Living in the Pages

The following work was originally published in the Gateways Anthology for Breakwater Harbor Book. The theme of the Anthology was to create a “Gateway” story from a previous or upcoming novel as an introduction to the larger work. Living in the Pages was my Gateway from the novel Hidden in the Pages, which was published in November, 2013.
In Hidden in the Pages, Jantzen Burke was given a tattered old journal by his grandfather and told that the book could find his perfect match, the person he was meant to love. So while his life fell apart around him, he wrote in the magic journal and dreamt of a future with the girl who answered.
In the end, when the magical promise was fulfilled, he vowed to get rid of the journal.
But objects made of magic have a life of their own.

I imagined that journal’s journey as it made it’s way to the hands of the next man meant to write his words inside. It may have been dumped in a Salvation Army bin and traveled to another town in a collection truck. It might have fallen from that truck at another pick-up location. It might have been picked up by a child running for a school bus, and unknowingly dropped again. It might have traveled a thousand miles to be washed down a street in the pouring rain just to lie under a purple table outside a bakery on Harris Street as it waited for the next man in need of it’s magic.
And this is his story.