From the beginning...

Impatiently, you circle the option to begin from the beginning... where else would you begin? You place the quill neatly on the desk, and the book stretches its pages as if yawning, slamming shut yet again. It hovers for a while, creeping up to eye level, slices of gold light glimpsed between its rustling pages. It opens suddenly, as if screaming into your face, its light streaming into your eyes...

As you struggle with your compulsion to stare into the light you start to discern sounds - the frantic scribbling of thoughts being committed to paper become the sound of a stream, of wind in the trees and bird tweeting away happily...

Your eyes adjust to the scene slowly. A harsh midday sun hangs over a dirt-path en route to a small rural town. It's not just your eyes adjusting either. As new memories take their place in your consciousness, you feel some part of yourself slip away out of sight, out of mind...

...

And then you're there wondering whatever you're doing dawdling, glazed over in the middle of the track. You reach into your basket for the list that father gave you, and know there's nothing new on it. There's nothing new here ever...

The baker is your first stop. As usual, his wife barely conceals her dislike of you. She thinks you're there to steal her husband, a balding middle-ager good only for his baguettes. The butcher provides this week's order with his seventeenth consecutive innuendo involving sausages. The priest doffs his hat with is one free hand, licking his lips as you pass cautiously.

You leave town with time to spare, finding a shady tree under which to relax for a half-hour. As you close your eyes, you imagine that you're back in the city, riding in carriages with expensive ladies and gentlemen... if only mother hadn't left you... and now father so entirely occupied with his inventing. What you wouldn't do to get away even from him...

The figure that now looms over you offers a timely reminder. Gaston is the town's narcissistic oaf. He's also your former sweetheart, and you can't help but blush deeply at that thought...

“Well, well my dear Belle, blushing as ever in my presence! I see that I shall have you back without a struggle”.

He backs up this conviction with a firm groping hand placed on your chest. He takes a couple of deep squeezes before leaning in close and breathing down your neck. There's no easy way to correct Gaston. Conventional wisdom would have it that a man of his drive would keep his brain in his pants, and since you certainly didn't see it when you were last down there, you assume that it simply doesn't exist. How then, to break it to him, or to just break him?