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Unbound

Infinite realities lie inside every book.

By R!OTeverPublished 3 years ago 7 min read
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Once upon all time...

Fragile are the truths these days, and all that we believe.


Now fact is manufactured, conspiracies conceived,


society manipulated by shadows, both nefarious and fair


feeding thoughts into our psyche, as though ether from the air.

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of my death, the day that the book appeared. I’d awoken early, startled by a very definite touch on my forehead. As I lived alone, the touch was enough to have startled but it was accompanied by a whisper; an androgynous sibilance floating directly into my sleep-numbed thoughts.

“See.”

I’d jumped up with a strangled scream, yanking the sheets around my thin nightgown as futile protection, frantically seeking the intruder in my bedroom. I saw no one.

“Who’s there?” my tremulous voice shamed me a bit in its desperate helplessness and anger began to take hold. I swallowed and bellowed loudly, deepening my voice for some reason. “Get the hell out of my house!”

I listened intently, or well, I tried to beyond the staccato booming of my pulse and hyperventilation. I heard no one.

But then I saw it.

The book placed squarely in the center of the open bedroom doorway. I screamed again, terror blossoming darkly larger in my little space.

“What the hell is that?” I asked of my unseen visitor. I heard no answer.

The book was small and rather nondescript for all the horror it inspired in that moment. It was covered in smooth black with a black elastic band holding thick and crisply yellowed pages bound tight. With a semblance of returning coherence, I grabbed my cellphone from the nightstand and dialed 911.

The police were no help. I lived in a rural area, in a small house I’d bought only the year before for its view of the woods and quiet isolation. It took a while for the cops to arrive, bang on my door and then break through the dead-bolt to eventually find my body in a heap on the floor, clutching the book to my lifeless bosom.

Even as I’d breathlessly tried to remember my address for the 911 operator, I had stepped toward the doorway, begging the voice coming through the phone to hurry. Someone was in my house. I knelt down to examine the book at my feet. The phone voice was assuring me that help was on the way and telling me to stay on the line as I had reached out to nudge the elastic band on the cover.

I had to touch it. I don’t know why. It was just a notebook, a kind I’d seen before. A kind I knew I had owned before, back in art school. But those books were long gone, along with their notes and sketches and watercolors created and curated over years of study and then life beyond. They were part of the Before. Before the fire that had taken all that I had loved.

This was not one of my books, but it was enigmatically familiar. So known within its mystery, the sublime promise of creation on its smooth pages. The opportunity of making emotion visible, binding together the ephemeral thoughts, frozen in time. I had to touch it.

I had to open it.

My hands shook as I reached down, assuring the voice on the phone that I would remain on the line. Snatching the book, I hastily surveyed the empty hallway beyond the door. I saw no one, heard nothing. Even the birds, the wind, the world outside was silent as I pushed aside the elastic band and opened the book.

A thin stack of large-denominated currency was taped to the inside cover. The first page stared back blankly, with just a small brown smudge in the lower corner. I turned the page and found the remainder of the book crammed with thoughts. Handwritten notes. My handwriting. Doodles and sketches and poems that looked and sounded very like mine. But they weren’t. I’d never seen any of it before.

The end began when humanity no longer believed reality was finite.
Realities were endless and dependent on perception.
 Dependent on acceptance of the source and continued affirmation of others.
 Reality as the singular collection of beliefs within an individual.



The end began when civil and reasoned debate of ideas was overthrown by unfettered access to the ideas, the thoughts, the creation of humanity and tools that could twist those thoughts, those ideas and propel them into the world with a veneer of fact hiding the corruption underneath. Social media will be our downfall.

These were all thoughts that I’d thought very recently, following coverage of a tumultuous election as various sources and viewpoints from both sides were stretched and corrupted beyond credibility, reasonable doubt, fact. But I hadn’t written them down or even spoken them aloud. So how - I blinked - the page was suddenly blank.

“See.”

“Who’s there?” I screamed, dropping the phone, but not the book.

There was no sound beyond that of my breath scraping, too fast, up and down my throat. I tried to take a deep breath while listening intently for the sounds of help arriving in the distance. All the while, I was flipping through the pages of the book, maniacally. The money taped inside the cover was still there, but all the handwriting and sketches and doodles, were gone, the pages virgin of thought. Only the money and the smudge on the first page remained.

It couldn’t be real.

The edges of my sight began to lose focus and darken, closing in fast as my overwrought mind tried to grasp that I was about to faint. Great. I hadn’t even unlocked the door yet for my rescuers.

Just before the darkness wrapped itself fully around me, it began to retreat and lighten into a silken silver shimmer. The shimmer pulled back to the edges of sight and I gasped, silently.

I could see.

There was so much, so far, so distinct and detailed. It was overwhelming. Without moving I could see…everything. 360 degrees without turning. It was some amount of time before my feeble little thoughts realized they were floating free, unmoored to the heaviness of the body I had worn for so long.

Thinking of it, suddenly I could see my body in sharp focus as it slumped in my bedroom doorway. The police had arrived along with an ambulance. There were people both inside and outside my house, all of them so very focused on the infinitesimal region of space that was my little house. They looked down, they looked around, seeing only a short distance. None looked up. They couldn’t see all the truths hidden just beyond. But I could.

My focus re-centered as a kneeling, rubber-gloved figure shifted my body and my arms flopped soundlessly to the floor, empty. The book was gone.

I was momentarily alarmed at the instant stab of grief, of loss, the thought brought with it. Somehow the knowledge of my free-floating consciousness apart from my body, my life as I’d known it, didn’t engender any negative emotion. But the loss of the book…the divine promise of creation within its pages. The overwhelming potential those crisp, blank sheets represented was such a visceral physical pull. The urging insistence of thought, of genesis.

Then I saw it. The birth, the creation was all around me, within me. It was everywhere and every thing. Love and beauty and violence and destruction and hope and fear. Life. Unbound. Limitless.

I thought of my life as I had known it, and the love that I had abruptly lost. And he was there, in front of me; smiling the slightly-crooked smile that I had loved from the moment we met, holding the little black notebook at his side.

He reached out with his empty hand and I felt weight settle lightly around me as the silver shimmer coalesced into my own hand, ensconced in his. I could feel the familiar warmth of his hand radiating up my arm and into the center of my being. I was whole, for the first time since the Before.

“See?” His voice, so real and solid and evocative of so many memories, gently prodded me to awareness as he gestured with the book. And I saw.

He put the book into my free hand and we stepped, as one, into forever.

fantasy
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About the Creator

R!OTever

YOLO-ing long before it was an acronym. A gloriously flawed, female human with a riot of ideas and stories in her head. Some of the chaos can be found published on Amazon and other booksellers, www.MelodeeLane.com and www.riotever.com.

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