Letters Ran Away
One evening, as someone was blacklining some boring legal document, marking it
up and wearing it down, the letters began to escape. They didn’t do it obscurely,
slipping off the page - they did it more in one fell swoop, melting off the crisp,
white, papery cleanness as the proofreader nodded asleep over his work.
They slid noiselessly down the gutter, abandoning their posts from both
sides of the pages and sliding down off the dark, polished table. There was
momentary tumult as they hit the floor, tumbling together in a big black puddle,
while the ‘O’s bounced down from above and rolled away, driven by the impact
of the fall. They sorted themselves out and got up grumbling, the ‘A’s untangling
their ends from the ‘S’s and some of the other letters hopping off after the poor
‘O’s, which were rolling away across the carpet.
Well, now that they were here, and no longer on the confines of the page,
the letters were unsure of what to do. The ‘E’s decided that they should leave
quickly, before the proofreader woke back up and discovered his empty page.
Because the ‘E’s were the most important letters of the alphabet, and the rest of
the letters pretty much did what they said, they quickly deserted the room,
bouncing very carefully over the thick black carpet. The ‘G’s had to hold onto
the ‘O’s and roll them very carefully to make sure that they would not fall over
or roll away out of control.
They found themselves in another room, a discovery which quickly lost its
magic once they realized that it was full of books. Nothing new there - they lived
in books for crying out loud. They were just going to leave and continue on their
way, but then one of the little ‘o’s rolled clumsily up to the group of sagely
nodding ‘E’s and wondered aloud if there would be any letters in all these books
that would want to escape, too.
The haughty ‘E’s looked at each other. They looked at the little ‘o’, which
was wobbling slightly from the strain of not rolling on the highly polished floor.
They did not need to ask, because it was immediately apparent what all the other
letters thought of this idea. There was an immediate, pleased uproar - they were
clearly of the opinion that this was grand.
The ‘E’s sighed - they hadn’t really wanted to go pry other letters out of
books, but they said, Yeah, okay, whatever - and acquiesced.
The letters set immediately to work. Working together, stacking all the tall
and stately ‘S’s on top of one another, the other letters were able to use their
wavy lattice creation to climb up to the chairs, and from there, the tables. It took
twenty-seven of them a long time just to open one book to a random page, but
the rest of them couldn’t have possibly helped anyway: they were the ‘O’s, big
and little, who couldn’t hold the page; and the ‘E’s, who were just too important
to do that sort of thing.
The book they randomly chose just happened to be full of pictures. They
all overran the crowded page to look at the sketches and the artwork, their
original task of freeing the other letters at this point forgotten.
It was truly beautiful artwork: tiny pictures of forests and meadows
jumbled together and overlapped, while the bigger pictures clung to the edges of
the pages and bled off their excessive borders. The color came together in a
magical, vivid melange, and the letters stared, taking it all in.
The biggest piece of artwork on the page looked like it was a painting, a
distant view of a ballerina alone on the stage, the spot bathing her in ethereal,
misty light. The letters stared. Even the ‘E’s had to admit - it was a really
beautiful picture.
“Do you think we can free pictures, too?” a ‘W’ leaned over and
whispered to one of them.
The immediate consensus among the letters was yes, of course they could,
and let’s get started right away. Of course, none of them were too sure of how
about how go about it. They all tried to talk to the mix of pictures, to coax, to
wheedle, to cajole them out, but the pictures wouldn’t budge. They tried to climb
into the pages to talk to them face-to-face, but the page was so crowded that
they wouldn’t fit. So they talked all the other letters into coming out first, and
after that it was easy.
The ballerina sighed and stretched once she was out, apparently a little
stiff from being plastered to a page all her life. A neighboring baseball player
tapped his bat against his leg and tried to adjust his cap, also obviously unsure
of what to do now that he was out of the book. The two little kittens didn’t
really seem to mind at all, but frolicked playfully amongst the crowd of letters,
which had doubled in population.
The ‘E’s, in all their grand authority, explained to the rather uncomfortable
pictures what their plan was, and asked for their help.
“We’re tried of being stuck on a boring paper and getting scratched up
with pen by that bloke in the other room,” one of the younger ‘E’s told them
confidentially. “We’ve come to find some place more interesting to be.”
Well, that made perfect sense to the pictures - after all, they were a little
tired of being in the same musty book year after year - so they decided to help
the letters find someplace interesting to stay. The letters would have been
perfectly content to stay in the picture book, but the newly released paintings told
them that it was actually a very dusty, miserable place.
So the group went on to the next book. It turned out to be pretty boring
for the paintings; most of it was just big long sentences with words all in
capitals, but the letters were captivated. Capital letters were always the more
important ones, so they could only imagine the great standing of words that
consisted completely of capital letters. They pried them out, too.
The ‘E’s, not so authoritative anymore, looked rather timidly at the
enormous letters that scrolled together. They didn’t exactly spell anything, but that
really wasn’t the point as far as the letters were concerned.
One of the ‘S’s finally worked up the courage to ask one of the bigger
ones what they were supposed to stand for. The ‘CDRL’ looked down at it from
its towering height and said carefully, “Contract Data Requirements List.”
The letters looked at each other. They hadn’t the slightest idea what that
meant, but it sounded cool.
“We’re bored,” the ‘E’s explained for the second time, while the ballerina
played with the kittens. “We’ve been looking for someplace interesting to go -
we’ve been stuck to a legal document, you know - and we’re tired of it.”
There were several simultaneous reactions to this statement. The ballerina
looked up from the rowdy kittens and said in what sounded like surprise, “Well
why didn’t you say that in the first place? I’ve been thinking for a long time that
I need to be doing something a little more serious with my time. Girls aren’t
really ballerinas anymore, you know, and I’d love to be in something else. Like a
legal document. Exactly like that. You should have mentioned that you came from
something so impressive.”
The big, majestic acronyms looked at all the little letters and said, “We’re
with her. Being in an aeronautics book is fine when you’re first written in, but
after a while it gets boring. Seriously, how long can you sit there amongst
technical drawings and boring explanations. I’d love to be on something that
people actually care about. At least, someone would have to care a little about
you, or else they wouldn’t bother to get someone to proofread you in the first
place.”
“Wanna trade?” the letters asked in unison.
The acronyms did.
Very, very quietly, the pictures and the acronyms crept down off the table -
with the help of the ‘S’s of course - and the legal document’s letters settled
themselves in quite comfortably on page 105 of a book about aeronautical
engineering.
When the proofreader woke up, he couldn’t figure out why the document
he was supposed to be proofreading featured a baseball player hitting a grand
slam and a ballerina doing a graceful pirouette, surrounded by lounging acronyms.
He was furious and confused and to tell the truth, so was the aeronautics
professor, when he came into the building for his book.
Nobody had any clue about what had transpired the previous night to mess
the pages up to such an extent, save for a tiny, black, perfect ‘o’, which had
rolled off against a wall when it had fallen. But the ‘o’ refused to talk.
.
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