Episode 269: Fictitious
April 22nd, 2024
Kristen Zaza
[Eerie Theme Music.]
[Your Narrator:]
Hello. Good day, good evening, good whenever, my friends.
It’s a dull, aching kind of sorrow that fills me tonight, as I see that everything is gone.
The ideas I created, the buildings I constructed in my mind, every different concept of what I am and what I will be - all gone.
There is just darkness, once more, as the Black Hole ate the castle up entirely
At least, in this moment, it did. I’m not really sure how it works.
So many little ideas floating around, like photographs, letters, stories that were collected, just softly floating around me as though there is no gravity here, which I guess there isn’t
I am floating around, too, in that darkness, trying to catch at these little memories, these blossoms of ideas I cherished, and I try to try and look at them and catch them again and see if any of them could still be realized, if any of them could still turn into whatever this strange unit I call life, this one, the real life, you know, you get it
Can any of these ideas be caught in my hand and become something real?
I think not.
Even if they they could, they would never be exactly the same as what I envisioned. Details always change. Maybe that’s why, more and more, I have been eschewing details.
My mind is tired
My personality is confused
My heart aches
But my heart is constant.
Is anyone with me, here?
What are we to do about this?
This silence echoes back at me around and around and around and I honestly don’t feel quite so lonely, so that’s nice.
Anyway, despite the absence of a storyroom, I do have one this week. Just a little one.
I feel like, in the emptiness, some characters, some set dressing, some location, some fiction - yes that’s the best word - some fiction will help.
Once upon a time, there was a woman at work.
Her mind was also tired, her personality just as confused, and her heart ached tremendously, she just didn’t really know it yet.
She worked at an office, don’t ask me what kind because I don’t know and that’s not what either of us are here for.
She worked at the same desk all day. She drank her coffee at her desk five minutes before work began. She would sift through the mail the guy from the mailroom had already dropped off on her desk; never anything interesting. She ate her lunch at her desk for thirty minutes in the middle of each day and watched some of her co-workers do the same, and some go out laughing with each other for their break. She didn’t understand how they had the energy. And she sat for five minutes staring at the black computer screen she turned off at the end of the day, imagining how tomorrow would not be any different, and how her evening would pass by so quickly, and how she would be too exhausted to do anything with her evening other than lie on the couch and not watch whatever she put on the television, and think about cooking but probably just microwaving something or ordering something fast and cheap. She would think about how she wanted to meet people. She wanted to take classes. She wanted to go dancing. She wanted to go for walks in woods. She wanted to try a sport. She wanted to go to a concert. She wanted to do anything different. But she would be back here at this desk so soon, what was the point? The guy from the mailroom would pick up her mail she needed to go out that afternoon without looking at her, and she would pack up her things and leave for home.
That was how she spent most of her days. I don’t judge it. I understand it, actually.
Sometimes, it is at the end of long, unending strings of days such as these that a perfectly marvelous catalyst presents itself in one’s life.
In this woman’s life, it appeared in the form of a book.
One morning, she sifted through the mail the guy from the mailroom had already dropped off at her desk, preparing to silently drink her coffee for five minutes
But underneath the pile of uninteresting paperwork sat a book.
[a sighing voice, singing a strange tune]
It was blank; it was black; it was leather. It had a ribbon for a bookmark. She thought it might be someone’s journal, but it was not.
It was a work of fiction, she thought, for it too began with ‘Once upon a time’. It had works typed across over two hundred pages.
But it had no title.
Strange.
[Piano music; distant]]
She began to read.
A world unravelled before her eyes; a world of darkness and adventure, of heroes and villains, of magic and death and rebirth and good versus evil
You know, the wonderful things that make a fantasy or science fiction so rapturously succulent, so delicious to consume.
But this was better than any book she had ever read, because the characters seemed to come off the page and into her world.
Well, to be fair, one character. Only one character, really.
In fact, it seemed like the rest of the story was just a vehicle for this one character to exist in a world all of his own.
[The music booms out in its fullness; frightening, rolling, strange]
I mentioned heroes and I mentioned villains.
He wasn’t entirely either. He was, I suppose, an anti-hero. Perhaps we might call him that because he was not quite the picture of goodness; he didn’t perform good deeds for other characters, but rather, he sowed chaos, he committed crimes against them, he acted out of selfishness and personal desire with no care for others’ lives and what they desired. He was not part of the Great Evil, for every good fantasy story must have that, right? But he was certainly not a part of the Great Good. Perhaps because he leaned a little more towards causing harm than good, he was more villainous, but the reader would be damned if they didn’t find themselves rooting for him, somehow.
There was little about him by way of description, either. He was just a mysterious figure who appeared now and then to taunt the protagonist, to cause little bits of pain and frustration here and there. The protagonist was Good and fought Hard and did what she was Meant To. Yet she was constantly tormented by this nameless, destructive figure, who was described as having an irresistible voice and keen, envious eyes of the greenest sort, and of course the kind of grin that was horrifically menacing, and at the same time, the most disgustingly attractive thing the protagonist had ever seen.
