The Cottage

The cottage had hid amongst the trees for almost a hundred years. There was a small lane that led to it from the busier main road half a kilometre away. It was a dusty, decrepit white, and the trimmings were painted a peeling turquoise. It did not look like anything much. Inside, however, were a thousand worlds, a billion flashing lives all interconnected. The family who lived here owned it all.

The father, now, he was a man of considerable repute. He had been raised in a strict military household, and expected the same respect from his children that he had shown towards his father. If he said this household was a reading household, then, by God, it was a reading household! Profanities aside, he did not believe he had ever had to have an argument on the matter. It did not quite matter what they read, as long as there were minimal pictures, and they relied on their minds to entertain themselves. He preferred the histories and annals of wars and kings and armies, or the biographies and exploitations penned by persons like Norman Mailer and other such social critics. But he understood the love of fiction as well as he understood his immense love for his immense wife.

She loved to escape into a fantasy world, forgetting the circumstances which surrounded her. She had grown into a world of her own devising: fantastical landscapes, unicorns and dragons glistening over peaceful villages nestled in the underarms of millennia-old mountains. Her milieu had given her a drive for escapism, and she loved nothing more than to escape into her mind, or the mind of a similarly inclined author, such as Tolkien, Le Guin or Beagle.

The eldest child, a girl of sixteen, had begun to read at the ripe old age of five. She was instructed to read no less than three novels a week, and for this reason she read quite short novels. Her favourites were The Great Gatsby, which she had read more times than she could count, Animal Farm and The Old Man and the Sea. For many years now she had felt a twinge of regret when closing the last page of any book, but was comforted by the fact that the book remained there, the potentials limitless.

The second child, also a girl, had been born exactly two years after her elder sister. She had not taken after her mother or father in the love of magical novels or historical texts, but had fallen for another form of storytelling: the short story, to be perfectly succinct. So particular was her love, so unique was it within her family, that she had a full shelf of Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence and Wodehouse and E. M. Forster that no one else bothered to touch. The dusty spines were hers, and only her fingers brushed the pages and smelt the old ink and glue that bound these collections of fragile lives together.

The parents were quicker this time, and a year after the second daughter was born, a son shared the same birthday. His mind was inquisitive from an early stage and he asked so many questions that his parents, growing weary of having to respond constantly to his queries, taught him to read by the age of three-and-a-half. He had not ceased reading about the rest of the world since then, and his room contained, was packed with, actually, so many towers of editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a multitude of scientific and medical journals that he had substituted all furniture in place of these sturdy hardcovers.

The last child is always the problem child, but he had tried to hide it for as long as he could. He had been born sixteen months after his brother, and had never celebrated the simultaneous birthdays that his siblings had, and – shock-horror – had never enjoyed a single book in his life. He had never told anyone this, did not have anyone to tell, but it was no matter. Today, right now in fact, was when he came out of the closet. Literally.

He pushed open the door from the inside, pulling the string to turn off the light that had been installed there for his sake, and wiped the sleep out of his eyes. It would be chaos if anyone discovered he slept rather than read. He wandered to the kitchen, where his mother was busy voraciously devouring both The Dragonriders of Pern and a packet of chocolate biscuits. He looked down at the book he held awkwardly in his hand, entitled with a title he could not remember, disrespectfully with his thumb wedged close to the binding between pages 46 and 47. He cleared his throat, and his mother delicately tucked another biscuit into her mouth, like a chipmunk, and turned slowly to face him.

He had no idea how to begin. He had no idea how it would end. Would his family exile him from the only home he had ever known? Would he be forgiven, and welcomed into the arms of his family, like pages, in turn, welcomed them? He began to speak, but then decided against it. He shook his head and exited the room, his mother returning to her snack, her perplexity waning as she was absorbed once more into the phantasmagorical vistas that awaited her, beckoning eagerly.

He walked through the lounge room, which was so full of books there was barely enough room for the three armchairs, squeezed in as they were. He placed the book he was holding haphazardly onto a random shelf, neglecting to file it in the proper way that his father had worked so hard on. Luckily, his two sisters did not look up from their readings, and probably did not even notice he had passed them. The room was so claustrophobic that he had to get out of there. He navigated his way to the front door, to the outside world, and sat on the step, watching the world pass.

The sun was overhead, and it was a relief to feel the combination of its heat and a cool breeze caress his body. He closed his eyes and watched the red dance underneath his lids. He breathed deeply. This was his life. Not someone else's. Right here, right now, this was real. It was not that he was selfish, or apathetic. He was young, and deprived. He thirsted for relevance, something that, to him, was real.

He withdrew his notebook and pen from his pocket and began to write the first stanza.