Day 156 - Story Story

Story Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Tanny blinked her eyes and felt the flames of a universe dying. She hadn’t meant to do it. She hadn’t expected to do it. There had been that momentary spark of creation, but then it had been lost and with that its existence snuffed out. Her ideas failed her and the deed had been done – the death of a universe and the infinite inhabitants that had resided there. Infinite histories and infinite stories, and they were all gone—all in the blink of an eye.

Tanny had a passing thought, just the beginning of a nugget of an idea for a story. She had those all the time. She was haunted constantly with the beginnings of stories –hundreds and hundreds of beginnings. She didn’t really know where they all came from. She never considered herself incredibly creative, and yet the stories kept coming. She always thought if she were truly creative, she would have been able to finish them. Instead she was left with lots of lost ideas, crumpled up pieces of paper, and half finished notes.

She had killed so many worlds and so many people, meaning that in her own way she was the greatest destroyer history had ever known. She crumpled them up and threw them aside and let them rot or fade away. In the blink of an eye a world could be lost. When a dream was forgotten a life was ended. When she felt lazy or zoned out watching a movie, partially conceived people and places were abandoned. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t nice. But it was what she did.

Tanny created a magical world where there was a magical library that contained all the knowledge of the past, the present, and the future. The only way to access the knowledge was to forget everything that the individual patron already knew. A secret for a secret – a seemingly fair trade. A reader could have the secrets of the cosmos, but would lose their own. But who would make that trade? Surely there must be some. But what good would secrets be if you didn’t know who or what you were? She thought the secret to the story would have to be that someone learned to have both. But what good would that do? The story had more weight if it was a tragedy, so she changed it back. It felt like an old Twilight Zone episode or a Tales from the Crypt story. The man seeking knowledge loses the only knowledge that really matters. She liked twist endings.

She wondered if by writing the story down, that meant it came true. She liked that – the idea that writing something down could have that much power. Maybe, now that she wrote about it, somewhere in the cosmos, there really was a secret library full of everyone’s secrets. Maybe the librarian was really a trader – he traded knowledge – the secrets in his library for the secrets in the reader’s head. He was a man that survived by learning other people’s secrets, and he was the only person to ever keep his own. That was his secret. And if a reader asked the right question, and learned his secret, they too could keep all their knowledge, but then they too would be trapped in the library. Perhaps then, they replaced their librarian predecessor.

If it really were real, she would have no way of ever finding out. Not unless the library or its inhabitants came looking for her.

Then she grew worried. If what she wrote down became real, did that also mean that what she failed to write down was lost or destroyed? That idea scared her. She didn’t want to be responsible for destroying so many things.

She didn’t like the ideas anymore. She didn’t like her library. She didn’t want it to exist. She tore a page from her notebook and crumpled it up and threw it away. She swore to herself she would forget.

Later, Tanny laughed at her own silliness when she recalled the entire episode. She knew she had been acting irrationally and was worried for no reason at all. Still, when she went to begin her next story, she stared at the blank page for an extra amount of time. With great trepidation she began to write again, careful to only write down exactly what she would want to exist. She didn’t want the responsibility of creation, just in case she did possess some demonic ability to make it all come true.

Some stories are better not written down. Some stories are best forgotten. Some are best left unfinished. All Tanny did was write down stories. What happened with them next was out of her control.