There once lived a man in a cottage by the meadow. It’s no longer important what the meadow was called because it is no longer there, but back when it was it had the softest grass that danced in the wind, and the dewy mornings so rare in our world today. This man had just come into a fortune, and so decided to do what was done back then, and live out his days writing, baking, and drinking. Having achieved two out of three with relative ease, he now sat by his oak desk (antique- the seller assured him) with a pen in hand, and a notebook flat and empty upon the tabletop. 

It wasn’t that this man did not prepare to write. He had the appropriate starting line, pen and paper that suited his character (posh but ultimately, meaningless), a cottage uninterrupted by the bombs and blasts that come with city life, and a good solid desk able to withstand hours upon hours of fidgeting. He even had the appropriate mood, suitably tortured in his spirit to produce the melancholy that belies good writing. His face was also a mix of furrowed brows and lopsided lips, the perfect mask of a man in deep concentration. But a mask it was in the end. Our man wasn’t concentrating very hard at all, for all that he looked suitable to be cut out and placed in the corner of a moderately busy coffee shop with good WiFi. He held his pen a little too lightly, and his eyes were always wandering the empty glade, seeking a good distraction that would give him yet another reason to delay. Life cannot be written about if it is not lived can it not? In truth, our man did not really want to write, he’d rather be in the middle of the story, fighting off monsters and outwitting devils with deals. But monsters are in short supply and he had nothing the devil wanted. 

So there he was, a pawn of circumstance like so many in the city he left behind. 

“Once upon the new millennium, for indeed it comes only once..” he tried rolling his opening line off his tongue, hoping for more to come. But only silence followed, the country kind that reminds you of money wasted on questionably antique furniture. The man finally had enough. Enough pondering today. Enough cooling heels at the court of dreams and stories, awaiting an audience with Muse. It’s time to find his own inspiration, and he knew just where to look. Down into the cellar he went, where old wines were stored by owners long before his time. He never stopped to wonder why they went unenjoyed. Past the shelves of dark glass he went, and rolled away a large empty barrel. He discovered this secret entrance, and its secrets, one morning when his distraction seeking led him to wonder if the barrel can be used to age whiskey. Down further he crept, for that was the appropriate walking style in these times, down down a spiral stair that was there for too long to grow even moss. 

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

At the bottom of the stairs was a simple chamber, filled with only one thing. There was a filing cabinet there, and this was, despite the lack of anything antique about it, truly ancient. This was his little secret, extraordinary happenings stored in an ordinary facade, much like all of us. He gingerly (it is the appropriate word here) selected a drawer, and with some grunting, heaved it open to reveal the only thing appropriate for a filing cabinet, rows of files. The files in this instance were old and dog eared at the edges, and there were stains which for a better writer would spark their imagination. Even the make of the files, were a mishmash of different eras in bureaucracy, a greatest hits-esque collection of the many ways humanity has tried to order their very nature, inadvertently creating a new form of chaos. But our man ignored all of this, because he wasn’t a writer. Ultimately, though he wanted to live a story, he was more suitably a reader of stories, someone whom things did not happen to. 

He pulled out a file labeled “H”, and there in the deep but suitably lit chamber, began to read about Helen Marsh, who owned the cottage in a time before his, and who met a tragic end drowning in her bath. In fact, every file he has ever read so far had tragic ends in them, stories of past owners gone before their time. He did sometimes wonder who kept such detailed records as surely, the property agency had neither the time nor the inclination to record the way another owner, Edward Tibbs, liked his toast in the mornings. Before he died horrifically having been stabbed in the eye with a butter knife, horrific because it was hardly the sharpest tool in the kitchen, and so would have caused some amount of squirming. 

The files do end with the letter “I” and having his name start with “J” did qualify this for a coincidence in big, red, letters on his life. But he was too engrossed in Helen’s story to care. Perhaps he could finish this story this time, if he actually tried. She did seem to have a great love affair with baking, like himself, and seemed popular with the town below, set to change the world of domestic kneading forever before her accident. Perhaps this would be the one story he would get to finish, to tell the world about a Ms Marsh who lived in a meadow. But the next interesting paragraph drove him on and, his character having reasserted itself, kept reading. He would come to finish “I” soon enough, and having devoured all the reading material the cottage had to offer, would be obliged to provide more for future guests. To any other protagonist, this story would be the beginning of a great thriller, the pattern too obvious to ignore. But our man was a reader, and so he kept on reading. And a fountain pen sharpened in the corner, ready to cap itself on the life of the writer that never was.