The Beacon of Darkness

When the ghost of Mister Poe's raven whispered in her ear, Rebecca opened the tome and stepped back into the realm of phantasmic tales. Pushing her way past the clouds of dust and cobwebs in the vestibule of her consciousness, she proceeded down the Tunnel of Narrative and through a labyrinth of deliciously dark dreamscapes, where she encountered the serpent of writing addiction. The beast sank its fangs into her flesh, and a ravenous passion for words started coursing through her veins.

Continuing along the path, she came upon a Stygian scene, where musty stacks of rejected manuscripts were piled along the wall. Undeterred by that graveyard of broken dreams, Rebecca pressed on.

Congregating with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Leo Tolstoy, she interrogated literary legends about their various philosophies on composition--short, long, light, dark--and followed a trail of lemon drop sensory particulars to the cave of emotional perception. The boundary between history and literary fiction became clouded when Count Dracula confronted General George Custer and sparks started to fly. The caustic smell of gunpowder permeated the air, as explosive bits of detail ignited chimeric visions in her imagination. Then, Huckleberry Finn drifted down from the peak of cultural enlightenment, carrying a bag of fresh perspective on his raft constructed from logs of social truth and authentic vernacular.

Capturing observations in her journal, Rebecca continued to wander through the jangled Maze of Motivation. Word by word, scene by scene, those impressions etched themselves into her psyche, until a beacon of darkness led her to the conclusion that she could actually create such phantasmagoria herself. The worrisome witches of punctuation and grumbling goblins of grammar kept throwing slippery slabs of irrational concern in her path, but she persisted under the auspices of the Creative License, vested in her through the authority of the nine Muses.

Today, members of the colorful cast spawned in the depths of Rebecca's fertile imagination roam the landscapes of films produced by The Walt Disney Studios.


330 words