The Everything
People disappear all the time.
Some want to. Want to leave their life and families, or
find the same. Want to forget who they were or discover who they can be. Some
want the anonymity of being whoever they want, not who they currently are.
Some don’t have a choice. The news stations and papers
are filled daily with abductions and missing person’s reports. These are the
ones who may or may not have been happy in the life they chose to lead but have
been cruelly taken from that life, not given a choice.
Most of these lost souls will be found eventually, dead or alive; they’re found by strangers or reporters or police, but they are found. These disappearances, after all, have explanations.
Most of them.
And some find themselves taken from their life through no fault of their own and no responsibility on another’s behalf. These are the people no one ever hears of, the ones society has chosen to forget, more so than the ones who suddenly disappear one day never to be seen from or heard from again.
And these are the ones to watch, so much more so than the
rest. These are the ones whose destiny has been changed or whose destiny has
finally been fulfilled.
These are the ones who haunt us…
~~~~~~~~~~
It didn’t care.
It was happy where it was but would be just as happy
someplace else. It never slept, but it was never fully awake, either. It was all
it knew, and it had known it for time immemorial.
So when the stranger found it, the book took no notice. It
had been used and discarded numerous times, only to be found again. It really
didn’t mind, it was content to be wielded this way until it was needed.
But when the stranger opened the book to certain pages –
pages no one else had even known of, let alone thought to look for – the book
began to take notice. ‘Wasn’t that
interesting,’ the book thought in its timeless way. ‘Something new.’
The words uttered by the stranger flowed from the book into
the air. Swirling around everything and nothing, it created a vortex of
immeasurable power and substance and of nothing at all. Across a thousand
thousand universes the power flowed, and when it was done, the stranger put the
book back where it was found and walked away.
It was time to see what had just happened. The book was
curious, it was true. So it opened its’ eyes for the first time in this
time and looked at its new surroundings. Everything was the same, yet different.
It was still atop the power, but the air was different, something charged,
somehow changed.
Interesting.
For the first time in too long to remember, the book was
unlocked by its key, and awoke fully to concentrate on its, on their, new home.
Maybe this was what it was looking for all these years. Briefly wondering who or
what the stranger was, the book decided it didn’t care. This was new and
exciting and far more interesting than anything that had happened to it in so
many long and lonely years.
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