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Blank Papers

While working as an elementary school teacher, I secretly made a name for myself as a novelist. Due to writing under a pseudonym, my students and fellow teachers didn’t know I was a novelist. However, the pen hadn’t progressed at all recently. No idea came to me when I looked at the paper. I was holding my head in front of a stack of blank papers.
“I’ll leave the theme to you. 800 sheets.”
“If it’s your novel, there is no doubt that it will be a hit in any genre.”
It’s nice that the editor in charge said so, but it’s hard to do. Days when I was holding my head in front of a bundle of blank papers.

There was few days before the deadline. When I was watching TV as a distraction, I found out that there was a silent music titled 4’33”. There is also a copyright.
I wrote “800 sheets” on one paper and handed it to the editor in charge along with 799 blank sheets.
“I will postpone the publication time, so please!”
“No, this is my last work. This is my last novel. If you don’t publish it, throw it away.”
Said so, I retired as a novelist.

Surprisingly, “800 sheets” was published. White books with numbering pages were lined up in a bookstore in a flat stack. Whether they bought it for something unusual or for a diary, it sold quite well.
As a strange social phenomenon, it caught the public’s attention. Many expected the gimmick from cultural figures and other writers, but no one thought that the pseudonym was an elementary school teacher who retired from writing because he couldn’t write in a slump.

A few months later, I held my head in front of a bundle of blank papers again. All my students wrote the reading impressions of the same book.

Published in Short Short Story

3 Comments

    • Thanks for your comment.
      This is only a made story. I have no experience of a teacher nor a professional author.
      Past I’ve attended a web site which members post short stories and others post impressions. I selected the ones that were popular and posted them here. Original language was Japanese, and stories were based on the life in Japan, so it was difficult for me to translate English.

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