The Book

Author: Richard A Lutman

Richard A Lutman earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. As an award-winning author, he has published over three dozen short stories and published seven books. His story collection, published in 2019, was a finalist in the 2020 American Bookfest: Best Books. Current work comprised a biography of my ggfather and a second collection, both were published in 2023.

It was November when the words stopped. He noticed it first as he sat in his apartment, surrounded by unfinished drafts like skeletal remains, his fingers hovering over the keys with nothing to say.
She texted him at 2:30 a.m.
“Did you ever feel like the page was watching you?”
“Yes.”

They were both 31. Once they’d been called “rising voices,” “literary disruptors,” and “the future of fiction.” But now they were simply two writers who couldn’t write. And worse, they didn't believe in the words they used to love. Their sentences felt like dead, brittle lies.
They had met in a bookstore café where baristas no longer asked if they were working on anything new.
He stared into his coffee like it might spill.
“I read one of my old short stories last night,” he said. “Felt like someone else wrote it.”
She didn’t look up. “Same. Every word I write feels false. Like a performance of meaning.”
She stirred her tea.
“What happens to writers who don’t believe their own words anymore?” she asked.
His laugh was dry. “They become editors.”
They tried to break their loss of words. Lit candles. Read poetry aloud at midnight. Took mushrooms in the Catskills and listened to wind in the trees, hoping the universe would whisper back. It didn’t.
One night, in frustration, she smashed her laptop on the kitchen floor. He found her sitting among the shards, gripping the battery like it was a dying heart.
She looked at him and said, “There’s something inside the silence. I can feel it watching me.”
He didn’t tell her then, but he’d heard it too. In the gaps between keys, in the spaces between sentences—something waiting. Listening.
Then they found the book in a used shop neither of them remembered seeing before, down a narrow alley. There was no sign, no storefront—just a door that was ajar. The air inside smelled like salt and paper rot. A single book sat on a pedestal in the center unmarked, bound in black cloth, no title, no author.
He reached for it, but she stopped him.
“This is stupid,” he said.
But she opened it anyway.
There were no page numbers. No chapters. The text was handwritten, jagged. Every word felt like it was watching them back.
She read the first line aloud.
“The mouth of silence opens not with sound, but with surrender”.
She gasped. It echoed in her skull like it was her own thought. A sentence she didn’t write but believed more than anything she’d ever written. He took the book from her, flipping the pages with trembling hands. Every line felt true—not just beautiful, not clever, but fundamentally real. Like scripture. Like something older than language.
They bought the book. Or thought they did. There was no clerk. No register. When they left the shop was gone.
Back at her apartment, they read it for hours.
They didn’t eat. Didn’t speak, just turned the pages. The book was a story, but not in any other they’d seen before. It wasn’t plot or character. It was essence. Truth carved into language. The truth they had tried—and failed—to capture in their careers.
He whispered, “This is what we’ve been trying to write.”
She nodded. “We need to learn from it.”
So, they started copying by hand. They told themselves it was just a writing exercise, but the ink didn’t dry and the words wouldn’t let go.
The more they wrote, the less they slept. He filled ten notebooks. She stopped eating solid food. Stopped answering calls. He moved into her apartment because it was easier to work near the book.
They stopped writing their own sentences. Only copied. Over and over. As if transcription could grant salvation. And the more they copied, the more the book changed. New pages appeared. Lines shifted. He said it was alive. She didn’t argue.
At night, they heard whispers in the walls. No words—suggestions. Shapes of thought pulling them deeper. The book was no longer inspiration. It was a command.
One morning, she heard a scream. She ran to him. He hunched over the book, clutching his temples.
“I saw it,” he said with a gasp.
“Saw what?”
“The mouth behind the silence.”
She stepped closer
He was crying.
The open page's words were smeared.
She looked down
And though the letters swam she saw the sentence.
The page does not forgive the tongue that doubts.
That night she burned her notebooks. But the next morning she woke up and found the words etched into her walls.
They hadn’t left her. They never would.
He lasted two days. On the third he broke into the library and filled a bible's margin with fragments from the book. When the police found him, he was reciting the lines backward, over and over.
He was hospitalized. She came once. He didn’t recognize her. He kept muttering.
“The page is hungry. The page is real.”
She went home and opened the book again and found new chapters, written in handwriting that looked like hers.
She hadn’t written them. Had she?
Winter came. She no longer left the apartment. Her skin was pale. Her voice brittle. She didn’t speak unless the book told her. And the book always told her to.
One night, she opened it to a blank page and saw a question written in blood.
Do you believe in me now?
She shook her head.
Then you may begin.
They found her body in the covered floor to ceiling in ink. Thousands of pages. Some in her handwriting. Some in others. All saying, over and over.
The truth lives where your voice dies.

Months later, a young writer moved to Brooklyn and stumbled across a strange used bookstore in an alley in Red Hook. No sign, no clerk, just a black-bound book on a pedestal. He opened it and read the first line.
The mouth of silence opens not with sound, but with surrender.
He blinked. The sentence felt familiar. Like something he could’ve written. Like something waiting to be written again.