Ermanno Pullar sometimes found himself wondering if he was only a very minor character in a vast meta-narrative, and he found these thoughts unsettling. Didn’t old Bill Shakespeare write, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” or something like that? Whoever wrote it, it didn’t quite sit right with him. Lately, he had gotten the strange idea that he only existed because someone received a strange spam email from someone with a strange name that amused the recipient.

He found ways of distracting himself from these thoughts. Lately, he had started writing Ficlets, and recently, he even started inserting himself into them. “How self-indulgent can you get?” he thought. He probably wasn’t the first Ficlet writer to insert himself into a Ficlet, and he probably wouldn’t be the last.

Ermanno was struggling to find an ending for the Ficlet he was working on, and all of a sudden…