Paper Bound

• Chris Andrews, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2008

“Mum, do I exist?”
“What?”
“Do I exist?”
“What a strange question! Of course you exist. What made you ask such a funny thing?”
“Well it’s just that I was reading a book at school, about a boy, just like me, but he didn’t exist did he?”
“Well of course not, he was just a make-believe character in a book.”
“Yes, but how do I know that I’m not just a make-believe character in a book as well?”
“Well, because I can tell you that you are perfectly real, and so am I, and so is everybody else in this world. But now, it’s time for you,” she paused as she tucked him into bed, “to go to sleep.”
“But how can I know? How do you know?”
“Because I told you so!” she called back as she descended the stairs.

But John wasn’t convinced…

He finally fell asleep wondering; “How would I know? How would we know?”

When he arrived at school the next day, his teacher announced that it was time for reading.

Just as John retrieved his book, from the red “advanced” level reading box, he suddenly remembered his thoughts from the previous night. He headed to his teacher and voiced his concerns, suddenly glad that he had bothered getting up to go to school.

She was rather strange, although in the nicest possible way, which perhaps helps to explain why she replied in the way that she did:

“That’s a very interesting thought. It is something that I have, in fact, thought about myself, not that there is anything that we can do about it if we really are just a creation of someone else’s imagination.”

“Do you think that if we were a story, that the story would be about me or you or somebody else?”

“Oh I am sure that it would be about you John, it is always the person with the strange ideas who gets to be the main character in a story. It makes it more interesting that way.”

Just as she finished saying this there was a loud ‘bang’ as one boy pushed another into a table knocking it over. “Oh dear, go back to your seat John,” she said, before going on to resettle the class.

The bell rang and the class streamed out the door.
* * *

A world away in another time, place and dimension as Jack, another similar boy, read these words, a similar bell rang. He shut the book that he had been reading and replaced it in the red reading box. After being dismissed by his teacher, he headed to the school gate and waited for his mum to pick him up.

While he waited Jack thought about what he had read, about the boy in the story who was just like him, but he didn’t exist, did he? When his mother arrived he got in the car and asked: “Mum do I exist?”

Does he? - Do we?