It is a truth universally acknowledged that a best selling novel always begins with a

brilliant first line, and Blaire Massey knew that. Which is exactly why the frustration she had
when she couldn’t get it right burned her skin to the third degree. By the end of July, she was
well into her 27th day of constant trial and error—more error than trial.
Endless upon endless mornings and afternoons of writing were wasted away, her
self-diagnosed insomnia and imagination fornicating to create a stupor of constant binging to get
that dreaded first line just right, which slowly but surely began to suffocate her. And it even
continued after the sun went down and gave birth to an ebony-blanketed sky carpeted in the
brightest stars.
It is said that if you stood in complete silence in front of 213 Greenfield Drive, you could
possibly hear the echoes of a Royal 10 typewriter clicking and clacking away until the break of
dawn. It’s normal to almost every writer’s journey through their craft to have a little all-nighter
every once in a while, but not for Blaire; it was almost every single night.
Piles and piles of crumpled thoughts and ideas and hopes and dreams were scattered
around the entirety of her bedroom floor. From the outside of the window looking in, you’d think
it somehow magically snowed on the inside of the Massey house.
Blaire Massey lived in her grandparents’ house; she’d been there ten years now, writing
in her little attic directly above their chandelier-strewn kitchen den. It was both for artistic
purposes, and because it was the best spot to get absolute silence from any outside
distractions. And by distractions, she meant her grandparents.
For years, ever since she was a little girl, she was unsure about a lot of things. She was
unsure about why you could never put the toothpaste back into the tube after it was squeezed
out. She was unsure why no matter how hard she tried, she could never catch the Tooth Fairy
enriching her with the face of Abraham Lincoln in exchange for a singular dentilication. She was
unsure why people were actually sad about her parents dying in that car crash when the scars
of what they did to her were permanently tattooed into her subconscious:

“You’re 21’st in your class? Why aren’t you in the top 20?”
“You did your best? Well, do better!”
“You think you like girls? Genesis 19:1-11!”

Yes, what a picture-perfect family indeed.

She’d never admit it out loud, but deep down in the depths of her despair, she was
actually and selfishly glad that a man who was married to alcohol decided to go for a drive that
fateful Tuesday afternoon after her mom and dad were already an hour late for her 8th birthday
party. Did that make her a bad person? Was she going to go to hell for feeling that way? She
didn’t think so. She took it as even God himself realizing the mistake He made giving her those
wolves in sheep’s clothing for parents and deciding to alleviate her pain.
But when everything else fell away, only one truth remained that Blaire was always
certain about: she wanted to become a writer. There are certain forces of nature that people
can’t really seem to explain, and the knowledge of her love of writing and passion for making it
into a successful career since the age of 2 is definitely one of them. Right next to what happens
after we die and who the Zodiac killer is. Even with disparaging and discouraging remarks from
her late parents echoing in her mind, it only breathed more oxygen into the fire within her soul
which made her only more dead-set and determined to see her dream be born into reality just to
spite them, and fill the emptiness that had been burned into her since the moment she was
born.

“Hey, Blaire-Bear.”

She looked up and saw her grandmother, Nana, hovering over the rickety, chipped
wooden staircase in the corner of the attic, wearing the same blue half-frame glasses resting
just above her nose that she had for as long as Blaire could remember. Now, she may have
looked like any other American grandma on the outside, with her sooty-colored hair curled to an
extent and her always being seen wearing some kind of floral-patterned blouse with white
sneakers and ruby-red lipstick accompanied with just enough wrinkles to pass for 67, but she
looked nothing like anybody else on the inside. Blaire saw it as that if her Nana’s heart had two
little doors, that if you opened them, there would be the sunshine. She just never really said it
out loud to her or anyone else.

“I told you to stop calling me that, Nana,” she softly spoke in response.

“Oh, don’t give me that. When you were little, you always loved it when I called you
‘Blaire-Bear’,” Nana sarcastically said as she made her way to the little corner of the attic where
her granddaughter had become some sort of literary hermit.

“Yeah, I did. I also liked Audrey Hepburn, playing princess dress-up, scrambled eggs,
and Saturday morning cartoons. But you don’t see me singing the theme song for Scooby-Doo
word-for-word anymore, do you? Sometimes people just grow out of certain things.”

“What? Like me,” she asked as she sat down next to her, trying her best to get Blaire’s
eyes unglued from her blank sheet of paper sticking out of the machine that’s held her hostage
for more than three weeks.

“No, I-. You know what I meant, Nana.”

