The Lantern 2015-2016

in order to see something extraordinary. Nothing killed my damned writer’s block.

Now, I had been low on inspiration for a while now, but the mere thought of writing had begun to leave my mouth dry, sandpaper tongue against gristle sides. Last Sunday, my editor had told me to either write “something good” or consider myself the penniless blogger I had been before they picked me up.

A stoplight counted down to red, and a stampede of cars clawed by. I must have watched the crossing sign come and go three times by now, rooted like an ancient tree on weary sidewalks.

This time, however, when the sign changed, I stepped out onto the slippery white lines bridging the gap to Lamprey Drive.

The Amber Macaroon, advertised only by a decaying wooden sign hung on limp thread, lay at the bottom of a cellar staircase. The place would have been impossible to find for anyone without previous information about its whereabouts—and then, still difficult. I circled the old Greek restaurant multiple times before finding the inconspicuous sign around back for the unaffiliated business renting out the basement. The Amber Macaroon. I nearly turned and left.

The door handle, cast in milky darkness from the building above, left a gritty coating on my fingers, but hunger for the services they supposedly, improbably had left me pushing brazenly into the store. Dust blotted out my vision with angry mushroom clouds, stirring and stewing like cobweb soup. Amidst the storm, lost in the gunmetal shades, stepped a man of unidentifiable age— forty? fifty? ninety? He rested his hands on a cracked glass case containing week-old pastries beneath its fine mint patina.

“Let me guess,” he creaked, and the voice sounded wrong—too real in this fantastical place I had likely invented— and “you’re here to buy a dream.”

He was an emaciated author type, this one. From the way he burst through the door, all jointed knuckles and wild eyes, I knew.

“Can you do what I’ve heard you can do?” he blustered, beer heat rising to his face like a balloon being pumped.

“Depends on what you heard.”

My sooty friends danced pirouettes around his ragged suit and unwashed hair. He began to pace around the cramped room in tight strides, able to do only what he knew in a situation so foreign.

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