He told himself it was only a story.
Not one of the children. Not a favourite pet. Not a prized object or a tool. It was just missing.
A simple, small and architecturally sweet set of ideas that had been scaffolding itself up into life. Quietly working up behind his eyes for days. He had felt it’s beams slot into place while he washed dishes, when he heard his partner’s voice, while he waited at traffic lights, as he lay awake at night listening to the house breathe and the cats pad across the floor. It had weight. It had weather systems. It had a particular shade of day light. Mostly monotone but the colour splashes would come. There was a feeling. He could feel the feeling. He thought it might be a good piece of work. There was potential.
And then one morning he woke up and it was gone.
Not faded or pale, greyed out, but gone. As if someone had come along during the night and with careful, surgical hands, had lifted it cleanly out of him. The blue sanitised gloves had carried it away. Like a specimen. Out of sight, somewhere else.
He lay still, eyes open, scanning his mind the way you pat your pockets for a misplaced wallet. Characters? Nothing. Setting? Blank. A single line of dialogue? Not even a syllable remained. No tones or filler. Inside his head was a white expanse, naked paper, featureless and almost luminous. He had the unsettling sense that something had been removed by some precise pickpocket.
“This isn’t writer’s block,” he said quietly to the ceiling. Writer’s block suggested obstruction, a clot forming in the artery of imagination. You feel like you need to punch a hole in it. Free the pressure. This felt more like embezzlement. The funds had been siphoned away for a sports car or an exotic holiday. The account showed zero balance. It was an internal crime scene. Black and yellow tape sealed off further investigation.
Where does a lost story go?
He tried to reason it out while making a coffee. Perhaps it hadn’t been much of a story after all and had died quietly of plot starvation. Thin and threadbare as an old cotton shirt. Chewed by rodents or faded by the sun’s rays. Perhaps it had been too ambitious, too sprawling for the area available in his mind and it had slipped through it’s fences, bolting into the wild territories where ragged, unedited stories roamed feral and unfinished, over the hills and further away into some subconscious hidden valley never to be seen again. Or maybe it had been a hungry, weedy thing, embarrassed by its own smallness and lack of development, and had gone somewhere dark and private to wither in peace, for the greater good of everyone.
He closed his eyes and searched for clues or suggestions. Story style footprints in the mind’s muddy paths. A fragment of landscape. The contour of a face. Shapes in shadows. He found nothing. Only that white interior sheet, unmarked and waiting. He wanted to throw a can of red paint at it.
It was true, the waiting angered him.
He was angry that he’d not kept notes.
An own goal.
No reliable back up. No laptop memory storing the nuggets.
He spent the day interrogating himself. What had it been about? There had been a journey, surely. Or was that just because most stories have journeys? He pictured a coastline. That felt plausible. But when he tried to approach it, the sea evaporated like a mirage. Were there details? Hanging a jacket on a hook but the hook’s not really there and the jacket falls at your feet, crumpled. Yesterday was now an imagined thing that was not explainable.
He began to suspect that the story had not simply vanished, it had hidden.
“If you’re in there,” he muttered, tapping his forehead, “you might as well come out.”
Silence. The mind is good at silence. When it wants to be.
Nobody had ever said that before.
The day was finally spent. All knots and dead ends. All tangles of nothingness.
The log burner flames had risen and roared earlier in the evening. A burning fire god, it stood in the centre of the room. Once alight it seemed to have an awareness about it, as if it knew all the answers but revealed none of them. So the answers burned. He’d stared into those wise flames but could see no clearer. No clues or direction. Now they were dying back. Dead wood burned to ash. Light and energy gave way to a dark, inconsistent slow smoulder. Sleep would be welcome.
Later that night he dreamed.
He stood in a vast library with no shelves. Books drifted in the air like idle birds, covers fluttering open and closed. Some were thick and leather bound, paperbacks were more aerodynamic and hovered easily; others were stapled pamphlets and notebooks, embarrassed by their own brevity. They circled him warily.
“Mine,” he said, though he wasn’t sure how he knew. “One of you must be mine. Come back.”
A few books snapped shut defensively. One darted upward toward a ceiling he couldn’t see. Another hovered near his shoulder, then veered away when he reached for it.
At the far end of the room, if it was a room, he saw something smaller than the rest. Not quite a book. More like a stack of loose pages, wind tossed, edges uneven. A4. It did not flee. It did not approach. It simply hung there, as if undecided about gravity.
He walked toward it, and the other books parted slightly, not in deference but with the good manners of helpful, mild curiosity.
When he was close enough, he saw that the pages were blank.
A pulse of disappointment ran through him. “Empty,” he said.
The pages rustled. Not blank, he realised, faint impressions dented their surface, as if words had been pressed in hard and then erased. The grooves remained. He reached out and ran a finger lightly across the top sheet. The indentations formed no legible sentence, but they were not random. They curved and dipped with intention.
“You left,” he accused it.
Or perhaps it had never fully arrived.
The loose stack shifted, and for a moment he had the strange impression that it was studying him. Weighing him up.
“You weren’t ready,” he heard, not as sound, but as a pressure behind his eyes. Like hearing a long dead parent calling out your name through a fog.
“For what?”
No answer. Just that hovering patience.
He woke with his hand outstretched toward the bedside table, fingers brushing an empty notepad.
“Flying books, talking pages; Now Harry Potter and Mr Morris Lessmore’s tales have invaded my head.”
Morning light slid between the curtains. The white space inside his head was still there, but it no longer felt sterile. It felt noticed and expectant. Like ground after a fire, charred and darkened, but also cleared.
He sat up and tried again to remember the lost architecture. Nothing returned. No stupid coastlines, no travelling, no coming together of a plot. Only the faint sensation of grooves where something had once pressed hard.
He picked up a pen.
Instead of chasing what had fled, he began tracing the indentations he could not see. A man wakes to find his story missing. He suspects theft. He imagines it starving, or running wild, or choosing solitude, perhaps kidnapped. He dreams of a library without shelves.
The sentences came slowly at first, as if feeling for purchase. He did not know where they were going. He did not know whether this was the lost story wearing a convenient disguise, or merely the outline left behind by its departure. Like an unmade bed once a guest has left the house.
Halfway down the page, he paused.
There was a curious sensation, not of recovery, but of companionship. As though something just out of sight had settled nearby, watching without interference. Not hiding now. Not quite returning either. Did it have the eyes and patience of a cat?
He understood then, dimly, that perhaps stories do not belong to writers in the way phones or keys do. Perhaps they pass through, testing the shape of a mind, leaving when cramped, returning when there is space. Perhaps what he had lost was not the story itself but his certainty about it.
He wrote until the page was full.
When he looked up, the white expanse inside him had softened. It was no longer blank paper. It was foggy still but dense, and alive with the possibility of forms moving within it.
The original story did not come back that day. It did not snap neatly into place with a triumphant click like the correct Lego brick. No, but something else had begun, something that might, in time, grow branches and blossom and move in the breeze, on and around a particular shade of afternoon light.
And somewhere, whether in the wilder margins of imagination or in a dark, unreachable corner of his own consciousness, the missing story remained unaccounted for.
Not dead. Not dead at all.
Just uncommitted.
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