All the World's a Page

 Jo Burnham was a writer- of that, there was no doubt.

She’d written articles, short stories, entreaties on the meaning of existence- even three-quarters of a novel. Free days were spent in front of the computer, tap-tap-tapping away ‘til the sun went down. The nights were more of the same, sleep barely stopping her. Yes, she was certainly a writer. What she wasn’t, was an author.

Her name wasn’t displayed shelf-side in a bookstore, or highlighted in digital print on the latest e-reader. The only place it did feature? The tag pinned to her work shirt. Of course the tag called her: ‘Joanna’, a name that only her mother had ever used. One day, when she got published, she would finally, definitively, be Jo.

If she wanted that, then she needed something to publish.

It was a dark and stormy night, and Allison Preacher watched the rain.

Watched?

She considered the word, squinting as the cursor blinked.

… was watching the rain.

The page almost dared her to keep such a clichéd start. It taunted, white and vast, an ocean of snow with not a footprint to mar it. This was her canvas, waiting for the paint of her words, and she had absolutely nothing to say.

Back skipped the cursor, gobbling up words as it went. No matter how many it ate, it stayed svelte, thin and blinking. Jo envied it.

One bright, sunny day, Allison Preacher witnessed a murder.

Again the cursor stopped, halted by faint disgust. Was the opposite of a cliché really any less clichéd? Did she think that was clever? That no one would notice?

Stupid, she admonished herself, pinkie hammering backspace, Idiot, dumbass, moron.

She thought more things, each one less kind, until she was gasping, teary, shivering. If Jo had one talent, it was putting herself down. Away from the keyboard, away from the desk, over to the fridge, to the comforts within.

She stopped short as her fingers wrapped around the door handle. Deep breaths, in and out, like she’d just surfaced from a deep pool. In, and out. Away from the fridge, back to the keyboard. The empty page mocked her.

A tip she’d seen on a writing blog came to mind. She opened up a new document, and wrote the most ridiculous thing she could think of.

It was a dark and stormy night, and it was raining flamingoes.

The ludicrous image twitched a smile into the corner of her lips.

Allison Preacher took cover from the birds by doing a handstand.

It might not be giving her any ideas, but it was certainly cheering her up.

She decided to meet her friend Jo for coffee and donuts.

In all the days that followed, Jo could never say why she’d decided to include herself in this activity. It wasn’t part of the advice on the blog, it wasn’t something she would ordinarily do. Perhaps it was just a whim.

She used her powers of persuasion to convince a flamingo to fly her to Jo’s apartment.

A shadow fell over the writer in her chair, causing her to glance out the window. She’d seen a lot of things through those panes, people mostly. The city always had something new to show to the dedicated observer. Something she hadn’t ever seen, however, was a pair of bare legs.

They were rather nice legs, long and finely furred with soft, orangey hairs. Up and down they bobbed, suspended outside her window by some invisible force.

“Hey Jo!” Called a muffled voice, “Open up!”

Her chair was suddenly a lot less comfortable. She knew that voice- in fact, she was the only one one knew it. It was sultry and rounded, but with a hard edge that let you know its speaker meant business. She knew that voice, because it was exactly how she’d once described Allison speaking.

Allison Preacher, the fictional character.

Jo’s steps were cautious as she approached the windowsill.

“Come on, it’s freezing out here!” the muffled voice cried.

She unlatched the frame, barely able to feel her fingers as she did so, then opened the window. As she did, she took in the rest of the scene.

Great rolling thunderclouds swirled overhead, booming with distant fire and fury. Down the gods hurled great sheets of water, and thunderbolts followed in their wake. Flamingoes. There were a lot of flamingoes, tumbling out of the sky, perching on her fire escape, disrupting traffic by standing one-legged at the intersection… reading newspapers?

Why would you read a newspaper in the rain?

This absent thought was an attempt to distract from the present, most significant absurdity. A flamingo was flapping its wings most fervently, in a desperate doomed effort to keep a woman suspended aloft in its grip.

“Took ya long enough!” Allison huffed, rain soaking through her exposed undergarments, “help me up.”

Jo obeyed the command with a kind of numb credulity, forced to take for granted the utter insanity of it all. So she grabbed a hold of her ink-born creation, and hauled her over the metal. She had the strength of a writer and the agility of a sedant, so of course the two fell into a messy pile.

Allison sat up, smoothing down the skirt that had, moments prior, covered her angular face, spat a soaked strand of crimson hair out of her mouth, and waved the flamingo goodbye.

“Nice guy,” she commented, jumping to her feet while Jo stared, open mouthed.

The protagonist of her unfinished novel, and latest attempts at writing, was standing in front of her, flesh-and-blood. Said woman, powerful and graceful, looked down at her writer and offered a helping hand.

Moments later they were back in the apartment.

“You still keep the coffee in the same place?” Allison asked, striding over to the studio kitchen, “Ah! You do!”

Jo, soaking wet, sopped into her writing chair. She watched, wide-eyed and opened-mouthed, a dead fish in the monger’s aisle.

