Saving A Story
I sighed as I got to the bottom of the story that I was writing. “THE END.†I typed, and rubbed my eyes, then wiped my sweaty forehead.
I scrolled to the top of the document in my wordprocessor, and started to re-read again from the beginning: “In all of the worlds that could be conceived, in all of the possible realities that could be visited by human minds, the ones that are strangest are closest to those with which we are familiar….†I hit the down arrow and continued down the page. As I read the third line, I gasped as I saw the words “In all of the worlds†get smaller, as if they were falling away from me. I squinted at them as they continued to shrink.
The rest of the letters on that line dropped away, as if falling into a deep hole. The next line began to disappear as well, as if my story was a strange rope that was uncoiling in front of me, and plummeting into a white, bottomless well.
My eyes went wide with alarm! I had worked on the story for so long, had created such vivid descriptions, and they were falling away. I clicked the disappearing words, but the story continued to get pulled downwards. If anything, it sped up, as if the earlier words had weight and pulled down harder on the parts that were still anchored. In fact, the scroll bar at the right shrunk as if it were becoming a shorter document because of deletions.
I tried saving the document, but it ignored my commands. In desperation, although I didn’t think it would help, I touched the screen at a line that was disappearing. But, instead of just feeling the cold glass of the screen, there was a sinuous feel to the words, as if I were touching a thread of some sort. It was too small to get a hold of, and the line dropped away like the rest.
Frantically, I grabbed at the screen to pull at the words. They were too thin. Quickly, I selected the entire document, and sized the letters up to the highest size I could see. The anchored letters seemed to get heavier, but fallen letters had also become larger, and it didn’t slow. I tried again to grab a word, a sentence, a fragment. But they fell away.
The final sentence came by, and I made a desperate grab for the final “D†in “THE END.†I got my pinkie hooked in the curve of the letter, and it yanked against my skin, cutting me, creating a crimson line of blood around the first joint of my little finger. I winced with pain, but still grabbed at the sentence behind “END†and pulled, slowly extracting my story from the white depths, letter by letter, phrase by phrase.
When I was done, there was a messy pile of words on the floor.
Later, I checked the wordprocessor’s website. It turned out there was a bug.