Word Creme

The writer slathered a thick crème layer of words onto the listeners and breathed a sigh from the podium. With the first few lines of it’s book, the listeners—faceless figures that sat in hard plastic chairs—were thrown a dream like state where they weren’t aware of the writer. They had thousands of gods to look up to in those carefully chosen words. Each pair of eyes were shut, as they visualized the words coming to life, the characters waltzing across the back of their eyelids in flowing capes of eloquence. The listeners came from various walks of life but sitting in those chairs, they were soon filled with ideas they could never have come up with themselves, saw romances played out that would never happen to them and go places they’d never see. The gravity in their lives was ripped away as they sprung high into sugary clouds, their eyes near blinded by the colors they’d never experience.

The writer’s face was shrouded, seeming to swirl with every movement. It stood leaning against the cold metal podium, mouth close to the microphone, voice broadcasting to all four corners of the conference hall. Spindly fingers wrapped in silver rings reached out from the body and flipped the crisp pages, then quickly withdrew to hide again in soft folds. The words slid softly off the page and through the microphone, with almost no effort from the writer . . . it had done its part long ago in the writing of the words themselves.

The writer’s face was shadowed by wild hair that seemed to slither about the writer’s shoulders like exotic snakes, coiling around legs and arms and spilling across the floor, filling the hollow part of the podium. The writer almost didn’t seem human in its distant, aloof attitude, the way it didn’t speak anything but the written words. This magical being didn’t delight or despair in anything.

The writer read from a handcrafted book. The cover was crushed velvet tacked to a sheet of wood, shards of the writer’s life safety pinned to the cloth. At the end of the book, a stack of papers lay unbound. This was the end of the book that the writer had never added. The writer had read the formatted part of the book and was now nearing the end of the stack of pages. Here, the paper had lost its crisp quality and was instead thumbed and bent. Different marks were scrawled in the margins and the writer’s index finger ran over each line before continuing. The writer’s voice seemed to have mastered metamorphosis—in the space of a few words it went from a barely audible whisper, a voice as thin as parchment, to the authoritative voice of the gods as it reached the crescendo. The writer’s hand darted out, flipped to the page that ended the tale and retreated again for the final time. ...

• uh-huh. you gotta wait for a while before finding out the rest. So there.