After a conversation with a nameless entity, it dawned on me that I should be telling this story here. The words, “It was a dark and stormy night,” seemed to be almost the perfect beginning for a novel. Yes, a novel with a sense of humour. Now, to be honest, this wasn’t my idea at all. Left to my own devices, I would stay as far away from a story like this as possible. But the nameless entity is insistent. Just think of me as a scribe for the unknowable, doing what he is told by someone who is commissioning a work. Just don’t think I’ve lost all of my marbles.
* * *
Prologue
It was a dark and stormy night.
“Erase that, you can’t write that. I hadn’t invented night yet. Everyone knows that to have a night, there also has to be a day with morning, afternoon, and evening thrown in for good measure. All that comes later.”
“Okay, okay already,” I grumbled. How about, “It was dark and stormy.”
“Geez, can’t you just write what I tell you to write? It wasn’t stormy. You can’t have storms without planets, atmosphere and weather systems. Just write. “It was dark.”
“Boring,” I stated with exasperation. “I heard what you said. Yes, it was dark and that is the whole story for so long that you finally got bored of nothing but darkness. Do you really think anyone will want to read a story that basically talks about nothing else but darkness?”
“That’s not fair. You know that there is a huge story that will follow.”
“You talk about being fair?” I protested. “If there was any fairness, I wouldn’t be writing this crap that no one in their right mind is ever going to believe, even as a fiction story if they even bother to read it at all.”
~
It isn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be, to write this story, especially since it isn’t even my story. I’m like a ghost writer with my name never being attached to the document, not that I would actually want to ever admit that I was ever involved.
It wasn’t easy, as the voice in my head was determined to control every single word that was to be put on the paper, well, the keyboard and screen. I had been reluctant to give in to this impulse to write this particular story as the voice wanted the “truth” to be told as it had never been told before. When I protested that it couldn’t be a novel if it wasn’t fiction; and if it was fiction, then the words really didn’t matter as long as the story was told. My reluctance to give in to the inner voice only resulted in a headache that didn’t let up for several days.
I took my concerns to the woman who is my significant other. All that she had to tell me was to just go with it, trust that the inner voice, to trust it as my muse. After all, what did I have to lose other than a headache whenever I resisted that muse? I had to admit that she was likely right about the whole mess. After all, when the story was done, I sure as hell didn’t have to publish it. Conceding a defeat of sorts, I returned to the keyboard to let the story be told.
~
It was dark. Darkness was all that there was, an infinite darkness that was unbound by time and space and place. The darkness was anything but empty. All that was to be, all that would never come to be, everything was already in the darkness unformed. It was dark, It had always had been dark. And it was boring.
“Boring? I didn’t tell you to write ‘boring!’”