All he could see of the offending scrap was its top most edge, the rest was obscured by a bunch in the rug he had caused while moving the furniture. He walked over to the page and stood staring down at it with wide eyes.
“I don’t believe you. What devil’s trick is this? Who could’ve? I don’t believe you!”
Amazingly the page took Doug’s insults and questions in stride. Snatching it up from the floor and shaking it menacingly in the air he might have initially thought to force a response, but good sense won out and Doug realized that the page was just a page, with an author.
“Who wrote this,” he asked the door, then the windows, and finally the broken typewriter which sat dead center on the large wooden desk, but no one came forward to take the credit. Defeated, Doug slumped into the moth eaten leather desk chair and ran his free hand through his hair. He shook his head, eyes closed, and wondered why he was so disappointed so surprised. The likelihood that some ne’re do well would slip from the shadows and admit to playing the loathsome prank was both slim and nil. Still, he had wanted something. A response of any kind, while shocking, was warranted given what the page had said. Instantly, he remembered the crumpled thing clutched in his balled fist.
The look in Doug’s eyes spoke of destruction and rage, and fire, as he stared at the badly wrinkled piece of paper. “This is not true,” he said to no one in particular. “Its a pack of lies and scare tactics, and I wont stand for it!” Emboldened he sat a little straighter. No he thought to himself its something all together different, its a story. Just one of his little adventures which had gone a bit off course and was now running away with him Doug reasoned with himself. The problem with this theory, however, was that the page did not read like any story Doug had ever read. The character had not been introduced or explained, the story line, if one could call it that, bounced around, a lot, though it only seemed to cover a single day’s worth of time, and the ending was so sudden it could hardly be absorbed. Additionally, while the writer had included plenty of obstacles there was little to no resolution or thematic plot to be found.
Doug cocked his head to the side as if a different vantage point would bring a serge of clarity, he was wrong. The page remained as mysterious as it had always been and he, he remained perplexed. If this was indeed not a story, it would mean that Doug was going to have to consider the possibility that the words on the page were real in more than just the tangible sense and that was an eventuality he was not prepared for.
By Jeannette Woitzik
b00kreader 