A reader's sorrow

The sound of a music box was all he heard.

He knew he was just a character in a book. Knew he was sitting on the doomed marble stairs of a long gone empire in ancient times, the remains of its former glory crumbling under his feet.

But he also knew he was handsome and many readers had stopped at his image to stare at his masculine beauty. The shiny chest in the billowing toga, the strong legs with leather strings criss-crossing his ankles.

He was a hero too. A fighter of dragons, rescuer of damsels and he occasionally entertained a lonely shepherd during cold winter nights. Not all of his endeavors were mentioned in the story.

Today, though, he was desperate. Staring through the pages at the man reading his book filled him with sorrow, for tears were streaming down the man’s beautiful face.

He knew the man. Had spent his youth with him, either sitting on a bookshelf or in the boy’s hands as he grew up.

The melancholy tunes of a nearby music box seemed to increase the man’s sadness.

When the man turned away from the hero to wipe his eyes on his sleeve, a thought occurred to him.

He never dared leave the steps that some artist hat created for him. Crumbling stairs that started at the bottom of the page and led to nowhere at the top. Old ivy grew along the edge of the stone. The hero stood leaning against a stone arch that led to green fields and forests beyond. He never did take that leap into the unknown, never left the comforting safety of the book’s cream colored pages. He couldn’t imagine himself among the colorful and huge things that the human world consisted of.

And yet he knew that comforting the crying man was more important than contemplating his own insecurities.

The hero balled his hands into fists and took a leap off the illustration and felt himself falling through countless letters and white, billowing clouds.

At the end of his fall, he found himself standing outside his book, looking down at the opened page with his ancient stairs on it. There wasn’t a hero on the painting, though, for he was standing in the human world now, his body of flesh and his toga of linen. He was behind the crying human who had not yet noticed the change on the page he was reading.

Taking a sudden breath into his lungs like a diver emerging from the sea, the hero startled the reader and saw the man jerk away from his book, facing him first with fear and then with resignation on his face, as if he was certain the reaper was coming for him.

The hero opened his arms and waited for the man to come to him. Watching him with fearful eyes, the man finally flung himself into his arms and let him caress his back, as sobs shook his body.

The man’s lips moved against his chest, warm puffs of air telling him the story behind the man’s sadness.

The hero nodded and kissed the top of his head. 

He knew nothing of the world of humans, but he knew pain and tragedy.

Slowly folding away from the man, he took his hands and spoke to  him softly before turning to the open book with him.

The music box stopped playing, as the book lay open on the floor. The opened page still showed the ancient stairs overgrown with ivy, but the stone arch on the platform beneath now sheltered the hero in a lover’s embrace with the man he had saved. The man he would spend his story with - until their happy end.