one man's two person three page story

The first book written had no introduction. It had no climax, no ending or action, none rising or fallen. There were only two characters who lived their lives out on the page patiently. On the first page, they were wiping their cuts from another one of their fights. There was not nearly enough food. On page two, the sun comes up. This was an exciting event, and is usually seen as the greatest triumph of the book. On the third page everyone is dead, including our two characters. Critics have supposed it is a skilled, softly-veiled allegory of when the dinosaurs perished. Others impose that knowledge, being a seed you should never swallow, is what killed our two characters. They had no names for their bodies. Their faces were old-fashioned, stern and dry. When they held hands, the sky threw rocks down at them. This was not in the story. It is implied.

I think I wrote this book. Or, at least, I think I know it well enough that I am capable. If I had been born at the right time. I could have made the three page finger painting that sets in motion the whole wheel of literature. Sure, I know the characters well enough. They practically invent themselves. But the whole idea of it tastes like milk: familiar, but not my own. Indulgent. I wonder about the absent introduction. Could their have been an inkling, a stinging temptation to sculpt the scene, to triangulate the moment? And why begin a book in the dark?

Of course the dark sparks everything. Let there be light, an obvious man said. Then he filled up three pages and left out the beginning and the end. I have seen the pages smiling in the dust. Sometimes in my dreams, I meet the original architect, the first messy child, who combed the sky into chaos, the indulgent master, the one who said let there be light. We've discussed the book at long length, and our conversation is usually the same. You didn't do a thing, I find myself saying. The light lets in itself.