The pen shook violently in her hand, creating a series of tears, rips, and unfathomable black squiggles on the once-clean paper. She grunted and tore the page off the notebook, crumpling it into a ball and hurling it out her window, not caring who or what she hit. Outside, a cat screeched furiously.

Unmindful, she turned back to the blank notebook that was lying so invitingly on her desk, though in her mind it looked like it was glaring up at her in challenge. Her eyebrows furrowed in concentration and with her still quivering hand gripping the pen like her life depended on it, she wrote four words: "Once upon a time".

She froze. Her face contorted into several expressions of rage and frustration. How could she begin with such a clichéd line? She banged her fist on the table and tore the page off once again, this time attempting to shoot it into the trash can. Instead, the wad hit a glass ballerina, knocking it off the shelf and making it crash to the floor in a million pieces. She didn't care. She was alone in her own world, oblivious to all that happened around her; robbed of all her senses. She was alone in her own world. But at the moment, her world was dead.

She sat there in silence, thinking, thinking, thinking. Looking around her world at the colorless sun, the dead trees, the barren wasteland.

Then all of a sudden, something in her mind flickered. A distant memory. A vague recollection. And her eyes widened, her heart beat a hundred times faster, as the flicker grew into a spark that grew into a flame that started to lick at the edges of her paper world.

She began to write. Her pen flew across the paper in a manic rush, her eyes gleaming feverishly. At the moment, she was a rabid dog in heat, a queen with the whole world as her footstool, Paris with three goddesses hanging on to his every word. She was a girl who could rob the tower of London with a plastic fork and no one could take her down. Indomitable. Unconquerable. Insurmountable.

But as all fires do, the flame that made her world burn so brightly eventually died. Her world went back to its previous dull state: dry and lifeless.

Her hand ceased to write. Her pen was still, halted by the realization that no more words would come into that brilliant mind of hers. Horror crept into her as it never had before. She searched frantically in her head for another flicker, another spark. Just one, she pleaded, her mind flitting crazily from one thought to another and following no coherent path. She could find none.

She screamed. She screamed in anguish, in trepidation, in utter aggravation. Her mind went blank. She began moving wildly across the room in a masochistic convulsion. Her hands flew around vehemently, searching for something real, something material to hold on to. They settled on her hair. She began to tug at it, her beautiful dark hair, until some of it came off in her hands and left bloody patches on her scalp. She pounded her head on the pale blue cement of the wall. She tore off her shirt and ripped it into pieces with her teeth. She was savage, uncontrollable. At the moment, she was insane.

She ended up on the floor, the floor that was still littered with the tiny shards of glass from the ballerina figurine.

As she lay there in a pitiful mess of blood, glass, and hair, she began to laugh. She laughed at the excruciating pain of the broken glass piercing deep into her skin, at the tears that were involuntarily flowing out of her eyes, at the ludicrousness of the whole situation. She laughed hysterically, unstoppably. And so she continued laughing as blood streamed from the gashes on her head and her legs and her hands. She continued laughing even as she cried madly.

And when her frenzied paroxysm was finally over, she got up, still laughing, and dragged her ruined body back over to her desk. She sat back on the chair, on her chair, the only object in her room that she would never lay violent hands on, and she looked at the bloody page of her notebook where she had jotted down three whole paragraphs in that glorious epiphanic moment.

Undeterred by the physical agony, she picked up her pen, licked at the blood still flowing out of her palm, and tried again.


She tried again.