What a hole, said Jo, rolling over onto her back at the bottom of a dry well. She was surrounded, not by brick or stone but by circling...bone? No, not quite. The forever off-white of books? Nope, not books either.
Pages upon pages, dry in the dampness, could only mean one thing.
Jo Mars was quite literally surrounded by everything she’d ever published, perhaps with talent, but before she’d refined her skill, before she’d read enough books. She almost choked on her scoff and thought she must be dead. She couldn’t see her breath. Dead like this flimsy metaphor. But there was writing here—a version of her here—that wouldn’t have thought it flimsy! What terror.
Her teeth felt brittle with cringe. Or soft? How long had she been rotting down here?
Jo sat up. Every bone cracked as she put her palms to the papery wall. Oh God, there are layers. But she’d paywalled her blog archive older than a year, right? Pay me if you want to see the scraps it took to evolve!
Her insides felt like the moment a seagull flies overhead, or more specifically, the ensuing prayer that it doesn’t shit out the pizza that someone fed it. Pizza would be excellent right now.
Jo didn’t believe any of these walls anymore. So, she decided to wake up. Has to be a nightmare. If nightmares need the illusion of power, she’d just wait a bit, then wake up.
***
Nope.
How unsexy she’d seem when Laura woke up next to her.
How would I even climb out? Nothing looked like a foothold.
Alright. Wrong type of wake-up. Think. There were nine years in the walls. Maybe that’s it.
Maybe being published at 19 isn’t that sexy, after all.
What’s sexy is still writing at 28 after publishing at 19, without deleting the archive of all the years between: as it happened, a living body of both work and time.
Ugh.
It’s all me.
It’s my body.
Maybe to be unafraid of growing up is to grow down. As far as the bottom of an empty well, searching for water to carry you like a root. Any sign of a current.
Jo spun around in circles, looking. The sconces were...floating? The red candles were lit, dripping bloody wax. The light seemed to have been opened from a package—a sample of the inside of a greenhouse under a full moon. Of course, there was fog. Of course, it chilled the nostrils like Everclear. No plant life pushed the paper walls apart. Petrichor would have been better than sewage.
There was no visible sky above.
This couldn’t be a well.
Jo tried to sit, cross-legged, only to find her knees halting against the rip of a floor-length cotton dress seam. She fell to her knees (unintentionally, of course).
A frilly pink bonnet fell off her head.
Oh, the insult to injury!
And then she started laughing. One claims their power back by laughing in a nightmare, apparently. Especially when they find themselves, somehow, a woman in the 1600s deciding between being a puritan and a...witch? It’s a nightmare!
Why not borrow the body before her, with the sole purpose of embalming the carcass of what she’s writing now? Which ones?
Jo tugged on a page, and a trickle of water flowed in. She pulled another free, and a stream poured. A river soon, and then, a current. Up, up, up, she swam and stroked until she dove back into the air from beneath her covers.
What the actual hell? Laura was still asleep next to her, curlers secure. Nothing had moved, not even the glinting sword of light through the curtains, slicing the ajar bathroom door.
Well, let’s shower all this off. But when Jo climbed into the tub and turned the faucet handle, all that ran out were wet clumps of paper.
***
Two hours later, when Laura walked in to use the bathroom, she found Jo on the floor, finally cross-legged, blow-drying wet pages of writing across the bathtub like papier-mâché layers.
Is that your memoir? You tried to rinse it down the shower drain? Why, Jo? It’s already published! Did you sleep at all last night?
Nope. Much worse.
I flushed us down the toilet.
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