That’s the thing about a good villain, a really, really, good villain - they make you want to join them. That’s the truly frightening thing. I’ve said it before and I’ll sing it again and again and again. Maybe because that’s the thing in me that I fear most myself - that I will allow myself to sink deeper and deeper into the velvet darkness simply because it can sometimes feel so...I don’t know...how do I describe feeling trapped, but in the most decadent and indulgent way?
Held?
I’m going on too long about this. The point is, he was a most alluring character.
And our hero, the one working at the desk, fell head over heels in love with him.
She didn’t realize she had read the book all day. She had missed her lunch. And, such a small cog was she in such a big machine, no one at work had even noticed. She had heard them laughing on their way to lunch, returning, typnig, picking up phone calls. She had even heard her phone ringing here and there. But she would check the messages tomorrow. She would get back to it tomorrow. It would be all right.
The guy from the mailroom stopped by her desk as she was packing the book away into her bag. He paused for a moment, and she saw his hands reach for a pile of letters she hadn’t got ready to send out. “Nothing today,” she said sheepishly without looking up at him. “There will be a bunch tomorrow.” And she heard the wheels of the mailcart moving on their way towards the elevator.
She practically floated home, the joy of a new story filling her up.
She tried to look up the story online. The characters had no names, somehow, and so she couldn’t find them that way. The actual plot was so generic that she couldn’t find the answer, no title for this particular book, and what was worse, no name for the character she was so smitten with. She couldn’t look up fan art of him. She couldn’t find a single thing that spoke to who he was, what he might look like, who the author was.
And as she sat down to turn the television on before picking up her phone to order herself some dinner, she heard a voice from the slightly open window:
[A low voice, echoing]
“Don’t you dare.”
Her heart felt as though it leapt out of her chest. She ran to the window to see if someone was standing on the apartment’s fire escape, but no one was there. She closed the window.
She must have imagined it.
She went back to the television and picked up the remote control, but as she gazed into the black screen and aimed the device at it, she saw a flash ot two briliant orbs superimposed on hers.
She screamed and dropped the remote.
She picked up her phone with shaking hands and searched all the details of a green-eyed villain. Perhaps others had experienced something like this…waking nightmares, maybe, visions of sorts, brought on by this character in a book, or others like it…someone had to know something…
Then her phone shut itself off completely.
[Menacing laughter, low and echoing]
She sat on the couch, and there was only one thing for it.
She went to read the book.
She opened her bag.
But it was gone.
She must have somehow left it at work, forgotten it there.
What would she do?
She microwaved herself a little meal, as her phone wouldn’t turn back on.
She ate it in silence, just a little lamp on. She was afraid to touch the remote controller again.
And as soon as she finished eating, the lamp burst, the lightbulb blowing itself out. She shrieked as the smell of burning filled the room just for a moment.
And in the smoke, light only slightly against the light of the city from her apartment window, she saw
A grin.
She moved her mouth as if to say, “Leave me alone”, but she couldn’t.
And that just made him smile all the more.
It’s just a story.
Just a story.
But what story was it?
And did she want to know the ending?
The next morning, she was late to work as her alarm clock had also stopped working in the middle of the night. Rushing out the door with her little breakfast and not much else, she made it through the door and to her desk late, her hair dishevelled and her eyes exhausted (she hadn’t slept much for the voice and the laughter and the grin and the eyes haunting her vision and hearing). Luckily, once again, no one noticed.
The guy with mail cart had already come by and brought what was for her.
She tossed the letters aside frantically, and then saw, much to her horror (or was it relief?)
The Book.
“Open it. Read it.”
The voice again.
She put it in her drawer. She turned on her computer and tried to get back to work. The eyes staring through at her once more, just faint green glaring through the company’s letterhead or the spreadsheet or e-mail or whatever it was she was trying to focus on demanded her attention, demanded her adoration, demanded her eyes move over the letters he wanted them to move over. Hours passed, lunchtime laughter and other people’s phones ringing on and off passed, and she couldn’t get those eyes or that laughter out of her head. I just want to see him, she wished against wishing. What is he? Why can’t I find anything out about him or his world? What is this book? The thoughts flooded her mind as she held her head in her hands. Sometimes a co-worker stopped to ask if she was all right, she muttered something about a headache. Her world wasn’t as indifferent to her as she believed it was - perhaps it was that she was cruelly indifferent towards it.
Her phone rang.
She answered it.
“Read the book.”
“Who are you?”
“Read the book.”
“What are you?”
“You want to see me, do you?”
“Why can’t I find anything out about you and your world?”
“I am my world. Read the book.”
“What is this book?”
“It is me. Read it.”
Click.
What madness. What confusion. What terror. What romance.
She took it out of the drawer. There was no hiding from it anymore.
She read.
