Mike clicked the retractable eraser out from within its plastic shell. He had been writing a letter to a girl he liked, Cindy Yaris, but he wasn't really feeling it. 'Too sticky', he thought. 'Like I'm trying to attach myself.' But as he erased the words, he felt a signal pass by him. Like a sound wave laced with lead, Mike felt something crash into the side of his skull. Blood gushed out his ear and dripped onto the page. "Dear Cindy, I am bleeding to death now," it might have read. Mike's mouth fell open and he began heaving a dry heat. The eraser clicked back inside the pen-shaped container, and then he felt alright. There was a sweet taste on the tip of his tongue. He cried fresh tears.

It had been the words. The eraser and the words. Sometimes, Mike later learned, there is a greater power at work. Like a carpenter, Mike had fashioned something forcible out of the English language. He didn't realize it at the time, but his eraser was a greater premonition. A seeking light that found authors like Mike and curved their preconceived notions. The erasers worst enemy was its own form. A lover of language, nobody ever thought to use him unless they didn't like what they were writing. The eraser understood the importance of drafts: First, second, third, fourteenth, but there was something it liked about the raw power of the finger's tongue. That first thought. It hasn't been curved or erected. Merely planted.

The eraser let out a shrill sound, and through the cracks of finite reality came a sound which burrowed into Mike's head and changed him forever. He no longer loved Cindy Yaris. Or his parents. Or anything. The sound came from a place where words were not just words, but inventions. And not in the traditional, earthly sense that words were, but like clicking eraser patterned the words together in its fifth dimension reality, forming shapes and patterns that weren't visible to humans except as curvatures on the page. And for a split second, as the blood sprayed from the depths of his ear, Mike saw that place. That horrible word place. That place that humans couldn't see, or hear, or whatever else they did there. Mike saw it, and he put his eraser away. He got up, gathered his books from the small carroll in the corner of the library, and breathed. He dipped his fingers in the blood on the side of his face and looked at it. 'That's funny,' Mike thought. 'That's the blood in my brain. My brain blood. These are my thoughts and emotions.' And he wasn't entirely wrong.

Mike quietly left the library, careful to hide his face, shameful of the accident. The library was on the third floor of his elementary school, right near a small, locked entryway to the roof. But, by chance, the door leading up to the old cement roof was unlocked. So Mike climbed the old steps, covered in the ironically muddy bootprints of the janitor, and came to the tip top of the school. Mike looked into the sun, the eraser still held firmly in the grip of his fingers. He clicked it out from its shell, then clicked it back in. The eraser let out another shriek, but this one did not find its way through the dimensional weave. The threads remained in tact, but Mike could see them in the sun. A patch work cloth in the sky. To Mike, the sun no longer seemed bright. It was as if the brightness of the city lights were reflecting against a small piece of dress in the sky. The sun was just another thing.

Mike bit his lip.