The distance from one blue line to the next is some unquantifiable measurement known as “college-ruled.” This is senseless to me, but I had liked the word college so I had taken these pads instead of the others my grandfather had offered. The pages are crumpled with age and golden like the sun. My hand cramps as the pencil dances. The space on the paper may be college-ruled, but as I write the space between my ears expands with the big bang of every new idea.
I am behind the freezer, my back is on the clothes drier, and I am vibrating like a plucked piano string from the working of the motors. In worlds entirely separate from me, my father demands to know “who is it this time?” There’s more yelling I cannot hear. With my pencil and my yellow legal pads I have shrunken myself down, crawled into my own ear, and stand witness to a world which is just beginning. I am seven years old, and this is my secret bliss.
The man who lives only on paper has a silly name that begins with the letter “Z” which I find to be the most mystical letter in all the alphabet. In England they call it Zed, and Zed is almost like Zordon, who is a floating head on the Power Rangers and this makes the letter “Z” triply mystic. Zimboc I call him, for no other reason than that the word tastes foreign and exotic on my lips. Foreign is good because foreign means “not here.”
Zimboc has the eyes of a serpent, for he was born of the dragon Mirran deep in the stomach of the earth where magic is strongest. Aelios, Lord of the Winds, brought him earthward when a distant mountain in a forgotten land spewed fire and cracked the earth open. I borrow here and there from tales I have read in a book of Greek myths for children. Nothing stays the same though. This is my story, on my paper, and the universe I’m watching through my own ear, like a sailor looking out at the sea through a port-hole, is unique like a snow-flake.
He is Zimboc the Incarnate. He is light and goodness made flesh, and can do no wrong. His sword is called Vegon. It is made of fire except the fire is blue and purple crystal. It burns hot enough to kill a god. I draw pictures sometimes when I don’t have the words. Incarnate is written in several places. I love the word. My grandfather had explained it to me. Incarnate… an idea made flesh. Zimboc is my Incarnate because he is everything I have ever wanted in a hero. I cannot make him real in the real world but in the peculiar dance between my mind and the paper he is real in another way for he breathes in my imagination. So surely if my mind is real, he must be real as well.
My parents fight all through the house, arguing over nothing. I do not stop. I am safe behind the freezer. I am flying with Zimboc on the dragon Polaris, and we are a world and a sky away from all mortal concerns. We laugh in the face of Doraneck and his Sarpents. We make friends with Charlome and the Grungles. When Zimboc kisses Sarna on her rose red lips, my heart twists and aches in my chest with wanting. For Zimboc is all the best in me, and Sarna is all I have ever wanted. In that way, she is an Incarnate too. But we only kiss, for I am only a child writing behind the freezer in the laundry room.
So I write and I write and I write, because here in the paper I live a different life. The golden sheets are my body and they are safe forever, because ideas are the one thing that can never die. I heard that somewhere. Captain Planet maybe. But probably MacGyver. And pretty soon I fill up a whole pad with words and stories and adventures, but there is no satisfaction in this. The satisfaction is in the act. The act of living on the page. The act of breathing godly life-bestowing breath on the universe of my dreams.
So I write and I write and I write. And Rachel finds where I have hidden my stories and she puts them in the burnables pile before I know it, and my dad sets them on fire. I can see her dancing wild and savage around that fire worshipping the dark idol of destruction.
See? Her eyes say. I can never make things. I could not make a sweater. I could not make a box. Not really. All I could do is put yarn together to make something that looked like a sweater or some wood together into something that looked like a box. But you make things. You put things together and make them more than the sum of their parts. That’s how you know who you are. And I come along, and I break those things. I find made things and unmake them. That’s how I know who I am. See? Her eyes ask.
So I try to strangle her when I see all of this, because what she has done is more than burn some paper. She has killed the Incarnation of Goodness. She has killed Zimboc who is all the best in me and all the best in everyone, and she has taken away the lips of Sarna so I can never kiss them ever again. And I know that I live, that all right-thinking men and women live, because life means that you say “No!” to what is in her eyes, but my dad pulls me away and tells me it was just paper.
So I get some more paper. And I write and I write and I write but Sarna’s lips never taste the same. Not since she was burned alive.
