Eryn Mathis was one of the people who reported to The Box every Monday through Friday. She spent her days craning her neck toward presentation slides and sitting through strategy meetings where her opinions were frequently requested and routinely ignored. Her boss, CeCe, hadn’t always been like that. Before her promotion, she’d been one of the good ones. She advocated for work-life balance and remembered that her team consisted of actual human beings. Then she got promoted. The running office conspiracy theory was that the promotion had come bundled with a shiny new lobotomy.

Now everything was an emergency. Keeping up meant dropping everything to execute whatever whiz-bang shower thought CeCe’s boss had dreamed up at the eleventh hour. Of course, it never made sense. It derailed the team, was always a clustermuck, and somehow CeCe made sure Eryn carried the brunt of the chaos. Lately, Eryn had been doing the work of three people. She was exhausted, angry, and running on little more than caffeine and spite. Every request for help was met with one of CeCe’s empty promises that things would get better after the next deadline.

Spoiler alert: they never did.

To no one’s surprise, Eryn’s proverbial cup eventually ran bone dry. Instead of refilling it with the can-do attitude she’d started with at The Box, she filled it with unmasked eye rolls and visible rage. During a launch meeting for a half-baked “Empowering Future Leaders” program, she finally said exactly what she thought. Live. On a recorded meeting. And, of course, in front of CeCe’s boss. Needless to say, the launch did not go as planned and by that afternoon, Eryn was carrying a cardboard box to her car and driving home from her first “real” job for the last time. Whether she was ready for it or not, she was about to get a fresh start.

First came internal loathing and the “what-if” self talk, then anger and then eventually acceptance. After all, Eryn had spent the better part of three years feeling sick to her stomach every Sunday night in anticipation of the week ahead. She knew that The Box might have been a great place to work for some, but it hadn’t been a great place for her.

Through all of this emotional growth and revelation Eryn was caught in what felt like an endless cycle of interviews, each one leaving her more deflated than the last. Not because the opportunities were terrible, but because she understood the language now. She knew that a “fast-paced environment” meant chaos. “Wearing many hats” meant being understaffed. “Growth opportunity” usually meant someone else had already quit. Halfway through one particularly painful interview, Eryn found herself listening to a hiring manager spend twenty straight minutes talking about herself. CeCe 2.0.

“I don’t want to start all over just to end up here again,” Eryn thought. As if the universe had decided she’d suffered enough, her phone buzzed inside her blazer pocket. Normally, she would’ve ignored it, but CeCe 2.0 was long-winded, and Eryn had officially stopped caring.

BIG NEWS!
You have a job here if you want it 😘

The message was from Adrian, Eryn’s work bestie who had escaped The Box seven months earlier for a startup and had spent most of that time trying to recruit Eryn. Apparently, she’d finally succeeded, and for the first time in the last three years, Eryn felt herself relax. She didn’t know what the job was yet, but she knew two things: Adrian worked there and that rent was due in two weeks. That was enough.

The next day, the two met for lunch, and by the time the check arrived, Eryn was on the phone accepting a position as Director of Communications. Impressive.

Even though an offer letter was waiting in her inbox before she got home, she knew full well this wasn’t her dream job, and it wasn’t even a daydream job. But it was a paycheck, and right now, that mattered more. Unfortunately, while the title sounded impressive, the salary was not and it came with one immediate problem.

Eryn’s downtown apartment had to go.

With only two weeks until the start of the month, Eryn was in full-on scramble mode, she managed to somehow find a friend of a friend of a friend’s recent college graduate who wanted to sublease her apartment and the timing worked for them. Hooray! The arrangement left her with a little cash in hand and she assumed finding a cheaper place would be easy but with less than a week left for her housing search, Eryn realized she was going to need to widen the search beyond the comforts of downtown.

With a new search filter added, there it was.

“Hmm. Walden? Let’s see what you’ve got for me,” she mumbled to herself.

The other dormer was regularly occupied by Henry’s little sister Violet, his little shadow, she was half his age and had twice the mischief; they had a special bond and they both adored each other’s company.

