Excerpt from The Author
Page 47
He left home the way a ghost slips through a wall. Not fast, not slow, but with the certainty that something on the other side was waiting. The sun hadn’t fully arrived when Eli stepped onto the road, his breath making small, white ghosts in the morning air. The house behind him stood quiet for the first time in years. No shouting. No footsteps. Just a single curtain breathing in the draft from the cracked window. The same one he used to watch storms through when he was younger.
The backpack over his shoulder was stuffed: two shirts, a dented flashlight, a notebook, all the snacks he could stuff in his backpack, and a half-broken photograph of his parents that refused to stay in its frame. His duffel that he kept from his father carried three glass milk jugs that he stored under his bed; wrapped separately by the only few clothes he brought with him. He didn’t know where he was going. He only knew that leaving felt truer than staying in a broken system.
By noon, the highway turned to dust and the air thickened with the scent of dry grass and gasoline. He followed the road until it forgot to exist, until it thinned into a trail that disappeared into the trees. The farther he went, the quieter the world became as if sound itself had decided he didn’t need it anymore.
Page 48
For three days he walked without company. He counted silences instead of miles. How many cars passed him up the first two days until he strayed from the roads. He drank from streams, slept beneath power lines, and tried to remember the last time someone had said his name kindly. The nights came heavy. The stars felt too bright, like eyes trying to see through him. It wasn’t loneliness he felt. It was distance between himself and everything that had ever been warm.
He began to notice patterns in the dark: the same three stars hovering above the tree line each night, the same low hum that came from nowhere in particular. At first, he thought it was the wind, or maybe the blood behind his ears. But the sound grew clearer, more deliberate, like a language trying to learn him.
He told himself he was tired. That it was nothing. That light could play tricks when the body ran out of sleep, but deep down, he knew something was watching. Not the kind of watching that wants to harm, but the kind that waits for you to stop pretending you don’t see it.
Page 49
He found the cabin by accident. A single-room thing, half swallowed by vines and memory, with a stove that coughed smoke like an old man and a window that looked out onto a field that never ended. He decided to stay for a while just until he could figure out what came next.
The first night, he wrote in the notebook:
“The world ends quietly. Sometimes in a house, sometimes in a person.”
He wrote until the ink thinned. About running. About the weight of leaving. About how escape wasn’t freedom; it was just motion. The type of things a normal twelve-year-old shouldn't have to worry about. When he stopped, he noticed the hum again. Faint, patient, almost gentle.
He stepped outside. The field glowed with dew under a half-moon. The sound seemed to rise from the ground itself, vibrating through the soil, through his bones, until even his breath began to follow its rhythm.
Something in the air bent. The trees wavered, their outlines trembling like candlelight. He blinked and the sky folded.
Page 50
It didn’t fall, it opened.
Three lines of light cut through the clouds. Not white, not blue, but a fiery orange that felt like warmth without the sun. It spread outward, a seam unstitching itself, revealing something vast behind it.
He should’ve ran. He didn’t. The hum deepened until it felt like his heart was beating outside of his body. Dust lifted from the ground, small stones rolled toward the light, and his body leaned forward without permission.
In the glow, shapes began to move. Not shapes like people or machines, but ideas taking form. Angles folding into themselves, surfaces becoming depth. The air rippled as if painted on water. He saw it before he understood it: a being, or maybe the absence of one.
No limbs. No eyes. No face. Only dimension rearranging itself to look back at him.
He didn’t hear words. He remembered them.
“Are you afraid?”
The voice didn’t break the air. It existed inside thought, soft and everywhere at once. He wanted to answer but found no language small enough. The light pulsed, and with each pulse he felt something loosen, every scream he’d swallowed, every apology he’d rehearsed, every time he’d looked in a mirror and not recognized the face there.
The light touched those moments, not erasing them, but unfolding them. Turning them sideways until they made sense.
Page 51
He saw the house again but not as it was. It hovered in the air before him, drawn in impossible geometry, the walls intersecting at strange, compassionate angles. He saw himself at nine years old, hiding under the bed, listening to his foster parents' footsteps. But this time, when the footsteps stopped, the door didn’t slam. The scene rewound, slowed, then faded into light.
It was showing him a way through memory.
Eli took a step closer. The air around him thickened like honey. His feet lifted slightly, the earth below sinking into itself. His body began to rise, weightless, but not detached. He could feel every particle of himself suspended, rearranged, accepted.
Then, through the brightness, came another question or maybe a promise.
“You can stay, or you can see.”
He didn’t understand.
“Stay”, the voice echoed, “and remain a story. See, and become one.”
The light swelled, filling his vision with warmth that felt like forgiveness. He closed his eyes, expecting to fall.
He didn’t.
He expanded.
Page 52
The next thing he knew, he was back in the cabin. Morning light pushed through the window. The hum was gone. The air smelled like rain and pine. His notebook was on the floor near the door, open to a page he didn’t remember writing. In his handwriting, one line stretched across the center:
“Some visitations don’t come to take you. They come to return what you lost.”
He touched the words, half expecting them to move. Outside, the field swayed like nothing had happened. But when he stepped into the light, the shadows bent away from him as if the world had learned his silhouette.
He smiled without meaning to.
For the first time, the silence didn’t hurt.
Cast: Obinna Udoye
Crew: Anthony Nguyen, Mickae Styles, Malcolm Rick
