The melancholy always arrived with November, and she had developed reliable defenses against it: thick socks, soup, lamps switched on before dusk, and the radio talking in another room so the house never became too aware of itself. What changed that year was the timing. Sad thoughts began reaching her a fraction before she thought them.
The sensation was difficult to describe. A page would rustle somewhere above the ceiling, and then she would remember her mother’s hands. Another page, and an old embarrassment would surface complete with details she had ignored for years. The thoughts did not feel implanted. They felt narrated.
She followed the sound to the loft.
Inside, narrow shelves filled every space between the rafters. Thousands of tiny books stood spine-out, each no larger than a matchbox and labeled in her handwriting. Dates covered decades. Some corresponded to terrible days she remembered vividly. Others marked ordinary Tuesdays that had somehow ended in inexplicable sadness.
She opened one.
The pages contained her thoughts from that day, but written in future tense.
At 8:14 she would think about the school corridor where nobody sat beside her.
At 9:03 she would remember an argument with her sister differently than it had happened.
At 11:20 she would decide she had disappointed everyone who had ever loved her.
She checked the clock.
It was 7:52.
Something moved deeper in the loft.
She found the author seated behind a miniature desk, too small to be human and too familiar to be anything else. Its face resembled hers after several sleepless nights. It wrote steadily in a blank volume while consulting older books, selecting griefs that connected neatly to one another.
The creature explained that it had always managed the seasonal material. Sadness required continuity. Left unattended, people might wake miserable without a reason, and that was unbearable. A coherent story made suffering easier to inhabit.
She asked what would happen if it stopped writing.
The creature seemed genuinely puzzled by the question.
So she took away the pen.
November became strange after that. Grief still came, but unpredictably. She cried over toast and laughed while remembering funerals. Pain arrived without explanations, then left before she could build identities around it. Some mornings were heavy for no discernible reason, while others contained inexplicable joy.
By December, the little books in the loft had begun losing their titles.
She still visited occasionally with tea.
The creature no longer wrote.
Sometimes they simply sat together while outside the weather changed its mind.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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