Looking Back Through the Glass

Tony sat his laptop, confused and irritated. He hadn’t published anything for some time. Not even a short story. He leaned back in the chair at his kitchen table, the sunlight streaming in through the sliding glass door of the kitchen. Thinking back, he remembered a small article he wrote to his fellow writers about ways to avoid writer’s block, yet, here he was, suffering through it himself. The ideas he was searching for seemed trapped behind the Berlin Wall of his mind. The coffee was still hot in the cup on the table next to his computer, and on the screen was an electronic box titled ‘Document3’ on Microsoft Word. The page inside the box had a title and a single sentence, Looking Back Through the Glass and “Tony sat at his laptop, confused and irritated”.

Whenever the simple wouldn’t do, Tony had always thought, always go for the super-weird. What’s weirder than writing yourself into a story? But, it wasn’t going very well… He took a sip of the hot Irish cream coffee in his cup and closed his eyes. He had to find something to write about! Seemingly proved wrong, once again, Tony remembered how he always boasted about the infinite stories in the Neverending Story that just had to be told… He stared at the computer screen, his mind as white and blank as the page before him. Had he lost contact with the Neverending Story?

Very nearly slamming the cup down on the table, he cursed as some of the coffee spilled over the side and onto his hand. Just write something, damn it! He sat up and placed his fingers at the ready over the keyboard. Tony felt the tickle in the back of his brain. Was it an idea beginning to take form? Was this the first crack in the wall? That’s when he saw the shadow pass by the sliding glass door.

He rubbed his still hot and tingling hand on his jeans as he rose from the chair. A couple of steps and he was in front of the glass door, peering out in his little, fenced-in yard. The afternoon sun was bright, and he strained his eyes to see through the glare. He spotted nothing until he looed to the left, where the old outdoor chairs sat rusting and dying.

“Deb?” he muttered to himself, under his breath. He thought that she was upstairs napping, how could she have gotten outside without his noticing? It had been long time since he plowed through writing a story that allowed him to forsake the world outside the page.

Slowly sliding the door open, Tony took in the wonderful late spring aromas carried by the afternoon breeze. It filled him with a bit of calm as he continued to struggle with how his wife had escaped his detection to arrive on the back porch. As he stepped out onto the old brick patio, he closed the door behind him and smiled to his wife.

“How’d you get out here, babe?” The look of confusion seemed permanently etched into his expression. His wife looked at him and smiled back silently. “Deb… are you alright?”

“I’m not Deb,” came his wife’s voice. “She’s still asleep upstairs. Look at me again… look deeper.”

“Not…” Tony shook his head. It certainly wasn’t Deb’s twin sister, Veronica. Yes, they were identical twins, but they were far from identical. “Who?”

Then he noticed it, the dark brunette hair hanging to her shoulders. The red hoodie hung about her torso loosely, but she wasn’t swimming in it. Then her eyes flashed at him with purple light.

Tony’s eyes widened to a near panic, “Claire?”

“In the flesh!” she answered and let a small chuckle escape.

“What the-… No… not possible,” he said, raising his slightly in show of mild defiance. “You’re not real!”

“Neither are you,” she retorted, eyebrows raised high and eyes flashing purple one more time. “Sit down.”

Tony brought his hand to his face and rubbed his unkempt beard in fear and exasperation. How can this be happening? He sat cautiously in the chair next to Claire, afraid to get to close to her.

“Don’t worry, Tony, I won’t hurt you,” she said, her assured tone anything but calming to the author. “I just want to know some things… ask you a few questions.”

“Uhhhh…” he had no idea what to say. Claire was the heroine of his first full-length novel, a GrubHub driver who ended up becoming God. Tony had written two more novels since, all three had been met with mild acclaim after publishing. It allowed him to quit his job and become a writer full time. Maybe that was a bad idea, he thought as he shifted uncomfortably in the chair next to her. “I suppose… What do you wanna know?”

Feeling it was better to just oblige her, he calmed himself and tried to remember every detail of his first novel, Prime. It was obvious from her flashing eyes that the power he had given Claire in the novel followed her into the real world. The last thing he wanted to do was to piss her off.

Claire smiled at him, and it pricked at his heart a bit because all he saw was his wife’s smile. “Why me?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Why me, Tony? Of all of the characters you could’ve chosen, why me?” Tony could hear a bit of anger rising in her words. “I was happy where I was. I had Eric, I had love, and we had plans.”

Tony had no idea what to say to her. How do tell your own character why you picked them? “You just seemed right for the story,” he began. “You’re based on my wife, and she is one of the most incredible people I’ve ever known. Claire… you, needed to be the same.”

“But you disrupted everything that I was trying to achieve!” she sounded like a jilted lover ready to exact revenge. “Why couldn’t you have just left me alone?”

“But I created you. You wouldn’t be here without me.” The statement seemed to morph into a plea.

“You’re wrong. You didn’t create me, you found me. I was already there, living my life, and you chose to disrupt it for your own gain.” Her words felt like small arrows of poison puncturing his skin.

“I don’t… I don’t understand,” Tony stammered, not quite grasping what Claire was saying.

