The page, yes – the page was his precious assistant, his key to achieving the velocity necessary to escape reality. It granted him access to its words and, through them, its visions.

When he’d complained of ennui and the classless lassitude that follows from a surplus of time and a lack of inspiration, the poet-king who sat at the end of the block with his head tucked between his knees had offered him some advice: “Writer’s block? Take a page from my book, and get out of your head for a while.” He’d determined that this was wise enough, but not quite right; instead, he took a page from a book of his own and invited it in, praying that some of the words would outlive their medium. 

He snorted the razor-chopped paper with one long breath, then sank into the couch as spindly figures of fiction were transcribed from their scenes into his. They moved slowly at first, but the twitching of his eyes soon made them dance, the typesetting which composed them shifting into font-wrapped limbs and broadsheet grins. They leaned in close to whisper in his ear, the words flowing forth in every mental voice he’d ever used when reading them. Their messages grew oddly-pronounced and ungrammatical as they threaded through each other, trading diphthongs and gaining punctuation in strange new places. Somewhere, a linguistic purist screamed.

Is this how novels are born? he asked one, searching its face for a stray word that might inspire him. Its flesh was written in simple clauses, though the occasional misspelling marred the otherwise attractive stream of consciousness they formed. Adjectives flowed just beneath the surface, creating gentle shades of light and dark and describing the curves of the character’s cheeks. He sought the perfect phrase, but the ink welling up in his eyes was making it terribly hard to see. 

Well, it replied, maybe postmodern ones. But nobody wants to read those, you know.

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