500 Words of Literary Hell

by Eleanor Boniface

I only stole a couple of words from the library, to help me with a story and now I am in literary hell.

An assistant librarian was sorting some books and spotted me taking the words. I grabbed them and ran, with the assistant following closely in pursuit. I burst into the main hall and tried to blend in with the other readers. But the assistant pointed at me and shouted,"Catch him, he's a word thief!" At that point I sprinted, but unfortunately ran straight into a tall and bulky reader who had been roused from his story by the shouting. He gripped my shoulder painfully and pushed me along an aisle towards the Chief Librarian. The Chief took me down a corridor and shoved me into small room and locked the door. The room was cold, dark and strangest of all, empty of books. I sat down on the hard floor wondering what was going to happen to me.

Meanwhile, the Chief Librarian contacted the Word Police and told them what had happened. They arrived in a flash and took me away for questioning; they took me to The Great Reader. She was a fierce and terrifying woman, her age unknown but her face was worn like the pages of old books. The head of the Word Police told her of my crime and her face darkened with disapproval. She told me that I was charged with stealing words and that my punishment was to be spent at the Word Mine - to get 500 words. I was taken to a Word House, which was to be my home for as long as it took me to mine the target.

That first night was the worst night of my life: the bed was hard and the thought of mining 500 words filled me with dread. At dawn, the other word criminals and I (who included some children) were marched off to work in the Word Mine. After descending what felt like hundreds of flights of stairs, we reached the mine. It was like a stony cathedral, tall and vast with jet black letters shining in the light of burning torches. We were each given a heavy pickaxe and set to work to mine words. I was working in a small corner near the back and didn't find many letters there. Each day it was exactly the same for me, there were always too many consonants and never enough vowels to make words. The irony of my situation was not lost on me; I had stolen some words and now I couldn't mine enough to get the 500 I needed.

A young girl, about eleven years old, came up behind me and poked me in my back. She showed me four of her vowels; I reached into my pocket and took out a few letters. She swapped her vowels for four of my consonants so she could now make her 500 words, but I still had a long way to go...