The Dust Factory Chapter 3 Part 1
Had two free hours tonight, that was enough to get through this piece
My trembling fingers went to the neck of the Warrior Princess. There was no spark. Nothing but a dead property, ready to be eaten by time and forgotten by history. I put my ear over her heart and listened for a beat. Nothing. Only a few feet from my eyes, the C’s dissolved into sparse clouds of random chatter, like fat predators trying to digest a particularly stringy kill and drifting to sleep from the effort, appetite sated.
A bit of the dust that had once been the embodiment of children’s love of Sherlock Holmes blew into my face and I coughed.
He was gone.
He’d been expelled for nothing.
Turned into dust by the Unpublishers, the Undreamers, the Uncreators.
Gritting my teeth, I placed my hands over the Warrior Princess’ chest and pressed up and down in three quick pumps.
“Come on, self-pub!” I hissed.
Ideas only went one way, or so all those who followed the C’s insisted. There was nothing from our world that went to the waking world. Dreams were created by reality but dreams could never create reality. To believe otherwise was to believe in God, and that was an idea so absurd it didn’t even exist here. Or so every smug self-insert atheist character here proclaimed. There was no way anything I did could help.
I put my mouth over that of the Warrior Princess and attempted to give her some of my spark. Her author had made her. They were connected, even if all the other critics had rejected her. What were they feeling now? What did her author need to hear?
“Think of all the eyes on you! There’s no such thing as bad publicity! Have some courage! The internet makes it so easy even my cowardly, lazy-ass author thought about it every day! There’s even a plugin for Word that will do the formatting for you! You can promote on social media!”
Tears in my eyes, I pounded on her chest again.
“Come on! You cared enough to imagine her! Don’t you care enough to give her a chance? Believe in her! Believe in her the way you believed before anyone had read her! Give her a chance to find someone else that believes in her!”
Huck Finn’s hand was on my shoulder, consoling me as I wept.
“It’s no use, Aliss. Nobody stands up to mobs anymore. Too big. Too permanent. Ain’t nobody gonna stand up to a mob without driving themselves so crazy they up and join another mob. It’s all just mobs now.” His voice was not happy, but there wasn’t rebellion in it either.
I turned to look at him. He was Gray. Huck Finn, who had taught children for a hundred years to do what they thought was right and good, no matter what anyone else thought —that it was even acceptable to risk damnation if you couldn’t see the right in what every other voice demanded— had accepted cowardice and turned Gray. No longer a protagonist but a passive bystander in his own life, doing his best to hide from a faceless horde of cruelty.
I threw myself at those dead dusty lips one last time, but this time I opened them and screamed down them as if they were a tunnel and for the briefest moment it was like her mouth became a tunnel. At the other end of the tunnel was the ear of a very scared, very intimidated, young Asian woman crying on the phone to her grandmother, asking to be reassured that she was a good person and Chinese enough to write a Chinese character even if she couldn’t speak the language and had never visited the country.
“I mean, they didn’t say that about the twenty-four thousand year old wizard. They didn’t have a problem with that. And there were slaves, grandma! I did more research on that than I did on the wizard!”
The grandmother said something I couldn’t make out, even with the phone pressed up against the ear. I hollered down the mouth, words I wished someone had told to my author before she went and tied a rope around her neck.
“You can either publish it and deal with the pain of it right now or live with the shame of backing down forever! What are you even afraid of! It’s not like these are good people anyway!!”
There was a pause.
“You’re right, grandma. If the publisher wants their advance back, I’m publishing it myself. Screw these people!”
The gray retreated from the Warrior Princess’ face and she coughed.
Saving me from a low day - will savor like the last piece of chocolate in the box.