“The Desk”

Every story that ever was or ever hoped to be, contained within it’s drawers.

The soft pat of small, bare feet could scarcely be heard under the hush of fallen night. The furnace hummed away off in some dusty corner and the faint creaking of the wooden stair barely resounded in the room below, smothered under the heavy velvet of early hours. A small girl, no older than seven or eight, was creeping down in the dark and at the bottom of the stair she peered through the balusters, her face illuminated in flashes by the flickering of the muted television. She waited there to register soft sighs of sleep before continuing past, arms outstretched and feet placed gingerly one after the other, as if traversing a tight rope suspended above the cave of a slumbering giant. Her mother was fast asleep and she passed without incident. Down the hall, at the very end, a small ribbon of light lined the bottom of a closed door. She waited there in front of the door, head down and wiggling her toes in the warm light until she could hear the creak of a chair and a gentle scratching from within.

At the sound of the knob he was disrupted but his harsh gaze quickly softened. She was standing there, framed by the darkness beyond, with one hand hanging on the door knob and the other pulling at her lip. Her oversized sleep shirt draped in folds and she leaned against the door frame, one foot atop the other. Her mother had told her many times not to disturb him in his study but she had awoken alone in the night and knew he would be there, scratching away the hours, bathed in the warm lamp light. He seemed to waft up from the large desk across the room, his lower half hidden behind its ornate form. With a pursed smile, he sighed and set down his pen.

“Alexandria, aren’t you supposed to be in bed?” She didn’t move to answer but looked across to him with eyes he couldn’t hope to rebuke. She was frightened but would never admit it and so, he waved her into the study just as he had on many nights before. He pulled a small chair from beneath the window and placed it beside the dark oak desk, patting the seat as she shuffled across the room.

The walls of the study were lined with a cascade of books and they were stacked in corners and perched in chaotic piles on nearly every surface, some left open to passages meant for return but probably long forgotten. The desk however, was completely bare save the scattered pages he labored over night after night, often writing into the morning. On that night his progress was particularly hindered and, in truth, he welcomed the interruption of his niece.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

“I know, it’s alright,” he replied. “I wasn’t getting anywhere with this wreck anyway.” And he started shifting and ordering the many dispersed leaves into a pile.

“Why is it stuck?” she asked. He paused his shuffling for a moment and looked to the ceiling, as if the methods for explaining the story to a child might be scrawled there.

“Well, it’s about a man and woman that are in love but life keeps making them hate each other and they can’t figure out why. It’s stuck because every time they run away from each other I have to find a new reason for them to come back and try again. After a few times, every reason I can think of isn’t good enough to bring them back together.”

“Well, maybe the man can bring her flowers next time. Wouldn’t that make them stop fighting?” she asked, shifting in her chair. “Maybe he can give her flowers and she won’t be mad at him anymore. I bet that would work.” He smiled and gave a low chuckle that rumbled her ears and made her grin.

“Hmmm, you might be onto something Al; I’ll try that tomorrow.” And he leaned to place the pages in the drawer at his side. Alexandria could see all manner of pages inside, some marked and scribbled over in red and blue. She knew from previous late night visits that that’s what happened to stories after they got out on the page in black. Her uncle would get out his color pens and ex and circle and draw scribbles and arrows all over the pages. At first she scrunched her nose at this, making the pretty black words all messy and marked, but she had come to love his scribbles recently and had taken to decorating her homework in the same style.

“Uncle Cal, do you still have the story about the girl with a thousand freckles?” she asked. She had especially liked that story of his and kept a mental tally of her own freckles as best she could keep track, performing a full review each night while changing into her pajamas.

“Oh sure,” he replied. “That one’s in here somewhere.” 

“And what about the one where the old man can’t find his glasses but they’re on his head the whole time?” She started to giggle and he hushed her so as not to wake her mother.

“Yes,” he replied. “That ones in here too. Every story that ever existed or ever hoped to exist is somewhere inside this desk.” Her eyes followed his hands as he spread them across the smooth, dark surface.

“What do you mean the stories hoped to exist? How can a story hope?” Her nose was scrunched up again and, being unconvinced, questions started to line up on her tongue in growing platoons of tens and twenties. Sensing her doubt, he quickly interrupted the amassing army of inquiry with further explanation.

“Here, listen. This is how it works: The stories are all in the desk; and not just my stories, but every story that has ever or will ever be told. They’re all just floating around in there, bumping into each other, getting stuck in the wood, and making all kinds of commotion.” Alexandria was pleased to already know commotion meant lots of noise.

Cal continued, “And sometimes, the pages that I write and put into the desk whisper to the wood in a language only they know. I think they remember it from way back in the forest when they were still trees instead of bits of desk and smooshed up paper.” He mashed his hands together to show how the paper was made and she strained to hear the secrets escaping from the desk. “And, if I’m lucky, the stories squeeze up through the grain of the desk and come out the top. They whisper to me late at night. Sometimes they beg and bargain to be written and other times, when I open a drawer to get some fresh paper, a story shouts in my face, my hair blows back, my ears slap against my neck, and I shake and quiver in terror, ‘oOooOOoooOooo!’” he wailed and mimed a ghoul. Alexandria laughed as he held his big ears out to the side and screwed up his face.

Then Cal got quiet, “Sometimes terrible things come out. Stories that make me cry, things that keep me from falling asleep,” he paused and her eyes grew wider.

