Catalyst.

I had just walked in the door of my job at the casino, and quickly found out that I was working in the V.I.P. room for the day. This was an easy task. Many of their high rollers like to come there to just kick back, read a newspaper, smoke a cigarette and have a drink or two. It was still early in the day, so there were only a handful of customers inside. I set my stuff down on the desk were I had planned to plant myself for the next several hours.

“Evan, you need to go get the papers,” one of my fellow employees informed me. I dutifully nodded that I understood, and walked out the door to the gift shop. The gift shop was in the process of clearing out a bunch of their seasonal stock at the time, so a lot of items like t-shirts and mugs were on sale. They also had an muddled assortment of postcards scattered along the countertop next to the register.

“I’m just here to pick up a couple of newspapers,” I told Susan, the cashier.

“No problem,” she said. “Help yourself.”

She didn’t have to tell me twice. I sauntered over to the rack full of USA Todays and Kansas City Stars and grabbed one copy of each. On my way out, a postcard in the pile I saw earlier caught my eye.

“Greetings from the Tzoid, Montedio,” it read.

“Oh my god,” I thought, “this is the postcard I wrote about!”

I picked it up and instantly recognized it as a postcard I had described in the story I was writing for National Novel Writing Month. It was a clue I had left myself in one of the early chapters, but here it was for real – resting in my hands. I hadn’t even designed it, nor had I created it. Nevertheless, it actually existed. My disbelief subsided long enough for me to make sure no one was watching me pick it up. As soon as I realized the coast was clear, I picked up a pen and scribbled a quick note to myself. Surprisingly, my first inclination was not to hold on to it, but to get rid of it. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was thinking, but I wanted to put it in the mail – addressed me at a certain point in the story – just to see where it would end up.

I called Susan back over to the counter. “Do you sell individual stamps?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Sure,” she told me.

I affixed the stamp to the postcard and got ready to drop it in the outgoing mail box just outside the gift shop. Before I let go though, I look one last look at the picture of the Tzoid on the front, as if I’d previously seen it somewhere other than my own mind.

Throughout the rest of the day, I thought off and on about that postcard. Where did it come from and why did it end up here? The strange appearance of it caused me to remember a vision I had a few days ago of being confronted outside the casino by a man named Cliff Brooks and an alien woman named Kelly. That experience caused me to abandon my efforts. Finishing that story was ridiculously self-indulgent, so I just stopped writing it. I wondered for a while if this had anything to do with that.

Liz, who worked with me in my department, was relieving me for my lunch break, and I asked her for a few extra minutes to “clear my head.”

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied nonchalantly, “I just need some fresh air.”

I walked outside into the cold, dark November air. I had a memory of leaving the casino and walking into my story, that vision I thought about earlier. Thinking back, it felt lucid, almost like a daydream. Standing outside again in the parking lot, I closed my eyes and attempted to will the seaside cliff of my mind into my reality.

I shut them. At first, nothing. Slowly, I recalled various elements of that place; the soft sound of the crashing waves offshore and the warm breezes that trickled across the rocks around me. I was determined to make it comfortable, someplace I wanted to be. As my smile grew wider, light began to gradually filter through my eyelids and the chilly air that tingled the pores under my coat got warmer and more temperate. I opened my eyes to the bright light I had seen before. I was there again. I was back.

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