Violet often sat in her window on a creaky bench and sketched fantastical creatures in a beat-up sketchbook, she read book after book (sometimes the same ones two or three times) to escape to wild worlds outside of the real and painful one she lived in, and she spent hours watching the wind tickle the leaves of the old Southern Magnolia tree in front of the house. Violet often said that there was something magical about the tree and that it whispered to her; no one paid much attention to statements like that; after all, she was just a kid with a big imagination and that seemed to run in the family.

Violet’s imagination was a blessing, especially since kids her age didn’t seem to want to play with her much anymore, she had always had trouble with headaches and got sick easily. She started feeling stiff all the time and eventually she told her parents that there were spiders crawling in her fingers and toes, tickling her from the inside. While Violet always had a way with words, the frequency and peculiarity of these most recent mentions made her Mother worry. This was the start of a string of countless hospital visits.

One of the last times she came home from one of her “medical vacations,” as she liked to call them, she and Henry were in the attic, building a world, she sketched it out while he dipped his fountain pen and wrote it down. Dust motes danced in the streaming sunlight and the two of them worked side by side at Henry’s battered oak table.

“We have to capture it all, every wonder we can think of, before it slips away,” Violet pleaded as she thumped a thick blank sketchbook on Henry’s desk. The spiders were tickling more and more, some days were better than others but on the worst ones, Violet would get so stiff she couldn’t move her legs. She worried that soon, she’d be stuck as an observer to life, rather than an explorer.

Henry’s eyes carried the weight of things he hadn’t said aloud to her yet, because Violet’s worry was something he carried too, “Every last one, I’ll write it all down, V.”

And so he wrote down all her stories. All the odd places and things that the tree whispered to her, all of the interesting folks and animals she made up in her head. Henry wrote as quickly as he could to capture it all in perfect detail.

In the margins of Henry’s writing, Violet sketched creatures that had never been seen by anyone but her: small winged foxes with fur the color of twilight, ancient trees that whispered knock-knock jokes when you leaned your ear against their knots, flowers that changed their hue depending on what song you hummed at them. Henry recorded landscapes of impossible mountains, rivers that wound like silver ribbons across purple plains, and villages that glowed with a light you couldn’t put into words. Together, their work became a world that felt impossibly alive.

On the first page of the sketchbook that would become her living memories and fairytales, Violet signed her name in neat, confident letters. Henry watched her and thought to himself, “It would be worth a journey to see this world.”

And in a way, it already had been. Together they came up with a name for their book and called it A Catalogue of Remarkable Wonders.

It was a collection of Violet’s imaginary pets and friends, an index of her make-believe, a book meant to hold magic so tangible you could feel it in your bones. They both knew Violet had a lot to say, but before either of them was ready, she would no longer be there to help turn the pages and help write these fantastical places down.

So, for now, the attic buzzed with vibrant energy. Ideas and made-up places bounced across the pages like a suncatcher throwing prisms across the floor. In those moments, the world they built was whole and wild, just waiting for anyone brave enough to step inside.

A few months passed, and eventually the Elmwoods’ stopped sending Violet on her “medical vacations,” focusing more on making sure Violet was comfortable and as happy as possible. They also moved her bed to the attic so she could watch the Magnolia tree and be closer to Henry while he typed newspaper articles at his desk. Every day, Henry and Violet added to their book. She promised Henry she would stick around as long as the Magnolia tree had flowers blooming; selfishly she wanted him to finish writing down all of her stories.

“You’re not going anywhere, Violet. Don’t be dramatic,” he said with an empty smile, though he knew they would both be lucky if she could somehow stick around through the season.

The last flower fell from the old Southern Magnolia a few weeks after Violet left this world. Their father, Papa Elmwood, and Henry cut down the tree a few days later; neither of them could bear the sight of its naked branches anymore.

Eventually, life went on without Violet, though it lacked the sparkle and magic she brought to it. Henry officially moved to Walden proper and wrote for paper, making a pretty big name for himself. Mama and Papa Elmwood stayed at the farmhouse, not wanting to sell it, Henry always thought that it was their way of keeping Violet around.

After many years and even some happy memories later, Mama and Papa Elmwood eventually passed peacefully. First Mama went, then Papa a few years later. Their deaths forced Henry to come home to the farmhouse one last time.

