I was following the pack
Fleet Foxes, White Winter Hymnal
iii
“Has anyone seen a notebook lying around?” Alfred asked without taking his eyes off of the corpses weightlessly lining the ceiling. He was the kind of writer who was roughly one-third through his expected lifespan and frustratingly had not published a single sentence of work. It was a thought that plagued him daily, if not hourly, that he had not experienced anything worthy of attention and therefore could not deliver anything deserving of praise and therefore would not (and may never) write anything that might appeal to the masses.
Inspiration had come to Alfred early in life. He had breathed imagination as a younger man and recorded it all with a young man’s fervor. He kept reams about adventures he’d never undertaken, desire he’d never felt, peace that was evasive. Countless days of adulthood were spent locked in his study or buried in the stacks of the library whittling away at these sentences and thoughts, once fueled by an inescapable fever, now entirely absent from his brow. Alfred read, as any good student of the word does, and admired great works written by great people who aspired to greatness and seized it. Turning back to his own work, he soon found himself dragging daggers of ink across that old parchment until it bled, chest open and unbeating. Afraid of his own criticism, he waded into a lake of stories he’d written only in his own mind and very nearly drowned there.
But then he found the pen.
“There must be some kind of gravitational midpoint,” Tabitha said. Alfred peered at the bodies in hopes of discovering the means by which they had been suspended on the ceiling. The halfling was right – no bonds, no bolts. He made a modest hop into the air to put her theory to the test and landed firmly back on the ground.