The Paper Mill

Valerii Maksimov

RAVEN UNDERSUN

“The paper mill is where dreams are made!” Chase spun around, arms gesturing expansively around the space. His grin was wide as a river running to the sea.

“It’s your attic,” I said, chewing a strand of my auburn hair. It was morning, and the taste of strawberry toothpaste was still on my tongue. Chase sighed, mock dramatic. “Look.”

He pulled the lid off a big cardboard box. Inside, there lay reams and reams of paper. Good stuff, too, yellow and creamy. Nowadays everyone’s notebooks were full of recycled paper, tinged grey. So this was why he called it the paper mill.

“There’s a typewriter, too. Bit rusty, but we can fix it.”

Dust swirled through the air.

“You can tell there’s dreams left over. From all the blank paper. They never got used up, so they’re still waiting for someone.”

“I like that, Chase.” I gave him a small smile, one of the secret ones I reserved for special people. *

After we fixed the typewriter, we lay on our backs and stared at the ceiling.

“So, what do you dream about?” he asked.

“Uhh.” I thought for a long moment. A car drove around the block below, then its engine cut out. “Just for people to l-listen, I guess.” My breathing went funny after I said it, like my throat wanted to take the words back where they belonged.

Chase propped himself up on an elbow. “I listen to you, Dani.”

“Yeah but-” but no one else did, but good girls were meant to be seen and not heard, “–but you don’t know all the things I don’t say.”

“Whaddya mean?” His eyelashes, black and stupidly curly, beat together then opened again.

“Sometimes there’s things I think. But the words don’t come out.”

Chase thought for a moment, then slid me a piece of paper and a pen. “It’s gonna happen,” was all he said. *

“What do you dream about?” I asked. We’d been busy, me scrawling out fragments, Chase pounding away at the typewriter. Just get it all down like you know someone’s hanging on your next word, he’d said.

His jaw hung open and he folded his arms in on himself. He looked dumb, but I didn’t say so. I wanted him to answer. “Guess I wanna build stuff.”

“Like an architect? You’re not going all grown-up on me, are ya?”

“Nah, nah. Or, maybe. But I mean worlds, or like, you know when you walk into a room and it’s like another planet, and it’s not the walls or the furniture, it’s just a feeling?”

“Yeah, I know.” The paper mill was like that.

“I wanna build worlds like that. And have people live in ‘em with me.” He was blushing, and I knew how he hated blushing, so I didn’t tell him I was already living in one of his worlds, that world where someone was listening. *

We started writing together. He’d give me the setting of the first scene, and I’d spin it out into a story.

We wrote and wrote. He got blisters on his fingers. I got rugburn from lying on my elbows next to my pile of papers. When we started making our pieces into paper aeroplanes, I asked, “what do we do now?”

“Easy. We find someone to read them.”

“Aw, Chase.”

“I’m not pulling your leg. I’ve got a plan. Come on, Dani.”

I sat up. I was looking at hope, eye to desperate eye, like a bird two inches from your face that you’re praying won’t fly away. “I don’t know.”

“Momma says deep down you always know. I think it’s the only true thing she remembers.” Chase was jutting his jaw out, on the offense now.

“Okay,” I said softly. I was scared, but maybe it would be okay.

We copied everything into a magazine using the scanner in the garage. Nobody paid us any mind.

We used fake names. Casio and Dharma. Casio, like the watch, like the calculator, like all the machines Chase wanted to take apart to find what made their metal hearts tick. Like Cassiopeia, I thought, but didn’t say so. Dharma, like the book about bums my older brother was always talking about. Like the ashtrays in the living room and the idea that someday even cigarette butts could be reborn.

It took us a week, but we put the magazine everywhere in town. We put it in mailboxes, running off afterwards, slippery hands joined. We slipped it into empty spaces on the library bookshelves. We tore some pieces out, folded them into paper aeroplanes and threw them off the highest sculpture in the park. We left some copies where we knew only someone curious would find them: in rock crannies where the lizards warmed themselves up, in the old treehouse, and in the antique store’s mystery book section.

I never laughed so much as I did that week with Chase. *

For the summer, we had it all. It took a while, but people read the magazine. In the interim, we raided the garage for chalk and paints and drew on the attic walls. Chase traced my silhouette all over the place, getting me to stand in different poses and fumbling the chalk round my outline. “So I’ll always remember you here,” he said.

I smacked his shoulder.

People got curious about the way they’d found the magazine, so they talked to everyone else about it. It took a while, but they worked out it was us from Casio and Dharma’s initials, and the way we went everywhere together. The local paper sent their youngest wanna-be reporter. She had seventeen years to my nine and pink on her cheeks that didn’t belong there.

She even took our photo. We were crowded together, hugging, elbows at odd angles in striped shirts. In the paper it was grainy, printed in black-and-white ink. We clipped it out and hung it on the wall and blew kisses to it. *

Chase and I saw less of one another in high school. In freshman year I tried to cling onto him, too tight maybe. We’d meet and he’d only stay fifteen minutes before running off with the soccer team. We’d shoot another agonized glances when we didn’t know what to say, caught in crowds by the bleachers, wishing we could fall flat into our shadows under the afternoon sun.

I got bullied, but it was all words. If it had been sticks and stones, if I’d had scratches, maybe I could’ve turned up on his door and asked for bandaids. But I didn’t know how to ask for anything deeper.

