author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

Sometimes I look back at the week's timed writing sessions, and I don't like any of them. They're all just babbling, brainstorming at its most raw, total failures at being story-like objects. As freewriting goes, that's fine; as Fictionette material, it's distressing.

Eventually I choose the one I dislike least. I take comfort in knowing that I won't actually have to turn it into a Fictionette for at least a month. And then four weeks go by, and I find myself staring at the babble and wondering how the heck I'm going to make anything presentable out of it.

The prompt word for this session was "seclude," and it was amplified by accidentally typing the word "cake" instead of "cave." I think "Secluded Cake Accident" would make a great rock band name.

If you take a walk through Sidereal Park, you'd better bring a coat. Even in the summer, it's colder there than anywhere else in the City, cold as the space between the stars. Nobody knows why that is.

Some have suggested that it was once the site of the City's first graveyard. You've seen the tombstones in the museum; they were dug and taken there long ago. The corpses, buried with neither coffin nor shroud, were simply left to crumble into dust. But the ghosts of the City's first dead stayed on in Sidereal Park, and it is the chill of their congregation that you feel.

But no one actually knows where the City's first graveyard was. Too many records have been destroyed or lost since the City's founding. The City itself resists historians' efforts. It is shy, it has stage-fright, it doesn't care for the spotlight.

With this is mind, other theorists assert that while ghosts do collect in Sidereal Park, it has nothing to do with their places of final repose. Instead, they are drawn there by means of a sort of spiritual black hole. This is what locks Sidereal Park into an eternal chill, and is furthermore the secret source of power that runs the City. If you die within the municipal boundaries, which are roughly congruous with the black hole's event horizon, you'll wind up in the generator yourself.

Both theories are laughable. The cold has nothing to do with ghosts, and ghosts have nothing to do with the municipal power plant. But I know the secret. I know why it's so cold in Sidereal Park. I don't know the purpose behind it, but I know the mechanism and the source. It's because of what's in the very heart of the Park, in the center of its center.

It's a loaf of bread.

Don't look at me that way. It's true. I've seen it myself. Would I make something like that up and expect you to believe it? If I was lying I'd tell you it was a magic sword stuck in a rock, whoso pulleth etcetera. Or a harp that plays itself. Wouldn't that make a better story? Wouldn't that be less ridiculous than magical baked goods?

Fine. I'll tell you how to find it, so you can see for yourself....

This has been an excerpt from the Friday Fictionette for December 5, 2014. The fictionette appears in its entirety (1230 words) at Patreon and is available to all Patrons pledging at least $1/month.

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