Read The Narrator in sequence

A blinking cursor on the final canon draft dares the author. Lady Larouge clicks her unnecessarily long fingernails together, starting with her pinky, and whispers, “It’s working.”

As the first letter breathes life between blinks, her thumbnails click. In a voice that would cast doubt on her status as hero or villain of the story, she whispers again,

“My darling.”

One day I walked into the shop and something changed.

Jerry was still there. Still silent. Still with paper, still wielding the highlighter, but that day I felt something I recognized, but not yet from him. Levity.

He sat on one of those blue plastic chairs you had in elementary school, legs crossed, chewing on the ear part of his glasses (the temple, I think). And even odder, he acknowledged me. Not with a task, but with a greeting.

“Morning.”

One word. Not happy, not friendly, but not nothing.

He looked back down at the page and chuckled a little, like something on the paper surprised him in a way he didn’t hate.

I did my routine because I’ve had enough jobs to know the deal. Most jobs are an hour of real work stretched into eight with posture, timing, and believable exhaustion. If I really think about it, I’d been manipulating time most of my adult life, and I was pretty good at it.

Copier on. Trash out. Email laptop open. Print stacks sorted for pickup. Toner checked like it was a priest’s job to keep the sacred powder flowing.

I did eventually encounter customers after that first day. Grandparents scrapbooking, community organizers flyering, people who only need paper once a year when some form refuses to be digital, party promoters, and my favorite customer, Mrs. Greenwald, my personal recurring side quest.

Mrs. Greenwald appeared in the store one day, slammed her laptop on the counter her head barely sat above, and demanded:

“Fix it.”

We did not fix computers, sell computers, or have any indication that would suggest we did anything with computers, but I was intrigued.

“Fi-what?”

“My computah. It doesn’t work. I want you to fix it.”

I lol’d silently.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Somewhere that sells computahs that don’t work. That’s why I want YOU to fix it.”

Good enough for me.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Why is my email not in my computah. I want my email in my computah.”

I tried explaining the cloud, which was my first mistake.

She looked up at the ceiling like she was considering writing a complaint letter to the sky.

“Well, who the hell put it all the way up there?! I want it in my computah!”

Direct quote. The kind of line that opens a secret compartment of laughter in your memory and keeps paying interest for days.

The day was slow, even for the shop. And Jerry didn’t seem in a rush to throw busywork at me to keep me from noticing what he did all day. Usually he kept me moving. Like stillness was dangerous. Like silence would give my brain the chance to crawl back into whatever hole it lived in.

Which, for me, was one specific hole.

McKenzi’s apartment. Two months ago. October 20th, 2025\.

I’d been there to give her back her key. That was the official reason, anyway. The real reason was that we both needed a scene that felt clean enough to call an ending. I missed her cat more than was appropriate for a grown man. That cat and I had an understanding. We loved each other. I don’t have time to unpack why that matters, but it does.

The memory started to rise, the way it always did when the world got quiet. Like my brain had a default screensaver and it was her living room.

I felt myself drifting.

So I did what I always do. I tried to outrun the feeling with noise.

Small talk.

I took a couple steps toward Jerry, rehearsing something casual in my head, something that wouldn’t expose that I was one silent minute away from falling apart at a copy shop on a weekday morning.

Something like, you seem in a good mood, or, what’s funny, or, who are you and why are you laughing in my presence, sir.

The second I opened my mouth, Jerry spoke first.

“You really think those things are going to get humans out of the solar system.”

I froze. “Those…”

“Wait, what?”

He tapped the paper in his hand with the highlighter. A tiny, annoyed motion. Like the page had insulted him.

“Chemical rockets,” he said. To save me or himself from suffering through my lack of physics knowledge, he added, “The boom-boom-fire rockets in your story. You think those are going to get a ship light-years away.”

I blinked hard, once, because my brain was trying to catch up to the fact that Jerry was critiquing physics, and not in a Facebook comment way. In a way that sounded like he’d built something, broken something, fixed something, and learned the rules from the inside.

Then I noticed what he was holding.

The title on the page.

My stomach did a full drop.

It was mine.

A story from my old blog. Something I wrote years ago. Something I hadn’t looked at in forever because looking at it felt like looking at a version of myself I didn’t protect. Pride. Embarrassment. Memory. A whole pile of feelings I’d been trying to flatten into productivity.

And the worst part was, I felt it.

Which meant it worked.

Jerry glanced at me over the top of his glasses, like he’d been waiting to see what I’d do.

