“Run on, ‘I am.’!” I shouted.
Sentence crossed the town line; the Cone stopped at the border and doubled over, his shoulders heaving. But “I am.” didn’t slow down — he kept moving, kept getting louder, truer. “Newchording, Me-oh-mying, transmuliterating!”
I hooted to the sentence. “Keep going, ‘I am.’!”
“Anything and everything! Holy shouts and bouts and rambles! Cries and thanks and bellows, now and forever amen! To on and on and never—”
CHAMPION
That was the end for me, though — without “I am.” I lost myself. I forgot to live and died. I had no friends or family to remind me who I was, or why I was here. You really can’t live that way for very long.
One morning, I was cleaning up dead letters in the worryfields and listening to the remnants of music on my headphones when a bookworm — the sentence “You should just go ahead and die.”—emerged from a bookwormhole. The sentence was wearing a blue concert T-shirt advertising a band I didn’t recognize, and he seemed to be lost. “Excuse me,” said “You should just go ahead and die.”. “Can you tell me how to get back to Fialky’s Fields?”
I couldn’t answer him — I was struck by the words of his face. “I should?” I said.
“I thought I knew the way, but I kind of got turned around,” said “You should just go ahead and die.”.
“And if I did,” said a thought. “Would this all go away? The blight? The darkness?”
“Everything would go away,” the sentence said.
I still had the shovel I’d used to bury my house. I picked it up, put it to the page, and began to dig.
“Good,” said the sentence. “Yup, you got it.”
Soon I’d made a hole in the page about the size of my body. When I was finished, I tossed aside my headphones and lay down. “Could I ask you — if you wouldn’t mind — to bury me?”
“You should just go ahead and die.” looked at his watch. “I’m supposed to get back to my novel by noon.”
“Just a few shovelfuls, maybe.”
The sentence smiled curtly. “Sure,” he said, and he picked up the shovel and started pitching page over me. As he was working, a prayer came in from overhead. “
?” It was my Mom. I didn’t answer.
“You should just go ahead and die.” filled the page in around me, leaving only my face exposed. “How’s that?” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Nice and warm.”
“!” prayed my Mom.
“What now?” I shouted to the sentence.
“Now nothing,” he said.
“For how long?” I said.
“Forever, probably,” said “You should go ahead and die.”. Then he picked up a shovelful of page and threw it over my face. I felt the weight of that page — of all of the pages — in my eyes and in my mouth; I choked on it; it filled my throat and my lungs. Then I wasn’t; I let out my breath and died.
When you die, your parents hear it. They know your death in their ears and their hearts and their bones. My Mom was welding a footbridge out past Wolf Swamp when she heard the notes of my death knell. “No,” she said into her welder’s mask. “?” she prayed.
Somewhere off the margin, “I am.” howled.
Six feet above me, the bookworm who’d buried me started coughing. Suddenly all of my sentences started coughing — those in the trees, in the fields, in the fibers. Every word I’d brought into Appleseed, every sentence I’d invented, started spitting up black blood; line by line they squawked, shriveled up, and went silent.
My Dad, working at Muir Drop, saw a sentence fall on the factory floor and stood up from his workbench. He put down his tools and prayed. “? Buddy?”
Just at that moment, down in the page, I had what they call an—
What do they call it?
A realizing. An eponymous? New information in my almost-dead mind.
“Wait a second,” said a thought. “Maybe I don’t need to die. Maybe—”
But it was too late — I was already dead. I had one prayer, maybe less, left in my skull. I prayed it out as far as I could. “Mom! Dad! I’m so sorry. I—” I prayed to anyone who would listen. “All of this was my fault,” I prayed. The prayer — the sentences — wormed out through my skull and toward the surface. But I don’t know if it ever reached anyone. My mind went quiet, and dark, and still.
WESTFIELD SEEK-NO-FURTHER
Diane threw off her welding mask and flew up off the bridge, over the Connecticut River and the western Margin, past the deadgroves and the Prayer Centers and toward home. For the first time, she saw how many stories she’d missed: “Monarch,” “Bastille Square,” “Fathers in the Field,” and so many others. When had all those stories been written? And what were they about?
She landed near the pair of headphones, the corpse of the sentence and the lumpy page. “?” she prayed. She surveyed the site. Then she dropped down to her knees and ran her hands over the freshly turned page. She prayed her son’s name, over and over. On the third prayer, she received an automatic prayer from Appleseed. “I’m sorry, but no party is listed under that prayer name. Please check the name and try praying again.”
Across the street, her husband’s truck pulled into the driveway. Ralph leapt out of the cab and charged across the street. “Di!” he hollered. “Why isn’t answering my prayers?”
Diane’s mind raced. She ran through one idea after the next.
Then Ralph saw the lump. “What’s—” He looked at Diane — her face was a monsoon — and then back at the soil. “No,” he shouted. He dove at the page and started digging with his bare hands. “Wasn’t anyone with him?” he grunted. “That fucking Memory he always hangs out with? Or the Reader — where’s the Reader?”
Diane looked up into the darkness, then down at the page. “Wait a second,” said one of Diane’s thoughts to another.
“What?” said the second thought.
The first thought said, “What if we—”
“Dig, Di. Dig!” Ralph tossed clumpfuls of page over his shoulder.
Diane lifted off the ground, flew a hundred feet off the page—
“Diane!” shouted Ralph.
— hovered there for a moment, and then shot straight down, gaining speed and dropping through an open bookwormhole and down into the page.
APPLECORE
PICK-YOUR-OWN
Even traveling as fast as she did — scorching through the paper from story to story — it took Diane a long time (hours, days, or years, depending on the novel) to find you. For a while the search seemed never-ending. How many novels were there? More than once, she found a Reader who looked like you — sitting in a noiry diner, rifling through a used bookstore in a bodice-ripper — only to find out when she approached you that it was someone else.
When she finally did track you down, you were living twenty miles away and two years later and working as a newspaper reporter. You weren’t making much meaning at the job, but you were gaining experience and collecting stories. That day, you were covering an event called the Marginalia Arts Festival. You were on deadline — your story was due in less than two hours. One of the organizing tents had agreed to speak with you about the festival’s mission, and you were interviewing them by the entrance. Diane spotted you and the festival tent and dropped down behind a row of Port-a-Potties.