He wasn’t fine, I could see that much. He was always walking into the headmaster’s office with tears hung in his eyes like unripe fruit, spurning anyone who tried to pluck it off the vine.

I got other friends, who listened to me: none as faithfully as Chase in the old days, but sometimes. Sometimes was enough.

Once we ran into one another on a street corner, and he said, “My dad painted over the attic walls.”

“Bastard,” I said. It felt like old times. I had to walk away.

When I wore a suit instead of a dress to prom, he stopped and said, “You look good.” That was it. *

Chase and I went to different colleges. He went State, I went Ivy League.

I hung out of my dorm room window, gulping in the night air. A black wolf paced in my chest, restless. I had one year left. After that, I’d be stuck in a job I hated, or trapped back home under rule of silence. Kids were meant to be seen, not heard, and unsuccessful college graduates were surely a rank below that.

I’d strained the tendons in my fingers typing. Sending stories to wherever would have them. They all wrote back: ‘we’re sorry, but we feel that your work is not a good fit for us.’

I’d thought maybe it was me. Maybe nothing I wanted to say was relatable. Maybe that was why every submission was stamped with ‘Declined.’

Nothing until now. The local paper had accepted my latest story with a few edits. I let out a breath. It was something. I wondered who would read it.

A battered postcard made its way to me through the university’s internal mail. The loopy scrawl tugged at distant recollection that pricked tears in my eye. It read,

‘You did it! I’m so proud. Wish I’d been there.

Dream on, California.

Chase’

California like Dani California. Like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song no one should name their child after. It looked okay in Chase’s writing, though.

Mostly I was crying because no one else had said they were proud. Only a little part of it came from knowing he wished he’d been there.

Spring break before finals. I wandered through The Horizon, an art gallery joined with a theatre. The paintings sent ideas ringing through my ears even in the quiet hallways.

There was an open door. The smell of sawdust floated out from it. It looked like it went backstage. There were canvases on the walls, though, and those drew me in. They were adorned with sketches. I darted inside, knowing that the curious little girl inside me had never really gone to sleep.

I came out into a warmly lit room, with painted panels higher than my head set out like a maze. A jungle scene sprang to life on them, with a golden jaguar picking its way through dark leaves. I wandered to the centre of the maze, following the specks of colour, dark blue horizons and fuschia flowers larger than any I’ve seen in America.

And then I saw a shadow. A shadow I’d seen every lunchtime at the fountain in middle school, that had loomed over me offering open arms and comfort, a shadow who’s heels I’d chased since we were five.

He’d filled out since I saw him last and let his hair get a little shaggy. But it was him. He was painting. “Chase.”

“Oh.” He blinked once, then smiled. It was tenderer and fuller than his daring childhood grins had been. “Hey.” *

We got coffee and tried to lay the last years on the line. He remembered things about me from when we were younger that I’d forgotten. When I told him what I thought about his friends, his problems, the choices he faced, he said it was exactly what he’d needed to hear. He said separating in high school was one of his biggest regrets. I shrugged. He saw through it, like he always did, and invited me round on the weekend.

It was the same as always, except with our own beers and our own space. He showed me the sets he was working on for the theatre, and I smiled without thinking about it for the first time in a long time.

“Someday I’ll make a set for one of your stories. After they get turned into plays and movies.”

“That won’t happen,” I said.

“Just you wait. You’re right about all the small stuff, but I’m always right about the big stuff.”

“Okay,” I said, and stretched out, letting him build up belief and futures like a miracle worker. *

I wanted to leave the story like that, hopeful but unresolved. But Chase said people like to see happy endings, so here goes.

He flipped a cassette around a few times in his hands. “Remember when I said I was right about the big stuff?”

I nodded.

“Remember when I said we’d get married?”

“Yeah. We were twelve.”

“Yeah,” he said, and put the cassette back on the shelf. “Well, how ‘bout it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

“Why? You got someone else?”

“No.” That’s what would have been ridiculous.

“Okay then.”

We didn’t talk about it, but three weeks later I got down on one knee and said, “How ‘bout it then?” *

The ceremony was a small affair. In our vows, he talked about me stealing his best lines. I said some of the things I’d never could have said aloud when I was younger. Thank you for you, mostly.

We started an arts company, with a bookshop for a ticketbooth, plays, recitals, and storytelling evenings. We named it The Paper Mill. He spent every weekend painting the backdrops. I wrote the scripts and stories and fragments, printing them in tiny pamphlets shaded blue or pink.

The night before it opened, we lay an Easter egg trail through town, full of poems and clues, drawing people to the doorstep. We paid the living statue, spray-painted silver, to pose with one of my pamphlets. Anything to get people curious. Something about the slogan that curled under the billboard, ‘Where Dreams are Made’ made people smile and come back with their friends. The opening got in the papers.

Believing in the future, we snuck into the park and planted flower bulbs so that come spring they would announce ‘Come to the Paper Mill.’

The word spread, and we made enough to buy a little house, one with an attic. Chase drew murals on the walls, and I wrote my favourite quotes there too. Hope never flew away, and we stayed young at heart.

Raven Undersun is an Experimental Psychology student at the University of Oxford. She has a Transatlantic background, growing up in Berkeley, California and later moving to England. She has had two short stories published, one in Hypaethral Magazine and the other in The Scarlet Leaf Review. Her inspiration to write comes from uncovering and expressing philosophical truths about human emotions, and the hope of moving her readers in the way literature has always done for her.