ManicWorld Magazine

Aprinne swore the ink from his yet-again-jammed-up printing press stained everything in his personal universe–from his cold, aching digits, to his wrists, arms, and even his eyes when he rubbed them without thinking enough about the consequences of it. He had no good clothes anymore–ink blotted the worst and the best of them.

He felt that inkblots spilled over into less material things as well. An overabundance of inky, depressive heaviness caused his sweetheart Elia to walk away, and caused his mother to waste away.

He wondered if one day the world would drown in ink. Some wise poet had said if the world ended in ice, that would work just as well as fire. But if ink was the true destroyer of souls, then it would slowly drip into every small crevasse, every overlooked cranny, expanding until everything was coated in liquid pitch, colour was lost, and the world as he knew it would become all black and no white, no colour, just nothingness.

He thought he’d prefer the world burned or froze to death rather than inked, but he felt, deep within his soul, that the true way the world would end was when everyone was like him, choosing to never care about anything anymore.
Choosing the easy way out.
He sighed. What was the use of even wrestling with the printing press he handled now? Once he got it to work, he’d only print the stereotypical messages. Wars, murders, houses destroyed by fires set off by Molotov cocktails. Ink at its heaviest and finest.

People only ever really wanted to hear about the drastic happenings, of the dictators with ink-stained hands, and yet those same readers, too, sat down at the end of the day with hearts filled with ink that spilled out onto their children and the animals they kept as pets.
So what was the point of fixing the press if the paper readers would only use the headlines as inspiration to spread more ink? Wasn’t it useless for him to keep on trying? Why was he trying anyway?

It was during that thought process that he saw where the paper had jammed for the seventh time that afternoon. He oiled the piece he suspected was the source of the jam, and ran a test paper through, which was successful.
He reached into the stack of requested blurbs sent in from his readers and took out a large handful, prepared to sort them from “worst”, which of course would be the headlines, to “bad”, which would take up the back pages.
“War rumoured over there, flu statistics, economic shortages, business closing..” he muttered to himself.
And then he froze.
Next in his hand was a note written with a very familiar hand. Elia’s.

Aprinne, I don’t know if you’ll ever see this, she wrote, because you never seem to reach the bottom of your newspaper requests. But, if you’re seeing this at last, I just want you to know that my love for you hasn’t died, and never will.Whenever you tire of printing the pain that’s brought you and us so much misery, know that I’ll be here waiting for you on the other side.

…
It was a strange sight to see a crowd milling around the printing office, but none of them were holding newspapers. They were standing, taking turns reading the note taped to the closed printing office’s door:

Ink tells many stories, both bad and good. But it has its limits; it can inspire, it can create emotion, or the lack thereof, but it cannot take action for you. It cannot write your own story. YOU are responsible to write that.

I’m off to write my own story.