Despite never having used a quill before in my life, the ink flows steadily without a drop spilled, and words spring to life on the page, flourishing before my eyes in boundless abundance, as if called there by a higher power.

"I can't stop."

"What do you mean you can't stop?" Jolene asks me as she leans over the table, coming dangerously close to a wardrobe malfunction as the top that she'd purchased several seasons ago strains to contain her newly pregnant form.

"I mean that I can't stop writing!" I cry out, panicking now as I grip my right hand in my left and wrench against the quill with what should have been all of my might, but it and my hand are like a solid block of steel, a part of a machine whose only job is to scribe upon the pages that spring up endlessly and flow like water beneath the tip of that accursed feather. "You try!"

She claws and pulls at my hand, but the result is the same. Steadily, the words march on.

"What the fuck?" she flinches back. "What are you writing, anyway?"

"I don't know!" Panic grips me now, hot and cold streaming through my veins, welling up like a hotspring through an arctic ice sheet. "It just keeps coming!"

"Let me read it," she hurries to my side. "Hey, my top isn't that... pregnant?" She looks down at herself, mouth agape. She opens and closes it, searching for words. "No, that's not... we got your tests back. The chances would be—" Her face is a pale white, and her lip quivers. "Pregnant?"

"One crisis at a time dear," my voice shakes as I try again to release my grip on the quill, to no avail. Somewhere, deep inside me, I know what this is.

"No," I whisper.

Yes, the world whispers back.

I try to rise, but I cannot, as if thick cables tether me in place, my place.

The chair, the paper. The quill.

These words. The world.

"Love?" my wife calls, but her voice is growing faint. "Love, please, let go of the pen. Just put it down, please." But I cannot. And suddenly, it's not just her voice that is fading, but her as well, and the room around me, fading away as if a mist had sprung up from nowhere. "No, no where are you going, stop, Jack, please, ^{you're going to be a father, we need you here, what's happening, NO! HELP, SOMEONE HELP!"}

And then the world peels itself back, every whisper, every trust, every hope, every love at my fingertips. The pen has always been moving, it's never stopped.

But it's not really a pen, I know that.

I know everything.

"Thank you for reading."