Pages from Emma's confession:

I am going to tell you how this story ends. Maybe because of that, you will put the pages down, lips curling like the pencil shavings next to my handwritten copy. That is fine.

If you stop reading now, you are probably here to interrogate my story, to wring answers from it, to find fault in it. Or you are reading this to set fire to it and subsequently fire me. Maybe you will even claim to read what I wrote, the way most claim to read college policy.

But those of you who continue past the spoiled ending, the second person point of view, and the floral sentences at which some balk and to which some say secured me tenure (a black hole within a black hole, let me tell you) ...well then, you have probably heard of Regina, knew someone like her, or you wish you did. Maybe you keep reading because you know me. But I doubt it.

I am a cobwebbed corner office. I am reading glasses sliding down a thin nose. A face hidden behind too-long, split-ended blonde hair. I have failed to stand out for many years now, so I may as well be invisible.

I used to be words. I used to be colors. Then I became the lack of both. Later, in the dim of it all-and this is the part you were waiting for-yes, I became Regina's.

Now, I am finding words again like diamonds spilled in a third-world village. But these words do not feel like mine. My fingers did not feel the pencil when the lawyers advised I write down my story, so they could edit it to pieces.

No. When I completed my MFA some twenty-odd years ago, I still wrote of happy endings, of saviors, and Never-never Land. Maybe if the melancholy had caught me earlier, the way it did my colleagues, I would have ended up at your University of Iowa, your Sarah Lawrence, your Ivy League corridors dusty with famous fingerprints. Instead, I had my burst of fame before I could appreciate it, then fate took me to Vickers College in Maine.

It was here that Regina came to me. It was here she reminded me of the way I used to write, the way I once saw the world. It was here she wrote her capstone work, "The 5 Steps Left to Take."

And it was here that she died.

Pages from Regina's capstone:

THE BACKSTORY:

After tenure, routine must have tugged at Emma Swan with such soft tendrils that she sunk into it without any real sense of alarm. Perhaps she surrendered to routine on purpose. Either way, by the time she realized how colorless her world had become, she'd already disappeared into the dark. The vacuum of student needs and collegial expectations sucked all the wind from her little lungs.

I knew it as soon as I tracked her down on the Internet to where her picture floated among the rest of the Vickers faculty headshots. I compared the grimace she wore there to the textured, toothy smile on the back of each of the fantasy-world romance novels she'd put out years ago under a different name-Emelia Sparrow.

Who was this stranger?

She certainly wasn't the inspiration behind my homoerotic debut novel, Once Upon A Fuck.

I forget exactly how many years ago, I fell in love with Emelia Sparrow, who happened to hail from the same home state as I. I fell for the cotton candy pink stories of romance and fantasy between women that she wrote-women whose families embraced them, who swung swords at monsters that weren't human, and who lived fairy tale happily-ever-afters.

I suppose I fell in love with Emelia and just assumed that Emma must be a heroine like her lead characters. So after I retired from playing the political game and divorced my husband at long last, I Googled Emelia Sparrow and found her real name.

I remember that night well, even as other memories fade. Doctors had put the second stent in my heart two hours before, and my grown son called to cry over the phone at the example my divorce set for his wife and daughter.

"I won't ever forgive you," he told me as I scoured an article from Vickers College about Emma Swan's 6-week, summer fiction and poetry master class.

...may lead to entrance into the Vickers MFA in Creative Writing program for qualified students…

"That's nice, Henry, dear," I replied, mouse hovering over the sign-up button and to submit my 3 grand into cyberspace. "In any case, I do think I am moving back to Maine."

Words-the words from Henry's mouth and the words on the computer screen-were the key to my shackles. I hit the submit button and spread my wings.