For the rest of the day, she read. As her co-workers packed up and left for home, for family, for Fun Friday Plans, she read. And the world she was reading crumbled around her. The good characters lost the battle. The evil characters celebrated in the streets. The moon turned orange and the sun turned silver and the trees turned black and the grass turned red. And the protagonist, she gave up entirely, and fell into the cruel and demanding arms of the anti-hero, nay, the villain, the worst of them, the most dastardly, the most unyielding character she’d ever read. The hero went willingly into the madness that was his heart. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense. A battle-hardened warrior with a virtuous heart?
If she couldn’t stand a chance, what chance stood this weak-willed office worker who couldn’t even bring herself to go grocery shopping after work? To get up and go for a walk on Sunday morning? To call a friend on Saturday afternoon?
She stared at the book and didn’t realize it was dark out, the whole office was dark but for the little lamp on her desk and the faint glow of her ancient screen-saver ping-ponging its way from corner to corner of her monitor.
She was only brought out of her feverish reverie by the sound of squeeky wheels on carpet, growing closer and closer to her.
“I don’t have any mail ready today either,” she said, without looking up at the mail guy. “I’m sorry.”
“How was the book?” [That voice again.]
She slowly looked up at the mail guy she saw twice a day, every day, and was too shy, too afraid, too sad, too something or other, to ever look up at before.
The green light coming from his eyes burned through the darkness of the empty office almost as bright as lasers, barely illuminating his devilish grin.
“You wanted to see me?”
“I wanted to see you.
Are you there, or are you here?”
“Yes.”
“No, I mean the book, or the office?”
“There is no book.”
And she looked down at what she had just been holding in her hands, and it was instead, just a scroll. An ancient, yellowed thing with runes on it, and the long-ago remnants of blood and dirt and moss. Part of some old magic she didn’t know anything about, but could gather together from hints from the book she had thought she just read.
“I see.”
He grinned even wider and leaned against her desk, looking under his long, black nails. “I wrote it just for you, you see. You just seemed so, so…”
“Unhappy.”
“There, yes. But here? We’ll have to see.”
[Just the booming bass from the music before, like an 80s fever dream. Just a few hits of it as she looks out the window.]
And she looked out the window and saw a fallen kingdom. And the moon turned orange and the sun turned silver and the trees turned black and the grass turned red.
And as she turned back, the lights were on again. The office was back to normal. The other workers were back, it was morning, Monday morning to be precise, everything was busy, the city was outside of the window again, the sun was orange and the moon would be silver and the grass was green and the the trees were too. And a coworker clapped her on the shoulder and made a joke about how she must have fallen asleep at her desk. Another one was concerned and invited her to lunch today. Her boss commended her on her work ethic, everyone went back to their desks and phones rang and rang and everything was the same as it was.
[The booming bass again.]
And the elevator bell rang, and she looked up and saw the guy from the mailroom standing in it with his cart, his eyes not quite so green, his nails not quite as black
But his smile just as devilish.
And he winked at her
And the doors closed.
Hard to know what’s real and what’s fiction, when there are so many souls who can move in and out of both so easily, and take us with them. I think perhaps there’s a great secret to be learned from treating each as the other, at times. Not taking anything quite as real, and anything quite as fiction. Since we created it all anyway, didn’t we?
I guess I could get to creating a new castle, if I want. One that hasn’t been swallowed up by a black hole.
Maybe some day.
Maybe soon.
Who knows. I’m sure I will eventually.
For now, though, I’m actually quite a biit happier, now that I’ve had a story.
I can see it in my mind. The places. The characters. Their joys, their sorrows.
And everything’s not quite as empty anymore.
Probably a lesson to be learned from that…but after a bit of rest.
Much love, my friends, wherever you are.
Goodnight,
[Eerie theme music]
(Host speaks as Kristen:)
Hello everyone, thanks so much for listening to Episode 269 of On a Dark, Cold Night. With you as always is your host, narrator, podcaster, composer, etcetera, behind the show, Kristen Zaza. Thinking about fiction a little more these days. Thinking about breaking in and out of it. I guess that’s nothing new, but I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Sending warmth and gratitude to my newest supporter on Patreon.com, Mig Windows. Thank you so much for joining us over there, Mig, it means the world to me. And thanks so much to all my patreons who help me keep the show going every month. On Patreon, every supporter of $1 or more a month US gets access to my complete soundtrack of over 250 tracks, while every supporter of $5 or more a month US gets that, a weekly bonus meditation episode called my Quick Moments, and a monthly Tarot Reading video uploaded every full moon. There should be one coming up the day this comes out, so if you join now you’ll get a brand new tarot reading for my patrons. Check all this out at patreon.com/darkcoldnight. To donate one-time only without any perks, visit ko-fi.com/darkcoldnight; and to get just the bonus meditation episodes but also other great Sonar Network bonus content, subscribe to our Apple Podcast channel, Sonar+, for 3.99 a month. Search On a Dark, Cold Night on itunes to learn more. And t-shirts and hoodies are available at bonfire.com/on-a-dark-cold-night.
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Thank you so much for listening. Be well, rest well, and talk soon.
[Eerie theme music]
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