A/N: I decided to write a story based off an amazing poem, so here’s the first part! It’s basically about maybe girl who loves ink and paper, and dreams of The Boy Changed into a Stag Clamors at the Gate of Secrets, which is a beautiful Hungarian poem. Fantasy/Realistic Fiction • “Her own son the mother called her cry ascending in a spiral, within the gyre of the universe it rose, her limbs flashing in the light rays … The ripples subsided at last in the gloom, but a stag still stands in the foam of that moon.” - The Boy Changed into a Stag Clamors at the Gate of Secrets, Ferenc Juhász Maybe she was different. Maybe she wasn’t selfish or uptight, maybe she wasn’t a slut or too conservative, maybe she wasn’t giving and loving and gentle, or wasn’t harsh and cold and angry. Maybe she just was. Maybe that was her destiny. Maybe that was where the atom that was inside her, the one that used to live in the stars of the universe, was trying to get to. Maybe she is. Maybe she will be. Maybe she had peaked and now all that was left of her life was a sea of boring nothingness. Maybe she would love. Maybe she would lose. Maybe she would hope, maybe she would wish upon a star and have a dream come true, maybe she would find wonderland, or maybe she would make her own. Maybe she would always have a candy cane at the edge of her mouth and have notebooks where words filled every inch of the page. Or maybe her teeth would rot, and her bones would become so frail that she could no longer pick up her pen. Maybe she would live a poetic life, maybe a mystical one, maybe she would be a princess, a damsel in distress. Or maybe she was meant to be the prince, to save others in a brave, superior manner. Or maybe she was just meant to save herself. Maybe you can tell that her life was filled to the brim with “maybe’s”, but she couldn’t. At the moment, she was writing. She was always writing. As mentioned earlier. When she wrote, she didn’t stop. She kept writing until the page she was one was filled. If you look at the edges, you would find words cascading over the lines like a waterfall. But that waterfall had ravens overhead, black messy animals that made the landscape less beautiful. Less beautiful, and more threatening. Over each section of her writing, she had her trademark. She was a critic. The critic. The thing was, though, that she only criticized herself. Whatever she didn’t like, she didn’t cross out like a normal person. In tiny, delicate writing on top of it, she wrote a list of the bad things about. Too wordy, too long, too deep, not deep enough. That might have been okay, but she did this over all her writing. It was as if she hated everything she did, and maybe even herself. Now that you know that. She was staring and her clock. 1:10:56 am… 1:10:57 am… 1:10:58 am… 1:10:59 am… 1:11:00 am. She smiled and made her wish, which is a story we’ll save for another time. She closed her eyelids, and let visions of a deer wandering a forest take over her mind. He was wondering. The stag. He spotted a river, and ran to it. He was parched. He hadn’t seen water for days. But when he reached out his hand, as to run it through the stream, it wasn’t there. He was awake now. He was lost and he was scared. He tried to remember why he had been so shocked that he had a hoof in the place of a hand, but he couldn’t. He had been a stag his whole life. But even as he thought that, he knew it was wrong, and the only thing he had to prove that was a faint, soft voice calling him home.