As the last surviving Elmwood, Henry spent a final weekend at the farmhouse, he went through the last of the drawers, closets, and little tucked-away spaces. It broke his heart to do it, but he sold the farmhouse to a lovely couple who were excited to start their own little life there.

A big box of little reminders started to fill up as Henry moved about the house, when he finally got to the attic, he almost couldn’t climb the stairs. He didn’t want to be in the room where her magic went to sleep forever.

He started to turn away and leave the attic alone, but as he turned and headed down the stairs, a faint whisper tickled his ear. When he turned to acknowledge it, a trick of the light danced on the other side of the door and caught his attention. Henry knew he was alone in the house, but something felt as though she was asking him to come in and say goodbye, for real this time. He knew he’d kick himself later if he turned over the keys to his childhood home without going up there even though he felt like those few steps to the door were miles away. His heart felt heavy and he stood there for what felt like an eternity, but eventually one foot took a step and the other followed.

When Henry opened the door, the sun poured in through the twin dormers. There, in one, was her little bed, and in the other, his desk. Sitting on top of the beaten oak desk, wrapped in years of dust and its cover bleached by the sun, was the book they had written together before it all slipped away. Henry stood in the doorway for a little while before he closed the distance between this version of himself and the one that wrote that book.

A Catalogue of Remarkable Wonders

He opened the book and ran a finger over Violet’s signature. He thumbed through the pages, equal parts laughing and crying, until he reached the last finished page. Henry scooped up the dusty tome and brought it home to his new life where he sat at a more grown-up desk, in a more comfortable chair, and with a subjectively better typewriter and pen. The book sat on the bookshelf where he took time to notice it often, until time stretched and the book became just another book on the shelf. Of course it was special still and it was Henry’s prize possession, it just didn’t get the same attention it once did.

Years passed and Henry continued to write for the paper, live his simple life and enjoy each day as much as he could. By now, grey was settling into the hair above Henry’s ears and little lines around his eyes started to show. He hadn’t planned to do it, but one rainy afternoon, Henry found himself writing in the book, picking up where Violet and he had left off all those years ago. He wrote more of their silly stories, jokes, and magical encounters in her catalogue for years, until their final story was recorded. There were still a good number of pages left to fill, but that would come later.

Along the way, Henry retired his column in the newspaper and opened a bookstore. His Parkinson’s made it too hard to write with a steady hand, but dammit, if his eyes weren’t sharp. He surrounded himself with a collection of “very good books,” as he liked to call them, as Violet once called them. Little pocket worlds that he could slip in and out of, lots of little worlds that Violet would have loved to visit.

During these easy going twilight years Henry’s bookstore, Very Good Books, was peaceful and boring, in the best way possible. If he forgot where he placed a book, he just started reading a new one. Not a lot of foot traffic came into the shop, maybe a few souls here and there who really needed something good to read, but overall, peaceful and boring.

Every day, that is, until a young woman who was still technically new to town, pulled the handle of Very Good Books, and the little bell above the shop door announced her arrival.

The plan is to share a “cozy portal fantasy” with you all that uses a simple magic system and tugs on your heart strings (I’m talking about my character Henry here!) but the truth is, I don’t have it all done yet; the outline, yes, but the actual pages, no. So, you’ll have to bear with me as I navigate being a fantasy fiction writer and share each piece of this story as it is born.

So, what’s it about?

I’m currently calling this story “Project Walden” because I don’t have a better working title for it as a whole, so there’s that. It’s the story of an older female main character named Eryn who is just a loveable loser and fails at her dream job. Her professional failure brings her to Walden where she stumbles upon a bookstore that she later finds to be somewhat magical.

Throughout the journey Eryn will drift between the real world and liminal space via a handwritten tome she gets from the bookshop and eventually Eryn will discover that the world she keeps visiting is falling apart and that she has to figure out how to keep this magical space alive.

I hope that readers that find this story enjoy the color theory and symbolism baked into the characters as well as some of the historical touchpoints I’ve used as inspiration to help set the time and place of this cozy tale.

How to read it!

I plan to share it here, in a serialized format. If I can pull it off, I would also love to develop some character artwork to accompany each piece of the story I publish.

And so, that’s it for now! Let’s see where this goes!

— Rainey Daze (writer!)