“You printed my old writing,” I said, and it came out half accusation, half panic, half, please don’t look at me this closely.

“You wrote it,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Back when I was young and reckless and thought the internet cared about art.”

Jerry highlighted a line, calm as a teacher. Then he said, flat, almost bored, “No one is going to read this for your ideas on rocket science.”

I tried to throw a joke at it. “That’s rude.”

“That’s accurate,” he said. “They’ll read it for what you’re actually writing around.”

I stopped smiling. “Which is.”

He tapped the page again with the highlighter.

“Love,” he said. “Grief. The part you keep dodging by adding engines and distances and technical nouns.”

I didn’t answer. My throat tightened. The shop felt smaller, like the walls leaned in to listen.

Jerry didn’t look at me like a boss or a coworker. He looked at me like a guy who had seen a lot of systems fail and still believed the right tool could change a life.

“There are more rocket scientists than there are people who’ve had True Love,” he said. “Science is common. The feeling isn’t. The feeling is rare. Rarer are those who can communicate it. Rarer still are those who can, and do. That’s why anyone cares.”

I stared at the paper like it was evidence in a trial I didn’t know I was in.

Jerry’s voice stayed steady.

“You’ve been in love before,” he said.

Wasn’t a question, but I answered anyway.

“Yeah.”

He set the stack down on the counter, right next to the fax machine, like he was placing something sacred beside something dangerous.

Then he looked at me, finally, fully.

“You like sci-fi.”

“Yeah.”

“What if I told you this fax machine was a time machine that worked off stories.”

He turned on the machine, put my draft in. It made the same noise it did when I tried to fax my appeal.

“You can’t just write anything,” he said. “You can’t fax pink elephants and happily ever after and expect it to hold.”

I laughed because it sounded like an insult disguised as advice.

“That’s your big physics contribution,” I said. “No pink elephants.”

Jerry didn’t laugh.

“The machine rejects unstable realities,” he said. “It snaps back. Or it snaps sideways. Or it holds for a minute and then the seams show. People start remembering two different versions of the same day and they pick whichever one hurts less.”

I stopped smiling.

He tapped the paper in my hand.

“It has to be believable,” he said. “Not nice. Believable. It has to have weight. People can live inside it.”

I tried to act like I understood, like this was a writing workshop with an unusually aggressive office printer.

“So you’re saying I need stakes,” I said.

“I’m saying the world has to accept it,” Jerry said. “Or it spits it out.”

The fax machine clicked once, slow and patient, like it had an opinion.

I hadn’t written a word in years. My writing had been confined to drunk text messages, late emails with too many people on the CC line. Even the journaling stopped, and I realized that was the first time I’d ever not had a red pen within reach when I needed one.

I always used red ink for my morning pages. For years. So many starts and stops, eureka moments, whining, a lot of courtroom-style stenography, but the pen kept moving every day without me even noticing. And then it stopped.

I don’t remember when or why. It just stopped.

I’d filled an entire treasure chest of journals in the span of a year. I started stashing them everywhere. In the piano bench compartment with the music books I never read. In the bottom drawer of my desk. In a secret compartment under a couch I adopted from a Berkeley street corner. And the pens were everywhere too. Every room. Every pocket. Every cup in the car. Backpacks. Everywhere. Red pens.

Before I could think of an excuse out of it, Jerry slid me the draft and pulled out a red pen from his… I had no idea where that pen came from, actually.

I read back through the old story. I remembered the world, the inspiration, what I thought I was trying to say, and now I could see what the story was trying to say. To me.

The pen hesitated. Lines got scratched out. I stumbled. I got stuck in my head trying to find the right words.

Then I stopped thinking about finding the right words and started trying to find the true ones.

I got to an end and stood up. Jerry made a new face sound.

You sure about that one?

I sat back down.

I kept some words, made new ones. The pen moved faster. The critic in my head went on lunch break. What the pen was breathing onto the page was terrible, but it made sense. It didn’t stop.

And before the critic could clock back in and say what I already knew, as he swallowed his last bite of croissant, I balled the page up. Not out of frustration, disappointment, or embarrassment.

I got it.

I started plotting beats, not writing lines. Outline. The thing I love doing because it helps me move. I did it for the story you’re reading right now, but the lines you’ll remember started the same way.

Surrender.

One side of one single piece of paper turned an idea into a story.

I started to hand it to Jerry.

He nodded toward the fax machine.