a mouse had stubbed its toe. I looked under the bed and saw the violet eyes peering out from between the bedskirt and the dustbunnies. I grabbed Tomas and pulled him down to floor-level. When she saw him, it was as if she flew from under the bed. They threw their arms around one another and tears flowed unimpeded from their eyes. They stayed locked together for what seemed like an eternity.
When they let go, I didn’t bother asking Clara who she was or what she remembered. I had hoped she didn’t remember anything. Tomas did ask.
“Clara, what do you remember?”
She stood for a moment and thought,
“A light. And before that, nothing. You had left.”
The rest of the evening, we sat together. Tomas knew not to tell her who I was other than that I was a writer, though something told me she was aware that there was more to me than could be seen. Her eyes could see into people, past the physical and into what lies beneath. It was nearly midnight by the time we all turned in.
The following morning, I awoke as usual at 7:30. I went to the room Tomas had been using but found it empty, his old clothes still in the bag he had placed them in. I then checked Clara’s room but also found it empty. There was no noise coming from the any of the bathrooms or the kitchen. After I had thrown some clothes on, I checked the front and back yards but found no sign of either of them. The living room was empty as was the dining room. I went into my office. The notepad which had remained on the floor all the previous day was placed on my desk. A text document was open and it read,
‘Michael, I must thank you. Though outwardly, Clara and I are no more real than Santa Claus or the boogeyman, you know the truth. Without you, I never would have had Clara, and without you, neither would the entire world. I read in one of your chapters something that was entirely too true: Clara is my reason for living. Keep us forever in mind and remember as I said; your wordcraft has real-world implications, no matter how big or small. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. We are forever between the pages.’ Signed, Tomas Rougir.
Taped to my monitor was a sketch of a daisy; a perfect picture of the perfect girl.
I opened a new text document and began to write.
Tomas looked at me and smiled.
“It took the longest time to get that batter off of the ceiling. By the time we were finished making and eating them, it had dried. Those were good times, and they may not have happened without you Michael. Thank you.”
“And what little happiness I’ve found in my life wouldn’t have been possible without you either.
Tomas sat there for a while before getting up and walking down the hallway. It was then that I heard the clacking of a keyboard. I went to my office and saw him sitting at a computer, typing in a new blank word document. I only saw the bottom.
‘And Clara, a single flower among weeds, stood beside her father once again.’
Tomas said to me,
“If what is written is true, maybe somewhere out there, we are standing together. In another world perhaps.”
We both left my office and returned to the living room where we sat in silence. Tomas sat with a smile on his face, consoled in the fact that somewhere, Clara was OK. I got up to take Tomas’ new clothes into the guest bedroom and after placing them on the bed, I turned around and was face to face with a pair of violet eyes. These eyes were peeking out from behind small oval-rimmed glasses set just below dark bangs. Clara. I did all I could think to do. I yelled and Clara scrambled down beside the bed.
“Tomas!”
Tomas didn’t come running as I expected him to so I returned to the living room where he was still sitting and smiling. I pulled on his arm and he stood, then I guided him back to the room. Clara was gone. I ran to search the other rooms and Tomas began walking lackadaisically to the living room. It was then that I heard the softest squeak as if a mouse had stubbed its toe. I looked under the bed and saw the violet eyes peering out from between the bedskirt and the dustbunnies. I grabbed Tomas and pulled him down to floor-level. When she saw him, it was as if she flew from under the bed. They threw their arms around one another and tears flowed unimpeded from their eyes. They stayed locked together for what seemed like an eternity.
When they let go, I didn’t bother asking Clara who she was or what she remembered. I had hoped she didn’t remember anything. Tomas did ask.
“Clara, what do you remember?”
She stood for a moment and thought,
“A light. And before that, nothing. You had left.”
The rest of the evening, we sat together. Tomas knew not to tell her who I was other than that I was a writer, though something told me she was aware that there was more to me than could be seen. Her eyes could see into people, past the physical and into what lies beneath. It was nearly midnight by the time we all turned in.
The following morning, I awoke as usual at 7:30. I went to the room Tomas had been using but found it empty, his old clothes still in the bag he had placed them in. I then checked Clara’s room but also found it empty. There was no noise coming from the any of the bathrooms or the kitchen. After I had thrown some clothes on, I checked the front and back yards but found no sign of either of them. The living room was empty as was the dining room. I went into my office. The notepad which had remained on the floor all the previous day was placed on my desk. A text document was open and it read,
‘Michael, I must thank you. Though outwardly, Clara and I are no more real than Santa Claus or the boogeyman, you know the truth. Without you, I never would have had Clara, and without you, neither would the entire world. I read in one of your chapters something that was entirely too true: Clara is my reason for living. Keep us forever in mind and remember as I said; your wordcraft has real-world implications, no matter how big or small. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. We are forever between the pages.’ Signed, Tomas Rougir.
Taped to my monitor was a sketch of a daisy; a perfect picture of the perfect girl.
I opened a new text document and began to write.
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