FICTION: Vanishing Point

A closed book slid back into its spot on the shelf. His free hand opened, and a finger enquired along the spine of next one. He was reading them in sequence. He had lost count of how many he had taken and placed back upon the shelf.

There was nothing else to do in his cold world. Rain smashed into the window steadily. A car hadn't driven by in weeks. He hadn't seen another person for months. The only company he held were the people in the stories he read. What would he do when he reached the end of the shelf? He supposed he might start again.

He looked down at the paperback in his hand. How odd for it to have no writing on the spine. More odd was the front cover. White on white, yellowed slightly from the hands that held the cardstock during a prior reading, now consigned to history.

Vanishing Point. A simple title, almost illegible against the background. Another mystery. Another bit of text to meditate upon. There was little else to do. He had his stores of rations, and the rain kept coming. The books were always inviting. The reading nook was bathed in golden from a crack in the clouds, and the purple velvet of the chair was inviting as always.

He sat. His hands added to the staining on cover. He began to read. Immediately, and completely, he was immersed, after a few difficult sentences to get his bearngs. He read until the late faded. When he rose, with the intent to turn on the lamp he felt unwell. There was something odd about the space.

First, his immediate surroundings had changed. He was no longer in the library of a modern building. The chair he had risen from was red, and the street scene and buffetting rain he was used to was replaced by a provincial estate. He thought he saw some horses in a stable in the gloom beyond the room.

The book was still in his hand. It was the only object he remembered of his surroundings. Everything else was foreign. Everything else was new. Even the bookshelf was gone.

The layout of the room, dimensionality, at least, seemed to remain the same. It was roughly the same size as the room he was in before he started reading. Suddenly, the realisation came to him. This particular book had somehow teleported his physical form to a somewhere else.

Or was this new world he found himself in the correct world, where he had always belonged?

He went to wander out of the room, to explore the rest of the structure that he now found himself in, and continued to feel unwell, as though he had been walking through a desert for days on end. The world slowly started to blink out, but he clung to the book, it was the only thing he had of the old world he knew and remembered, ravaged as it may have been by the disease.

Author's Notes: The prompt for this text what font(tastic) - and write a journal, story, or poem using an interesting font. I wanted to do something a little like Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon, but much much worse.

I had the idea of the text fading as each word as read. It could easily work the same way in reverse, but I wanted the story to become more indistinct and unreadable as it went on.

Is this writing, or is this Art? I'm not quite sure, but I had fun playing with the concept, to produce something quite original.