“But other times stories come out that make me laugh and laugh until I think I might lose it. Basically, the desk supports me. It holds my memories and connects me to all the other stories in the world that I never got the chance to write. It gives me a solid surface to build my own on. The truth is, the stories want more than anything to be written, if only for the chance to exist in our world for a moment; they will savor that moment ink first falls on a fresh sheet and they are made to dance again, a black and white waltz across the page. They may well be destroyed in a fire or rot in rubbish but they lived when others, a whole universe of unwritten stories, did not.”

Within the desk spanned his Library of Babel, his Encyclopedia Galactica. All that he ever, or would ever dream up, write, imagine, was contained within that very desk. Sometimes it seemed to bulge at the joints, threatening to burst with bright fantasies and dark horrors. And it would go on and on for many nights like this: her, sat beside him, listening with frog eyes to his stories at hours well past when she ought to have been fast asleep. Distant lands where the sand blows and stings your cheeks, thick jungles where the mud soaks through to your ankles and the mosquitos, big as bumble bees, whine in your ear and conspire to steal your blood. With that one he always liked to buzz and tickle behind her ear and he would clap his hands together, smushing the mosquito in a grand finale. He’d wipe his hand on her shoulder and she’d squirm and squeal.

At the end of the stories, he’d always walk with her back to bed and she’d ask, “Can we go there? Can we go to the edge of the world in a sailboat? Can I drink straight from that mountain spring?”

And, knowing better than to squash the ambitions of young girls, he would reply, “Sure, we can go anywhere you dream up. And you can always bring the snowy mountains and the hundred foot waves right here if you’d like,” and he tucked her back under the covers. “You just have to dream it up. When you fall asleep, listen to the stories whispering of peg-legged pirates and mountain goats knocking rocks loose above. When you wake up, write down what you hear and you’ll make the story alive again.” And with that he kissed her forehead and shut the door behind him.

As the months wore on, Alexandria noticed strange changes in Uncle Cal. He grew skinny and irritable and stayed locked up in his study when he was home but would disappear for days with no trace. He wore the same clothes until they stunk and his cheeks went white and gaunt under his scraggly beard. He didn’t smile at her as much and didn’t have as many stories to tell when she’d sneak down in the middle of the night. One day, he shouted at her when she opened the door and, though he apologized for scaring her the next day, she never visited him in his study at night again. She would hear her mom saying things on the phone about Cal being “unstabled” and out of control. She always pictured him breaking out of a stable when her mom said that, running away through wide open fields alongside wild horses, taking off into the air.

“Mom said that you’re getting ‘unstabled’ and need a solid place so you don’t float away. Are you going to float away?” she asked? He paused,

“Sometimes I feel like I might,” he pursed his lips and forced a cracked smile. “But your mom is right and I’m grateful for you guys giving me a place to catch my anchor.”

“Promise you’ll tell me if you’re going to fly far away?” Alexandria pleaded.

“I promise. And if I do fly away and land somewhere far from here, you can bet I’ll send you a postcard. I promise,” Cal replied.

On one particularly turbulent afternoon, Cal stumbled through the back door and his sister screamed at him, things like get help before it’s too late. He was too weak to put up much fight and tried to calm his sister down. He knew, he said. He was going to get help. And when she slammed the back door, Alexandria could see her mother’s hand shaking while she lit a cigarette. She never saw her smoke before. Cal stumbled back to his study and lay down, flat as a board, on the floor in front of the desk. After a few minutes, Alexandria crept around the corner again and saw that his eyes were closed tight. She was scared from the shouting but stuttered out a question she had been working up to ask him for weeks.

“Will the desk ever talk to me Uncle Cal?” He didn’t open his eyes and she wondered if he was even breathing. Her ears rang to fill the silence of his pause before he replied,

“Of course, Al. If you learn how to listen and you feed it with stories, if you write them down, they will keep coming back to you, hoping you’ll reach out and bring them into the world.”

Alexandria wept on the day the news came that Cal wasn’t going to come home ever again. She wouldn’t know the true nature of his permanent departure for many years after but, every so often, she would sit at his desk and draw circles in the dust gathering there. She imagined him off somewhere far away, fighting stone dragons with swords and catching damsels falling from castle towers. Running into the sky with horses. She would use her sleeve to wipe the layer of dust away until the dark wood shined again but no matter how she strained she couldn’t hear his stories rising again from the desk.

. . .

The men grunted and strained up the narrow stairwell and Alexandria hovered three stairs above, offering helpful suggestions like, “Careful, it’s really heavy.” And “Watch the corner on the railing there!” And “Yep, just in the opposite corner, against the wall.” The movers set the comically large cargo down with a resounding thud and dusted their hands on grease stained jeans as they shuffled toward the door.

“It’s a lotta desk for this little place honey. Hope yer happy,” the man who seemed to be in charge said with undisguised contempt. He had a gold tooth, a hoop earring, and walked with a stiff-leg limp on one side. A bit nervous, Alexandria smiled, thanked the men, and paid their fee. She was happy when they left. The dark, oak desk took up unwarranted square footage in her tiny studio apartment. She had just finished school and moved on her own to the city to see what she could make of it. Now, looking down at the desk, she smiled for real. Quickly, she pulled a folding chair from the kitchenette and sat down at the grand desk, running her hands over the beautiful surface and around the edges to make sure it hadn’t been marred in the move. She’d have to get used to sleeping with the city noise but in that moment, the horns and howls of the city faded away. She leaned closer to the desk and her ear seemed to catch a faint whisper. It sounded like,

“If only to exist for a moment.”