I sit by my desk. Thunder rolls between lightning flashes in the starless, moonless night sky. The street is dark and damp, with an occasional oil lamp outdoors flickering in the storm, illuminating the shadows, revealing the cautious orbs glowing from the undergrowth – of a small predator, perhaps. The foxes are back to lurk, I assume. My chamber is warmer than the outside – brighter even. I have set a lantern on my desk, while a candle burns by my bed.
I stare at the flame in my lantern – a tamed fire, an imprisoned soul. The flame neither flickers as much as the one inside the lamp outdoors, nor is it as steady as the glow of the fox’s eyes. The candle melts faster than I thought it would. Untouched by its heat, my brain seems frozen by the storm growing outside.
I stare at my hands, dissociating, and then look back at my desk. The lantern casts a shaky shadow on some parchment sheets. Next to it sits my bottle of ink and that intricately carved glass pen – a rare find indeed. It is a fine creation gifted to me by that optimist of a nobleman. The town thinks he has a couple of screws loose from all that travelling – and I agree. He actually believes that my work can see the light of day instead of just the yellow haze of the candlelight from my nighttime epiphanies. If only it were indeed my work.
I pick up the pen. I feel the crevices under my fingertips – the treads made to hold ink. He will never understand, like he never has before, how my work isn’t my work. It appears on the pages that I have never written. He had laughed. Called me a funny girl. “Modesty,” he said, “won’t get you too far.” He laughed again. I don’t understand why it was funny. I certainly wasn’t joking, or lying, or being modest. He just doesn’t know what it is like to own the work that you couldn’t have done. He doesn’t know that the work that is supposed to be mine feels stolen – wrong, too. I twirl the pen, distracted by my thoughts and before I know it, I feel my hand go numb with pain.
I clasp the pen and lay my head on the desk. I watch my hand drag its way across the pages. I can’t fight it – I succumb. I see dark liquid ooze out from my hand – I bleed. I bleed black ink which soaks into the yellowish pages under my fist, dripping from the tip of the pen. The ink forms scrawls as it touches the sheets. It soaks deeper, filling pages with words that I might have thought. A familiar voice whispers, “Not yours” over and over in my ears. “Not mine”, I mutter as tears trickle from the side of my eye onto that very parchment, blotting the ink, and depriving the words of their structure and meaning. Another stack of parchment full of beautiful words that wrote themselves while I am just another fox, lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike. I lift my head to see the splotches breaking the stream of words that filled the sheets on their own. Maybe tears do nothing more than fade words into nothingness, leaving behind a stain, a signature of the memory of a happier time.