In the Night Wood

by Dale Bailey

So many links in the chain of circumstance. So many stories inside stories, waiting to be told. Once upon a time.

Charles had never seen anything like it — not just the house, but the library itself, a single room two or three times the size of the whole apartment he shared with Kit, furnished in dark, glossy wood and soft leather, and lined with books on every wall.

Perhaps stories had no beginnings or endings at all. Perhaps they simply branched out forever, like rivers, one from another, enveloping you for your brief span, each life a story within a story, intersecting with thousands of other stories to make — what? The story of the world, he supposed.

Charles could still recall some of their touchstone phrases. The monomyth and the collective unconscious. The eternal return. What has been is, what was will be: the marvelous everywhere erupting into the mundane.