Word Bottom (17 submissions)

The prose wasn’t delicate, and that was OK.  Seventeen submissions hadn’t harvested so much as an electronic whisper,  and a change was needed. Brow and finger; heat and stickiness. Something had to give - and maybe it was him. 

There was something about landscaping the Word file with a monitor turn instead of a software click that gave enough gravity to glyph him and grab him and garnish the doc’s innards with his presence. 

Alchemy.

The text - now a serif-ed histogram or a city skyline,  with author-glyph hanging his legs over the side of the first line;  head in hands, wondering at the ether’s curl and caress between the lines and paragraphs,  and what lay below. 

Single letters floated up;  vowels mostly, in enough succession that he was able to walk  from paragraph to paragraph, pausing to look down the letter-lined cliff faces until curiosity moved him again. 

Finally,  out of paragraphs and vowels,  he hopped on small ‘r’ and rode it like a dandelion spire to what lay below

A current of letters, carpeted with glyphs; some sitting contentedly,  coaxing vowels around consonant logjams; some fishing them out and tossing them skyward,  and others arguing about the flow and timbre that each action took, and how deconstruction might not have been THE apocalypse but it was certainly a second cousin.

He was currented supine through the valley - eddied by his paragraph cliffs and the pool from which they surfaced;  through a blighted wasteland of judgement and atrophy, to THIS side of the monitor, where he waited, fresh letters stacked like firewood - for the perfect moment to jump through and help finish the 18th submission.