Percival Quendlemoss was the sort of man who appeared to be on the verge of saying something profound, but never quite did. He had a perpetually furrowed brow, the gait of a man being chased by an unrelenting thought, and the wardrobe of someone who had once tried to dress like an 18th-century poet but gave up halfway through and settled on "perpetual upholstery."
He was a minor clerk at the Department of Obscure Forms and Pedantic Declarations—a government branch so profoundly arcane it once received a complaint written in Morse code and responded using interpretive dance. There, Percival spent his days rubber-stamping requisition forms for things like “emergency doorknob requisitions” and “certificates of negligible consequence.” His only real source of joy was eavesdropping on the ruminative mutterings of the office fern, whom he suspected was the reincarnation of a disillusioned taxonomist.
But it was on one particularly humid Tuesday, as Percival was re-inking his fountain pen and contemplating the semiotics of envelope glue, that he encountered the precipice of an existential collapse. While dusting his collection of unread notebooks—an activity he performed with more reverence than necessary—he opened one quite at random and found a single sentence scrawled inside:
“You were not born to file memos, Percival.”
The handwriting was unmistakably his own. Except he’d never written it. Or at least, didn’t remember doing so. Granted, he had once blacked out after consuming a questionable amount of marzipan and woke up with a manifesto against clocks etched into his wall, so his memory wasn’t the most trustworthy source.
Nonetheless, the sentence haunted him. He read it again. Out loud this time. The fern rustled meaningfully.
The next morning, Percival arrived at work wearing a monocle he did not need and a cape he could not explain. He greeted the receptionist with “Salutations, Madam,” and asked if the building had a scriptorium. She said no, but there was a copy room with a flickering fluorescent light and a chair that squeaked like an outraged librarian.
It would have to do.
He barricaded himself inside with a crate of biscuits, a stack of legal pads, and a single, absolute resolution: he would write his own story. Not the sanitized, bureaucratic obfuscation he normally dealt with. A real story. About himself. His inner life. His latent potential. His torrid feud with clocks.
Naturally, he began with a prologue—because nothing of significance should start abruptly.
“Prologue: In Which Percival is Inexplicably Melancholic but Wearing Excellent Footwear.”
The act of writing was initially slow, like pouring molasses through a sieve. His sentences had a tendency to become labyrinthine, stuffed with words even dictionaries only begrudgingly acknowledged. But something began to shift. Paragraphs blossomed. Metaphors galloped. He described his inner ennui as “a marshmallow of mediocrity slowly melting over the bonfire of unactualized grandeur.” The copier spat in his general direction, offended by the poeticism.
By the fifth page, Percival was no longer the affable minor functionary. He was a time-traveling illusionist with a mysterious past and an even more mysterious sideburn situation. He tangoed with fate, occasionally with actual tangos. He made decisions with reckless whimsy and quoted ancient philosophers who may or may not have been invented for narrative convenience.
It was glorious.
Unfortunately, his colleagues noticed his absence and broke into the copy room, expecting to find him trapped in a paper jam or buried beneath toner. Instead, they found Percival on top of the copier, declaiming from his manuscript with a voice trembling with catharsis and caffeine withdrawal.
“Behold!” he cried, “the transformation of man into myth! The escape from clerical purgatory! The rise of Percival, Vagabond of Verbs!”
He was promptly escorted out of the building, cape trailing behind like a disappointed flag.
Unemployed but undeterred, Percival continued writing from park benches, laundromats, and occasionally beneath a suspiciously judgmental goose statue. His story swelled to epic proportions. Subplots emerged: a forbidden romance with a librarian who only spoke in palindromes, a sentient umbrella that quoted Voltaire, and a villain who used semicolons exclusively and therefore was to be feared.
Then came the twist.
Halfway through Chapter Forty-Seven ("In Which Our Hero Consumes an Omelette of Prophecy"), he paused. The words on the page no longer felt like fiction. They felt... observed. Predetermined. He flipped back. He read. Reread.
And there, on page one, hidden in the footnote of his prologue, was a line he had never written:
“You were not born to write memos, but neither were you born to write this.”
Percival stared at it. The ink shimmered oddly, like it had opinions.
He dropped his pen. It rolled off the bench and into a drain.
The wind whispered something like "maybe."
He looked up.
The goose statue was gone.
And in its place stood a man who looked suspiciously like him—but with better posture and far more impressive eyebrows.
“Don’t panic,” the doppelgänger said. “I’m you from Chapter Ninety-Two. You haven't written it yet, but it's a mess and I need you to revise the ending.”
Percival blinked. “Is this a metaphor?”
“No,” the future-Percival said. “This is a narrative paradox. Also, we’re late. The plot twist is scheduled for 4:00.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the Author’s House. We’re going to complain.”
As they walked into the horizon—one version smug, the other bewildered—the manuscript lay on the bench, fluttering.
A pigeon landed on it.
Read the first page.
Then muttered, “That comma placement is aggressive.”
And flew off.
React