She was exactly as Jo had envisioned; every detail, from the curl of her twice-broken nose to the gloss of her sea-marble eyes. Tall, elegant, imperfectly beautiful. A noir detective and the femme fatale rolled into one deadly package.

Jo was distracted from her dumbfounded examination by the arrival of a box of donuts.

“Just about managed to keep ‘em dry!” Allison drawled, an amused bend to her rose-stained lips, “I got your favourite.”

She opened the box- too numb to notice her fictional brand printed on the side -to reveal three ordered rows of fried-dough deliciousness. Chocolate, plain glazed, and her favourite: vanilla crème.

“Thank you,” she mumbled, as water dripped from her hair into the box.

“Gross, Jo!” Allison protested, as she approached, two steaming mugs in hand. “You’re getting hair-juice all over ‘em!”

She confiscated the baked goods, leaving Jo’s hands trailing behind them. The writer’s foggy demeanour earned her a look of concern.

“You all right?”

“HA!” Jo barked, “HA. HA!”

Like a baboon that’s just spotted a lion. Allison jumped at the first, looked concerned at the second, then sat down with the third.

“What’s going on, Jo?” she asked.

Jo noticed that the mugs and box of donuts had magically teleported onto her desk, and that Allison appeared to have grown a chair out of her backside. She leaned back, accidentally knocking her computer.

Just like that, Allison, the donuts, the coffee, the flamingoes- all were gone. The sudden silence was more shocking than the absurd scene that had been playing out. Slowly, she turned around, to be greeted with a black screen. Her monitor had been disconnected.

A hand crept down to the cable, and plugged it back in. Instantly, she was greeted with her canvas, a few spidery word-steps scrawl-walking across the top. She re read the few lines she’d written.

“Watcha working on?”

Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest in imitation as she leapt out of her chair. A lovely thump greeted her body as it met the ratty carpet.

“Woah, girl! Easy, now!” Allison said.

Jo got on her hands and knees, crawled to the computer, and closed the document without saving.

“Hey, wha-” was all the detective managed.

Not even an echo hung in the air. She turned, slowly, to look at the page she still had open.

One bright, sunny day, Allison Preacher witnessed a murder.

With shaking hands, she wrote another line.

By the evening the word about the death had already been reported in the newspaper that Jo Burnham had on her bedside table.

As she finished her hasty typing, she took in a deep, trembling breath, and looked over at her bed. Sure enough, illuminated by her lamp as if it were a clue in a crime procedural, was a newspaper. Jo was absolutely certain that it hadn’t been there before. She didn’t read the news, didn’t watch it, didn’t want to know about it. But she knew exactly what was written in this paper. Another line.

The paper folder itself into bat and fly around her room.

There was a rustling sound. Jo didn’t even look. She knew what she’d see. Head in hand, her finger smashed into backspace and remained there. The sounds ceased. When she looked back, the newspaper was gone. The cursor blinked, taunting her with its readiness. She blinked with it, almost to the same beat.

It was a bright and sunny day, and Allison Preacher had just witnessed a murder.

Nothing happened. Of course not, why would it?

Lucky for her, since murder was her business. Not so lucky for the victim.

All that occurred was the appearance of words on her monitor screen.

Or the killer, for that matter. Because now, no matter what they did, where they ran, or where they hid, Allison Preacher would find them.

Jo stopped, reading back through what she’d written. Her mind was occupied by pink birds and unshaven legs.

She knelt down by her latest late client, gun in hand, and checked for a pulse with two ramrod fingers. He was dead, as she already knew, but it paid to be positive.

She stopped again.

What am I doing? This wasn’t a story any more, this was real. She was writing into existence a man being killed. She erased the final line.

To her surprise, there was a faint pulse there. “Damn, it’s your lucky day!” Allison exclaimed.

Paralysis. Even having saved the man’s life, she’d forced words into a woman’s mouth. She was robbing someone of their free will. There was only one thing she could think to do.

Allison Preacher decided to visit Jo Burnham. She knocked on the door.

Rap-a-tap-tap went four delicate, yet firm knuckles. Jo took a deep breath, and answered her door. There she was again, all five-feet-eleven-inches of her. Her character towered over the writer, both in physical size and largesse. Jo had never really gone beyond being a girl; this person standing in front of her was a Woman.

“Uh, hey, Jo…” Allison said, looking around, “… uh…”

“Come in,” Jo invited, opening the door wide. “We should talk.”

Preacher, the most confident and kick-ass private eye in the history of noir novels, shuffled into the apartment like a shy stray cat. She perched on the unmade bed, while Jo returned to her place in the chair.

“Sorry…” Allison began, a word she didn’t often say, “… I’m- I’m not sure what I’m doing here…”

“That’s my fault,” Jo interjected, “I didn’t write a motivation for you.”

Preacher’s porcelain brow was suddenly furrowed with wrinkle-cracks.

“Write a motivation?” she demanded, “I don’t get it.”

The writer turned, and wrote:

A cup of coffee appeared in Allison’s left hand, as if by magic.

The beverage had already manifested by the time she looked back.