“Do I? I do. You’ve never seemed to be able to communicate with these kinds of things.
Especially these last few weeks.”

“I’ve been working on this story; you and Papa both know that. I just can’t seem to get
this freaking first line right,” Blaire exclaimed in frustration as she buried her
blonde-haired-blue-eyed face into her lime green mini skirt.

“You mean to sit there and tell me that you’ve been basically living up here for almost a
month, and you haven’t even written a single line!?”

“I have; none of them were just the right one. It’s a delicate and demanding process,
Nana. I can’t just suddenly flip a switch and everything will come to me. That’s what’s fun about
it! Just being able to pick through your mind and finding the things you want to be able to say to
people and how you want to say them. But if you don’t start out with a gripping hook, they’re
never even going to try to listen. Now, I’m not even sure if I can even keep up with this.
Maybe… maybe my parents were right: this is just a pipe dream and I should’ve just married the
Vance boy when I had the chance.”

As soon as she uttered those words, it was as if a tidal wave had crashed over Nana.
Something struck and changed her as soon as Blaire’s rant was thrown out into the Universe for
all to hear; something different. Something new. Something good. She leaned over and grabbed
her granddaughter by the chin so that their eyes interlocked.

“Now, you listen to me, Blaire-Bear. I’m really old. Really, really old. And I’ve seen things.
The most wonderful and the most awful things. I didn’t have this luxury when I was your age,
you know. I spent the better part of a year hiding inside a nice man’s chicken coop just so that
the Nazis couldn’t find me. I passed the time by trying to count the pieces of straw that made up
the ceiling every day. I lost my place after only five seconds. And over six million of us died that
year.”

Blaire’s heart traveled to her throat.

“But only very few of us managed to survive. And I knew the moment fate made me one
of them, I was going to use my second chance to better my family and make all of their dreams
come true. That was the worst day of my life. But do you want to know what the best one was?
The day you were born. Now, your mom may’ve been my daughter, but that doesn’t mean I
agreed with every decision that bitch made. And, Blaire, the way they treated you was the
stupidest one of all.”

Her eyes began to well up with tears.

“And I know that I didn’t survive the wrath of Mr. Adolf Hitler just for you to doubt yourself
when I know for a fact that you are the greatest writer in the world. We all end up feeling this
way one way or another at some point in our lives. The older we get, the less sure we are about
anything. But it’s what we do to weather that storm that ultimately defines what’s going to
happen to us in the future.”

Correction: if Blaire was sure about anything, it was that her Nana was the best person
to go to for advice and no matter what, she’d understand and guide you through it while loving
you unconditionally.
It was just too bad that that was the last piece of advice she’d ever give.
The two lovingly embraced each other with warmth in their hearts, the sun and the moon
colliding to give birth to a perfect storm of emotions before it suddenly hit Blaire like lightning.
The perfect first line.
 “That’s just what I needed to hear, Nana. Thank you. And I think you’ve given just what I
needed. I just wish you would’ve talked to me sooner before the typewriter broke.”

“What do you mean it broke? When did break?”

“Three hours ago. But you try to write over and over again nonstop on a piece of
machinery older than the Constitution.”

“You always seem to make a valid point. So, what are you going to do, Blaire-Bear?”

“Don’t worry about me, Nana. I’ll be ok. I know exactly what to do.”

She had absolutely no idea what to do.