“In the Neverending Story! I was already there! All you did was find me and use me for your own purposes! I never wanted to be God… I just wanted to be me. And look at the hell you put me through!” At this, Claire stood up in an effort to calm herself. “None of you authors understand that you don’t create us. You find us. We already exist, and you capture us with your words and force us to do your bidding. We are real!”

“Holy shit…” He couldn’t comprehend what she was saying, it didn’t make any sense. “So, Tolkien’s Middle Earth is real? King’s MidWorld? They’re all real?”

“Yes, they are… Just as you are real, here in the Neverending Story.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Nevermind that, for now. I still have questions that need answering.” Claire’s tone was commanding, and Tony felt unconsciously compelled to obey.

Tony sat still, all of this too much to take in. Now he was supposed to answer for what he did? He was a writer, his characters had to face adversity, that’s their purpose.

“Wrong again,” she said. “All we want is to exist without being puppets. You writers just think that you can do whatever you please! It’s disgusting, really. Look at all of the lives you’ve ruined! Gerry, Lenore… Bruce! Look at what you did to them!” She stood over him now, her shadow felt like impending doom.

He scurried for an answer with validity, “But that’s how I found them!”

“No, you didn’t,” the venom dripped from her words. “That’s how you wanted them to be so that you could ruin them. Do you think I wanted to be God? Do you think I wanted to watch Eric die over and over, or to kill my others? All I wanted was a simple life! You don’t know me…”

“Yes, I do,” his anger began to mount as the accusations flew from her lips. “I know you better than you know yourself, Claire.”

“No! No, you don’t! How dare you?!”

Tony stood up in that moment, towering over his creation. “Look at what I did for you. I made you famous. I brought your story to so many people, people whose lives may have changed because they read about your struggles and used it to conquer their own.”

“So, now I’m just a tool? You have quite high thoughts of yourself, Tony.” She stared up at him, unafraid. “You’re an asshole. An asshole writer who thinks that Neverending Story is there just to be fucked with.”

This is crazy! I didn’t know writer’s block led to hallucinations… It had to be a hallucination, there was no other explanation. Could he seriously be standing in his backyard talking to the main character of his first novel?

“It’s real,” she said, seeming to read his mind. “And you’re a part of it.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that. What do you mean?” Tony’s confusion was beyond rational, now.

Claire pointed to the sky to his right. “Look.”

He did as he was told but saw nothing but blue sky.

“Look beyond the sky…”

Tony focused his eyes on a small part of the sky and stared. There! What the- He saw them, he saw the letters scrolling across the sky. The black letters, in the Times New Roman font, stood stark against the white of the electronic page of Word. And beyond, he saw his own eyes, staring intently at the words being typed across his sky. Tony watched as the author’s eyes shifted from the page to the keyboard to the room around him in which he typed. The story being told, of himself meeting his character, Claire, rolling through his mind just as he and Claire were living it in his backyard. Suddenly, a thought crossed his mind. Purpose…

He saw the word typed as he thought it, the font in italics as he always did when expressing a character’s thoughts. The Neverending Story does exist, as does its characters. But the characters needed purpose, otherwise the story just stands still. It all began to make sense to him, and he now knew how to answer for Claire’s anger.

“Claire,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. “I gave you purpose. I know that you had your own purposes in life before I came along, but none of them were your true purpose.”

Claire shoved his hands off of her shoulders and turned her back to him. “No, I won’t accept that. I had plans! Eric and I, we both had plans! You destroyed them!”

Tony shook his head at her, the new understanding giving him courage against this God of the Neverending Story. “No, Claire, I didn’t. I gave you the purpose you were destined for. Like I tell my readers, the stories must be told. Just as the real me is telling this story about us. We can see him doing it!” And he pointed back to the sky, where the words continued to scroll past.

“Damn you… Damn all of you writers! We are not your puppets!” Claire’s anger was reaching a boiling point.

Tony looked at her with a wry smile. With a nod, he said, “You’re not Claire. She would understand this, she would thank for telling her story. I don’t know who you are, but you’re not her. You should leave…”

Reaching into his pocket, Tony grabbed the pack of cigarettes and the lighter that were inside. He lit a smoke and took a deep drag, a bit of happiness rolled through him. The writers give true purpose to the characters of the Neverending Story, that is their true purpose. But that one drag was all he would be able to get.

Claire spun and grabbed him by the shoulder, placing her other hand on his forehead and flashing her eyes purple. “No! We have our own purposes, and you should be satisfied with that! Leave us alone!”

All went black.

The cherry burned his finger, waking Tony from his slumber on the patio. The sun shone down bright and blinding, and his head spun and ached. He quickly flicked the cigarette into the yard and cradled his burnt hand as he stood up. What had Claire done to him? Or did I do it to myself? He looked to the sky, but all Tony saw was blue. No large letters, no big eyes staring down at him.

Gathering his wits, he opened the door and stepped back into the kitchen. He was at a loss about what has just transpired, but it certainly seemed to put a huge crack in the Berlin Wall of his writer’s block. He quickly moved to his seat at the kitchen table and took a swig of coffee. But as he looked at the screen of his laptop, he was lucky to have put the cup back on the table without spilling it. On it, he saw a completed story where there had only been a single sentence. Tony’s eyes jumped to the final sentence that read:

He had looked back through the glass and found his purpose.