surrounding it is blue. A bright, unnatural blue.
Zachary dips a toe into the blue and it flutters.
It is confetti. Paper confetti in varying shades of blue and green and purple, with white along the edges for the surf. As it stretches farther out from the shore there are streamers mixed in with it, long curls of paper pretending to be waves.
Zachary looks up at the looming structure on the cliff behind him that is undoubtedly a castle, though it is constructed from painted cardboard. He can tell from here that it is only a facade, two walls with windows lacking structure and dimension. The idea of a castle painted and propped up to fool the eye from a greater distance than this.
Beyond the castle there are stars: giant folded-paper stars hanging from strings that vanish into darkness. Shooting stars suspended mid-shoot and planets at various heights with and without rings. An entire universe.
Zachary turns and looks out over the paper water.
There is a city across the sea.
This city is aglow with twinkling lights.
The storm of emotions he has been tumbling through ceases, replaced by an unexpected calm.
Zachary looks down at the boat. He picks up an oar. It is lightweight but solid in his hand.
He pushes the boat out onto the paper sea and it stays afloat. It sends the confetti water shifting and swirling.
Zachary looks across the sea at the city again.
Apparently he isn’t finished with his quest.
Not yet.
Fate isn’t done with him, even in death.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins steps into the boat and starts to row.
excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins
Hi notebook, it’s been awhile.
Everything got sort of quiet. I didn’t know what to do after the lady in the bar and I got all paranoid for ages even about writing anything down or talking about anything so I put my head down and worked and time passed and nothing happened and now it’s summer.
Well, one thing did happen and I didn’t write it down at the time.
Someone gave me a key. It was in my campus mailbox. It’s a heavy brass key but the top of it is shaped like a feather, so it looks like a quill pen that ends in key teeth instead of a nib. It had a tag tied to it with string, like an old-fashioned package tag, and it said For Kat when the Time comes on it. I figured it was an invite to somebody’s thesis project but nothing ever followed up on it. I still have it. I put it on my key chain (the feather loops around at the top). I left the tag on. Guess I’m still waiting for the Time to come.
I thought the bar lady would come back. Like it was the Refusal of the Call but I’m not on that kind of Hero’s Journey, I guess. It felt like the right decision at the time but you know, you wonder. What might have happened next?
That’s what I started working on, even though it was unplanned. I wasn’t working, at all, for a while there and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I didn’t know what I wanted at all so I kept thinking about what is it that I want and kept coming back to telling stories in game form. I got to thinking all of this might be a halfway decent game if it were a game. Part spy movie, part fairy tale, part choose your own adventure. Epic branching story that doesn’t stick to a single genre or one set path and turns into different stories but it’s all the same story. I’m trying to play with the things you can do in a game that you can’t do in a book. Trying to capture more story. A book is made of paper but a story is a tree.
You meet someone in a bar. You follow them or you don’t.
You open a door. Or you don’t.
Either way the point is: What happens next?
It’s taking an absurd amount of notebooks full of possibilities but it’s getting somewhere.
What happened next in Real Life™ is that I found Jocelyn Keating. Sort of.
I found Simone Keating.
Months ago I’d asked my friend Preeti in London to do some library detective work on the Keating Foundation for me if she could but then I didn’t hear anything so I’d figured she didn’t find anything but yesterday she texted me that she found some things and do I still want them.
She probably thinks I’m nuts