The evening of August 1st was probably the first night that Blaire Massey actually made
an attempt at trying to drift off into sleep. The only problem was that when you get only two
hours of sleep a night, it starts to do things to your body and to your mind. You start to see
certain shapes in the corner of your eye. Your body begins to feel heavy to the point where you
physically cannot sit up, muchless get out of bed. You start to even go as far as to hear things
that aren’t really there. And which one was she experiencing? All of the above!
Her eyelids felt like they were carrying two gallons of milk, her body felt like bricks were
stacked on top of it, and she could’ve sworn that she heard thumping in the distance of her
house. Like someone or something was inside of the walls trying to claw their way out. It
became too unbearable and seemingly realistic for her to continue to deal with until the sun
came up so, slipping out of her fluffy brown sheets that smelled brand new and into her torn
grey slippers, she introduced a match’s flame to a candle’s wick which guided her path as she
withdrew from her bedroom and into the unknown.
Blaire kept on mentally reassuring herself that the noise was probably just a figment of
her sleep deprivation state, but the pounding noise that grew louder and louder with each step
she took just kept on dissolving that statement due to the volume of the noise sounding so real
and so unimaginative. What could it be she asked herself? A robber? A demon? A monster?
Santa Claus? She was about to find out because once she arrived at an old portrait of a little
house on a prairie that hung just between the one bathroom and her grandparents’ bedroom,
the noise was louder than ever. It kept on pounding, and pounding, and pounding, and
pounding, and pounding…until it just stopped without warning.
That was when she noticed the tiniest scratch behind the painting. In such a way that it
seemed like the wall concealed by the painting had been tampered with. Blaire wondered what
could’ve hiding behind the picture. And curiosity killed the cat. Removing the artpiece from its
home, a hole punctured into the inside of the wall was revealed. Something broke into the wall,
and the painting was covering it up. Only there was nothing inside. Absolutely nothing. Nothing.
That is except an old typewriter. And a dusty old typewriter at that. Wait. Her old typewriter had
just been broken that same afternoon, and she just so happens to find a secret replacement
hidden in the walls of her house that she had absolutely no idea about?
That couldn’t have been a coincidence. However, Blaire didn’t see it that way. She saw it
as an ominous omen, yes, but rather mostly as a lucky replacement so that she could get back
to her work. And work she did. What should’ve been sleep was instead an adventure. An
adventure into the lively world of a small little town in North Carolina inhabited by a monster
unbeknownst to mankind that taught friendship and kindness to the children that couldn’t afford
to go to school who would also give them sunflowers after every successful lesson. And they
called him Buffido.
Well, when she was cooking, she was cooking with gas.
Come morning, she still hadn’t slept a wink, but she could feel that the holes inside of
her were becoming filled with the fulfillment of her short story that she had been working so hard
to perfect. And now, she was done and could continue to live her life the way she always had.
Or so she thought.
The sizzling scent of overburnt bacon followed by the clouds of smoke creeping up the
stairs immediately caught her attention. Something had to have been wrong because her
grandparents never burned any of their food and they would’ve alerted her if anything went
wrong. Piling her sheets of story into a chronological stack, she bolted to the first story kitchen
with minimal worry and an optimistic view of life. That was shattered when she came across the
kitchen painted red. Red…with her grandparents’ blood. Their bodies laid strewn across the
counter, their throats sliced ear to ear and their eyes gouged out. Blood continued to flow out of
their wounds, streaming into a river of O+-colored water. Their clothes were torn to shreds with
what seemed to be claw marks, and their mouths left open in postmortum shock.

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Waking abruptly, Blaire pulled her hands apart and felt the steel edge of the cuffs dig
painfully into her wrists. How she thought, How could this happen? Why did this happen to the
most sweetest person on Earth? And more importantly, how did the police know to come busting
through the door just as I found the bodies?

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you
in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford one, one will be provided to
you by the state. Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?”

Blaire just simply could not answer what the seemingly-40-year-old police officer’s
question as she was read her Miranda rights. Or the statements the middle-aged detective
whose name was Delilah Jones kept on asking her. She couldn’t believe it with her own two
aqua eyes. Her whole world after the flames of her hell on earth were extinguished was gone.
No other word to describe it. Just…gone. She just somehow knew that no matter what
happened, her life was never going to be the same ever again. There was just one thing that
baffled her as she was forcefully placed into the back of a squad car, miles and miles of caution
tape surrounding the-then “crime scene.” Why, in the name of everything that is good and holy,
were there sunflower petals found stuffed inside of their throats? A seemingly age-old question
was answered in just a matter of moments when Blaire turned her attention to the side of the
window she was facing, glancing at something peculiar in the rose bushes of the McMurtles’
next door.
Once her eyes became fixated and cleared from the mist of her tears, she soon wished
that they hadn’t. For in the distance, shrouded in the green leaves of the shrub, stood a figure. A
strange figure. An otherworldly figure. A monster. An unfamiliar monster. A blue monster. A blue,
furry monster. A blue, furry monster with green patches all around his body. A blue, furry
monster with green patches all around his body…named Buffido holding something in his
hands. And in his palms? Why, noneother than the missing eyes of her Nana and Papa. With a
sinister grin growing on his face revealing an endless maw of sharp, broken teeth, Blaire
couldn’t believe her own eyes. The creature she had conjured up in her mind had manifested
itself into reality! An embodiment of pure evil. But how? How could that have been? And then
she remembered the suspicious typewriter she found hidden in the wall, dating her desires way
back when a few week prior. She had realized that she had gotten what she had wanted. She
had gotten most of the holes inside of her filled from the adrenaline. She had gotten that
dreaded first line just right. She had finally began to make something of herself as a writer.
But at what cost?