If anyone should read this story, even if they should read this first sentence, get halfway through then stop, abandon it, it will be too late, they will already have allowed the story to enter them, a parasite of sorts, no, not quite the metaphor because it doesn’t require a host to survive, it can get along fine without one, more a spirit entering a body in order to live a while as a stowaway to some other consciousness, think along its thoughts, feel what it feels, remind itself of the chaos and confusion of being incarnate and mortal, the story is in them, one sentence deep, then two, three, paragraphs unfolding like dried or paper flowers dropped into water, they were mummified, abstract, arid, then absorbed a live element, flourishing after long hibernation, so the paragraphs float on the surface to suggest there are depths to the person thinking and feeling inside the story, but how could that be, they’ve just now sat to read it, their memory and attention sculpted into imaginary figures as they do so, persons, places, things, these combining into events, rising action, tightened into little knots of conflict, eye tracking the words and sentences and multiple regions of the brain working in coordinated complex fashion to visualize the goings-on of the characters, their thoughts, their feelings, coming alive in the hypothetical, made real in the consciousness of the reader where only moments before they were ink on a page, the story is what happens in the privacy and busy silence, the head stilled and the eyes tracking, this is the very story they’re reading, they the character they’re asked to imagine, the action a very minor one, subtle, person sitting alone in a parked car on a lunch break or before work, book open on lap or resting against steering wheel, a little introspective adventure before giving their mental energies over to the practical involvements of their employer, the smallest act of defiance really, maybe futile, to be a place where a genuinely new occurrence might become manifest without need of a witness, valuable for its own sake, that a category of experience as provisional and fugitive as a story might flower in the head and then spread throughout the body, shading its mood, its attitude, orientation in space and time, seatbelt still banded across its chest, one story before work, five, seven, nine pages long, a lifetime travelled from beginning to end, excerpt from a whole cosmology of character and action that will happen once then never again, not exactly this same way nor under similar circumstances, they finish and float off into the white space beyond and feel themselves dispersed like seedlings or pollen, after which there is the sound of a car door slamming, a coworker nearby, hand raised in a wave, so a hand has to be lifted from the book and raised in turn, thought with a different sort of a hand, a secret one, hybrid, part story, part person, that being the feeling that will last a few seconds, a few minutes at most, after the book is closed and tossed to the passenger’s seat, seatbelt undone, door opened, locked, closed, person walking with a story closing its many blooms within them, dormant and historical to their consciousness, despite their abandonment of its brief world for more immediate distractions and worries, a more real array of unrealities, more important supposedly because shared by others explicitly, talked about, argued over, joked about, asked after, explained, until each skate on the surface of an opinion, none held too long because they emerge too easily from conviction, no room for quieter places where it’s permissible to remain undefined a while, mutable, half-formed, a compliment to their own very nature, instances of return from they know not where, unmoored and so home.
