An attempt was made...

Bing!

Tom pondered over whether to add quotation marks to the sound of the computer telling him he had a new email. Do quotation marks require actual words? Does the speaker need a soul? He didn’t know, didn’t look it up, and didn’t add them in.

The email boldly proclaimed itself unread, and stated something rather fantastic. “Congratulations! You have won first prize!” He gave that quotation marks the reader noted, to which Tom would have replied: yes. He didn’t need quotation marks himself, not where he was going.

He didn’t open the email for another hour or so, in honour of his twin deities of scepticism and laziness. But when he did, a smile rippled across his face, quickly followed by the smug look of a smug man writing his own praise.

The email was not to the point. But Tom could paraphrase: he had submitted a few hundred words to a short story writing competition. The story had been about winning twenty thousand dollars, and had to feature a little black book. Coincidentally, Tom as winner of the competition, would win twenty thousand dollars. And, for the sake of poetical license, a small volume encased in a dark fabric cover. Tom frankly did not care about this part of the prize, nor really the money too - but recognition for his particular choice and ordering of words: that was what really mattered. Recognition… and bitches! Tom foolishly added, his own crude sense of humour betraying him once more.

Tom remembered writing the short story. It had seemed so incredibly obvious at the time. He had imagined hundreds of other writers plodding at their keyboard’s keys, writing the same story about the same email and the same prize. He had debated trying something else, but he could only think of hackneyed themes of love and loss: the Seven Stories retold, and retold, and retold.

It was hard to be original, Tom had thought, so why not dwell in the obvious? After all, with seven billion humans alive it-was-statistically-unlikely (he thought nasally) that he would be the one having an original thought. Besides, wasn’t everything just a composite of the things that had come before? True originality was the bible seller’s lie.

Fortunately, Tom had had a secret weapon up his cliched sleeve: a profound plot twist that had clearly won him the coveted prize. The surprise ending, the subversion of the expected, the ironic moral, the single line that he had hoped would cause his reader to smile. He would get to that at the end of course.

When he had first written the story, he had sent it on to a friend of his, a Mike of that name. Mike was a good editor (though he took umbrage at Tom's use of brackets), and some would claim that he had written this part himself, for Tom would rarely say a kind word about a friend if he knew anyone was listening, let alone committing comment to byte or paper.

A few hours after Mike had received the full text, he had phoned Tom, a strange coincidence given that:

Mike: Hi, how’s it going?

Tom: Alright I suppose. You got my email?

Mike: Yeah! I did, I liked it! Making some edits now, just some points of grammar.

Tom: But don’t you think it’s, well, kind of stupid? And obvious?

Mike: I mean, in some respects, yeah, but I liked the bit in the middle, even if you did call me out by name, and the ending is awesome!

Tom: Aww, cheers dude! It came to me in a dream. Also, heh, came.

Mike: Wait, that was in the…

Tom can hear movement from Mike’s end, and a brief rustle of paper.

Mike: This conversation, I’m reading it now, in your story.

Tom: That line too.

Mike: Yeah, and this one. What the-! Why am I still reading it!

Tom: I dunno? You’re an idiot?

Mike: This isn’t funny, this is really weird. Ahhhh!

Tom: Chill dude, it’s just a story.

Mike: What the- no- I- …. I’m hanging up now.

Tom: I knew you’d say that.

Click.

Mike refused to speak to Tom on the phone after that, and would frequently accuse Tom of witchcraft until his dying day. But he did make the edits, which Tom was grateful for, and he sent the story back in its final form.

And so Tom had sent the story in, and promptly forgotten about it, a briefly pleasant waste of time, or so he had thought, nothing but a convoluted example of his inability to concentrate on his actual, what-he-was-supposed-to-be-doing, work.

Now back in the present moment, whenever that might be: Tom sitting in front of his computer screen, reading an email that probably wasn't real.

There is not much text left on the page, and he can now feel the reader looking over his shoulder. A plot twist was promised – Tom hears the words almost like a sinister whisper. A demand from his reader, to give back the time he has taken, to make sense of this rambling witter. He shudders, as if he is being physically threatened by the shadowy weight of his own expectation.

An expectation that should always be subverted.

The End.

...

...

...

But Tom is kinder than that, and pretty facetious too. Let's give the reader more, practically an encore: there is a gentle knock at the front door.

Tom answers. A blinding light greets him, and his first thought is that 'some arsehole' (failing to not mention his neighbour Sandeep by name) had left their too-bright car headlamps on, but the light fades quickly, and there, Tom could not believe his eyes, was Gandalf! The wizard! But not shorn in his usual well-worn travelling clothes, but now dressed in a pristine, white robe. Tom would later question the pointed hood-not-hat though.

“Oh Gandalf!” Tom exclaimed, tears bursting across his cheeks, and forgetting his personal disuse of quotation marks and the correct use of you’re, “Your alive!”

Though, to be honest, too soon, it should have happened in book three.