One Saturday morning, a little before noon, all the writers went away. Where they went, no one knew.

But everybody was always talking about it. “Know what I wish? Wish I knew of a writer who would write things. Really write them, not just spell. Where did they all go off to, I wonder?”

“Beats me. I guess I would sell my kidneys to hear a real story. After all the writers ran off, there was nobody left to write about how or why they had gone and done it. Makes me feel right holler inside.” A writer could have said something more like what they really felt. Too bad no writers were around to say it.

No one had seen them go, but all over the world, sentences had broken off, desk chairs went empty next to half filled coffee cups, and nervous cats shredded and ate the notebook paper rough drafts they had left behind. Families, friends, and cats were left to grieve.

But mostly, everybody was confused. Before, writers had been everywhere. There was a saying that they were as common as cockroaches and almost as respected. Hairdressers. Politicians. Coaches. So many had been writers, or said they were. Few were paid much and most, not at all. Some writers were more skilled than others, but even the best struggled to get noticed.

Some fought each other to work at slave-wage writing jobs so they could claim the title of “professional writer.” Others begged people to take their books for free so they could make a name for themselves, but even many of the most talented failed to get readers and died unknown. Thousands of hopeful manuscripts died in Publishing Houses, buried in paper mountains which publishers called the “slush piles.”

For all the writers to go away was too strange for words. It was like the moon had vanished forever from the night sky.

Ad agency employers flooded job websites with writing positions. As they always had, they warned about their high expectations and scrawny budgets. But this time there were no takers. In fact, no matter how much money they offered, no one answered. No one queried. Book publishers waded through the slush piles like starving dogs in a junkyard, desperate to find a hidden gem in the paper stacks to sell.

Some publishers only shrugged at first. They assumed new writers would swarm in to replace the old. But it turned out that anyone of any age with any story-telling talent or a want to write had gone away.

A strange phenomenon occurred: writer sightings. Blurry video footage emerged, and it became common for a kid to say something like, “Ma, I saw one, I saw a real writer who looked interested in what he wrote,” to which she would reply, “Yes dear, sure you did, now eat your rutabagas.”

For a while chaos gripped the world. In the end it was the talent-less “grammarians” that kept it going. Frowning as they worked, the grammarians hated writing but they knew spelling and grammar rules. They punched out dry text for cash, but there was no spirit in any of it.

The gift of story-telling had become a thing of the past. The grammarians were strangers to creativity who slapped down barely functional sentences that were never any fun to read. They were like singers with screechy voices who could not carry a tune. Reading anything by them meant wincing.

But somebody had to plop down text, or the world would shut down. Despite their big salaries, they were the unhappiest people on the planet, ditch-digging word sloggers who cursed and gnawed their knuckles red as they worked.

Because of them the world went on. But it was not the same. The new songs had no words. Movies were all special effects with no story. Politicians had to say what they were really thinking because there was nobody to write what they were supposed to think before they said it.

But more than anything, the world missed stories. Nobody had thought much of them when they were everywhere. But it turned out that stories had woven together the messy details of daily life. Given them meaning.

One spring day the promise of meaning turned up in an unlikely place: a hospital. There, a boy was born who at first glance did not look like much. When he turned five, he was small for his age because he had been sick a lot when he was a baby, but he did a shocking thing. Almost as amazing, his parents had photographed him during the act and captured the look of joy in his eyes. He had written a story. It was three sentences long: “I sed I wonted a puppy butt Ma sed no. I made a sad face and koffed hard till she sed ok. Now I hav a puppy i love him.”

The story-teller became an overnight celebrity. His image was blasted over the airwaves. His three sentence story was read and reread. He was dubbed “The Boy Who Loves to Write.” With all the encouragement, he practiced and got better at writing.

But the world was still missing something, a context, an identity, a sense of where it was in place and time. So when the boy was 11, a teacher came to him. She knelt beside his desk and asked him if he could write a story that would “reflect back” the world as he saw it. It could be made-up as long as it seemed true to him.

He almost said no. How could a kid “reflect” the whole world? But at last he decided to try. He sat down with a sheet of paper and a number 2 pencil. He drummed his fingers against his neck. He nibbled on his eraser. He tapped his feet. He thought and thought until inside him something flickered, and a thrill shot through him. He leaned over and wrote:

One Saturday morning, a little before noon, all the writers went away. Where they went, no one knew...