You Noticed

You noticed. You chose. You goed.

Most people will never see this page. It sits at the other end of a small portal tucked inside a recovery kit, and it only opens for people who notice things. You noticed, so this is yours: a short story from a wild elsewhere, and something to take home at the end of it.

New here by way of a portal? Welcome. This is a free short story, it takes about three minutes. Settle in.

DAY ONE - THE FOG

The book came out at midnight on Tuesday. Technically Tuesday, but Monday night by any human reckoning. Hers came the way she had planned for it to come, because she plans her life around a book the way other people plan around weather. The Kindle copy, pre-ordered the minute pre-orders opened, landed at 12:01 while she sat up in bed refreshing the screen. The hardcover was coming too, for the shelf, due Tuesday by delivery. The Kindle was for the night.

Everything was staged the way the ritual said to stage it. Candle lit. Fairy lights on. The good blanket. The good cup, holding the good tea, the herbal blend she kept for nights that mattered. Dark chocolate. Shortbread. Phone on Do Not Disturb and across the room, where it could not reach her. At 11:59 she had closed her eyes and set her intention. When the book landed, she read the dedication out loud, alone, feeling silly for exactly four seconds.

The plan was not simple. The plan had nine steps and a pact in it. Read the whole book. Keep the 3 AM pact, or break it gloriously. Be at work at nine, however blurry-eyed it had to be. Tell absolutely no one. Nobody at her job knew about any of this, and nobody was going to. They would not care the way she cared. She hated it when they pretended to care. She hated it more when they did not pretend.

At 3 AM she reached the hour in the pact, looked at it squarely, and said "One more chapter." Out loud. To nobody. The way you negotiate with a cat that has decided it is dinnertime. After that, the record goes blank. She does not remember falling asleep. The last time she remembers seeing the clock was a little past four. She remembers the alarm going off. She remembers sitting up in a panic. She remembers finding the Kindle under her pillow, where it had spent what was left of the night without her.

Tuesday, she went to work. Of course she went to work; rent is not moved by literature, and she is not a woman who can afford a day in bed for a book, however much the book deserved one. She moved through the day like a woman underwater. At lunch she sat in her car with the Kindle and read eleven pages with her sandwich untouched. And they were the best eleven pages of the day.

The hardcover came at eight that evening, Amazon's last respectable hour, left at the door in its cardboard armour. She had eaten supper. She had cleared the decks. She did not even pretend she was going to pace herself. She went back in, this time with a real book in her hands, and she finished it. It was just before 3 AM, and she chose to count it as personal growth. She sat a moment in the quiet with the lamp still on and her heart beating like a drum. Then she lay down under the still-glowing lamp and stared at the ceiling for a while, because sleep felt like a rumour from another country.

She got up again on Wednesday at the usual hour, because there was no other option on offer. The kitchen had the colour taken out of it while she was away. The kettle clicked on, ordinary as anything, and somehow that was the strangest part. Her own life, which she had left neatly folded a week ago, seemed to have been stored somewhere damp.

As she turned the corner, she stopped in the doorway. The crowned ghost was sitting on the arm of her sofa, translucent and entirely too comfortable with the arrangement. It was reading the newspaper, apparently upside down. She was startled, briefly and completely. The ghost was not. The ghost had finished the book in one night, all of it, while she was still hunting for her Kindle in the bedding. The ghost had the calm of someone who has survived the weather she was still standing in.

"First day is the worst," said the ghost, kindly. "Hydrate. The rest is commentary."

She drank a glass of water standing at the sink, looking out at her perfectly ordinary street. Everything was exactly as she had left it. Everything, plus a ghost who had finished the book before she did. Right, she thought. The quest, apparently, was breakfast.

DAY TWO - THE PERFORMANCE

Work, it turned out, had simply continued. This felt inconsiderate. She needed sleep. She needed quiet. Work needed her to answer emails instead.

She answered the emails in a fog. She got them mostly right on autopilot. In the meeting she nodded at all the nodding places. When a colleague asked if she was feeling all right, she said "Quiet night." She said it with the straight face of a woman who had not wept over a fictional betrayal at 2 AM in her pyjamas.

At lunch she found she had typed half a sentence about a character into a spreadsheet. She deleted it slowly, the way one defuses something.