“What the-” Preacher yelled, quickly putting the mug down, “where did…?”

Realisation spread like thick foundation, smoothing wrinkles of concern to unblemished shock.

“Oh, God…” she whispered, “I’m not real.”

The speed of the realisation was impressive, but not necessarily unexpected. After all, Allison was the world’s smartest P.I.. Still…

“How do you figure that?”

Allison glanced at her for only a second, before looking back at the steaming liquid.

“I always wondered why we looked so much alike,” she muttered.

“… what?”

A smile twitched into the corners of Preacher’s mouth.

“I’m a little taller, a little thinner, different hair’n’all, but otherwise, we look like sisters.”

Jo couldn’t reply. That knowing smile grew into an amused smirk.

“You din’ do that on purpose, huh?”

She slowly shook her head, wet locks of hair slapping her cheeks.

“I didn’t do it at all…” she whispered, “you’re beautiful, and I’m…”

She stopped. Allison was watching her with those sea-marble eyes, greys and blues and greens all intermixed.

“You’re what?” she asked.

There was an answer to that question, but Jo didn’t have the guts to say it.

“Average?” Allison prompted, “or something worse?”

She hung her head.

“Hey, now, none of that.” Allison said, as tears raced wet tracks down Jo’s cheeks.

“You’re more than all right,” she insisted, wiping the wetness from her creator’s face, “and, besides, there’s more to life than looks.”

“Easy for you to say,” Jo grated, “you’re perfect.”

Her character huffed a little sigh.

“And who do I have to thank for that?”

“Not me,” Jo sobbed, “I’m an awful writer.”

“Well if you’re so awful, how come I’m so great?”

Jo looked away, her gaze fixing to the computer monitor.

Why did I do this? She despaired.

Her hand searched for her favourite key. A warm grip folded around her wrist, holding her arm in place.

“No,” Allison said firmly, “we’re resolving this, right here, right now.”

“Let go of me.” Jo demanded.

“Not until you agree to listen to me,” Allison insisted.

She was stronger than the writer, who quickly relented.

“I realise I might not know you,” the detective began, sitting back and sipping her coffee, “but I know myself, and I like that person.” She raised a sharp finger, pointing at the ceiling. “Who gave me that?” the finger came to rest on Jo, “you did.”

She sat back, the dying steam eddying across her word-sculpted visage.

“You made me,” she said, “my life’s been good-” she waved away Jo’s objection “-I’ve had tragedies, whatever, who hasn’t?” she leaned forwards, “tragedies are a part of life, and-” she punctuated her point with that same finger “-an even bigger part of stories.” She sat back, letting Jo mull over her words.

“I’m guessing you already know all this,” she mused, “since I couldn’t really know nothin’ if you don’t know it.”

Jo was staring at her hands.

“I don’t know if I can keep going,” she muttered, “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“You did it before,” Allison pointed out.

“I didn’t know it was real!” she protested.

The detective grinned.

“It’s always real, girl!” she announced, as if it were obvious, “if it’s not in a story, it’s happenin’ in real life-” she swept a hand over to the window, to the world beyond “-everywhere out there; tragedies, comedies, crime and punishment, fantasy, science-” her eyes flashed with enthusiasm “-stories. Everything’s a story.” Her hands splayed and she flapped her fingers like wings. “All the world’s a page!”

She stood, suddenly, looking at her watch.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, “killers to catch, crimes to solve!”

“What?” Jo asked, dismayed, “you just got here!”

“And now I’m leaving!” she declared, grinning. “I’ve got important things to do!”

“But…” Jo stammered, “I- I need you.”

Allison knelt down, taking Jo’s hands in her own.

“I’m right here,” she said, tapping Jo’s forehead, “and right there-” she pointed to the screen “-but right now, I’m needed elsewhere!”

She stood, squeezed her creator’s hands, then strode to the door. Jo didn’t watch her leave, just slouched miserably onto her desk.

“Y’know...” Allison said, bringing Jo’s attention back.

The detective was standing by the door, halfway out, holding onto the edge like she was hanging off of a cliff.

“I think the greatest tragedy, in all this wide, crazy, ugly-beautiful world,” she said, slowly, “would be if, whomever created us, hated themself.”

A red eyebrow rose, as she fixed an ocean’s stare on Jo.

“If they had done their best, and found themself wanting, it would be so sad.” She looked away, then turned only those eyes to look back. “Don’t you agree?”

Then she was gone.

Her words spiralled through Jo’s head, sinking and rising like driftwood on stormy seas. They might have been true, but what was she supposed to do about it? Suddenly, she had an idea. Hope bloomed in her chest.

Jo Burnham loved herself.

… nothing happened.

She sank back into the depths of her chair.

Guess it’s not that easy.

Yet, despite herself, her hope didn’t die. Because, really, who wants the easy way out of life? Maybe she didn’t love herself, but there was something that she did love. Perhaps that something could help her. Perhaps it could carve a way to romance her own heart.

She flexed her tired fingers, and got to work.

It was a dark and stormy night, and Allison Preacher was watching the rain.