Grayson Wright
January 16, 2020 7:40 PM
It's really a real thing that's real. by Grayson Wright
When the mail arrived at breakfast, it was customary and normal for everyone to look up, whether they expected any mail or not. This was what Gray told himself, anyway, and he had not noticed any reactions to his behavior from others to contradict his theory. A flock of owls entering the room and circling around looking for the recipients of the letters or parcels they carried was a distracting sight, even when one was used to it. It was likely that more people than not looked up, and anyway, why shouldn't he expect mail? He did, after all, know people outside this school. Mail was a thing he got from time to time. Perfectly normal to see if any owls were heading his way.Just the same, when he realized that this morning, an owl he didn't recognize actually was heading to the staff table, he dropped the knife he had been using to spread apple jelly on toast with a clatter, then dropped his toast as he tried to retrieve his knife. Well, he had never been known for his physical grace, he supposed. He managed to finish spreading the jelly just as the owl landed, dropping a small, rectangular parcel in front of him. He forced himself to casually take a bite of toast and then put the remainder down before he picked it up and started untying the string holding the wrapper on.
It was what he had thought it was. It was upon noticing this that he realized he had not really believed it was an object that would become real until just now, but here it was.
He flipped the book over, examining the comparatively cheap binding and cloth covers, and then opened it. There. Right there. Words he (for the most part; editors had made some suggestions which he had accepted, so he didn't think of those as his words, but that was academic) had written. They were printed in ink, between covers. The words were far, far from literature in any real sense, he thought - he couldn't imagine he could actually produce that - and it had a pseudonym on the cover instead of his actual name, but it was, well, a book. Which he had written. And which was an actual published novel.
Gray had been slightly concerned that he would find it hard not to have any noticeable reactions to this success, but it turned out that it was so surreal that it was easy enough to simply flip through pages as though it were any other book he had got in the mail. Perhaps it would sink in later, he thought. At the moment, though, it still seemed quite impossible that the stacks of drafts still in the bottom of a trunk in his room could possibly really become a real book which he had written and gotten an advance on and which it was not outside the realm of possibility that actual humans would buy and read - maybe even so many of them that he would get to keep the advance, even, though that was wild thinking. He was approaching the point of losing his head in public if he started thinking like that. Carefully, he put the book back in its wrapping paper and returned to his toast.
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Grayson Wright
It's really a real thing that's real.
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