"You are doing beautifully," said the ghost from the top of the filing cabinet, where no one else could see it. "Nobody suspects a thing."

"One person in this office has read it," she said. "I can tell by her eyes. We recognized each other."

"That," said the ghost, "is not a work problem. That is a future lunch."

DAY THREE - THE FEEDING

By Friday her diet had become archaeological: crackers from one stratum, chocolate from another, a handful of something from a bag that may have been a garnish.

The ghost appeared in the kitchen doorway with the air of a small sovereign reviewing a famine. "In my day," said the ghost, "we called this stage the Wasting. It ends when somebody cooks an egg."

So she cooked. Properly. Eggs, toast with the good whipped butter, tomatoes with salt, Earl Grey in the big blue mug, the one with weight to it. She ate standing up at the counter. Sitting down felt too ceremonial. Halfway through, the room came back into focus, like someone adjusting a lens.

Above her mug, the steam rose and curled, and for one second the kitchen window reflected a small arched doorway that is not in her kitchen, standing open to somewhere greener. She blinked. It was just the window again.

"Eat," said the ghost, unbothered. "Wonders keep. Lunch does not."

DAY FOUR - THE TEMPTATION

The book sat on the coffee table where she had left it. Finished, closed, and somehow radiating.

She walked past it to water the plants. She walked past it to pull on an oversized hoodie. On the third pass she stopped, the way you stop at a bakery window, telling yourself you are only looking.

"One chapter," she said aloud. "The good one. As a reward for being so functional."

The ghost cleared its throat from inside the bookshelf, where it was sitting between two of the earlier books in the series, like a bookmark with opinions. "A reread begun on Saturday," said the ghost, "is the weekend gone. You know it. I know it. The book knows it."

She negotiated, because she is reasonable: the book would go on the high shelf, in honour, not in hiding. She would let the story settle. Some books you do not reread right away for the same reason you do not tell yourself you'll watch just one episode on Netflix at midnight.

"Sunday," she told it. "We will discuss Sunday."

It is possible the book sulked. It is possible she did too, briefly, and then she made soup.

DAY FIVE - THE RE-ENTRY

On Sunday she went out into the world on purpose, which is a different thing from being dragged there by employment.

Coffee with a friend, a real one, in a café with yellow walls. A little bell jingled every time someone came through the portal, as if every arrival deserved announcing. She listened to actual news about actual people. She laughed in the right places without thinking about it first. Twice she almost said, "That is exactly like the scene where..." and twice she steered the conversation away, the way you wrangle a shopping cart with one wheel determined to go somewhere else.

"You seem rested," her friend said, suspicious. "Did you go away somewhere?"

"Sort of," she said. "I was in a wild elsewhere for a while. I am back now. Mostly."

On the walk home the air had that clean, end-of-weekend sweetness, and her step had a bounce in it that had not been there on Wednesday. Re-entry, she decided, was survivable. There might even be a certificate.

DAY SIX - THE MEDAL

Monday, five days after the last page, she woke at a human hour and lay there a moment, inventorying: slept, fed, employed, friended, plants alive, book un-reread and glowing quietly on its high shelf like a lamp that had done its work.

She pulled on her favourite tee. It was the one with the little survival kit printed across the front. Every pocket-sized remedy a reader needs for the week after a book like that. She had bought it as a joke before release week. She wore it now the way marathon finishers wear their medals to brunch the next morning: not to show off, exactly. To remember accurately.

Over her shoulder, in the mirror, the ghost tipped its crown to her. "Full recovery," the ghost pronounced. "Discharged. See you after the next one."

"The next one is in January," she said.

"I know," said the ghost, and vanished with enormous dignity. "I have already cleared my shelf."

She made tea, and stood a while in the morning light, a survivor in a very soft shirt, ready for whatever the to-be-read pile did next.

Something to take home.

Four bookmarks on one sheet, the crowned ghost in both cover colours. Print double-sided, flip on the long edge, and cut along the light guides.

Download the bookmark sheet (PDF)

The medal at the end of the story is a real shirt, in case your own recovery week needs one.

The Release Week Survival Kit Tee

The shop waits on the other side of the next portal. Come and see more of this wild elsewhere.

More portals exist. Some are already hidden. Happy hunting.