I typed up the last part of one of the paragraphs of my thesis and sighed. “Thank God that’s done.” I stood up.

“Leaving?” my friend asked, sitting next to me at a different computer.

I nodded. “Yeah, finally. I don’t think I can stare at that thing anymore.” I picked up my backpack and stuffed my laptop in it. “See you next week, Matt?”

“Yep, see you.” He went back to typing. I grabbed my car keys and my backpack and walked out of the front doors of the library. It was the only place on campus where I could find some sort of solitude. That’s how Matt and I met. We happened to always be sitting near each other working on homework. We got to talking one night on the way to our cars, and I learned a few things about him. It turned out he was looking into grad school. As a graduate student myself, I found I could answer a lot of his questions. I pulled my jacket around myself a little tighter, the night air chilling me to my bones. My mom always said I needed to eat more. I was the skinniest Italian she’d ever seen. I continued walking as fast as my skinny legs could carry me.

My frozen thumb hit the lock button and my old Nissan Sentra honked at me from a row away. “There you are.” The heat and A/C didn’t work quite right in my little automobile. It was either extremely warm or extremely cold. A lot of things didn’t work quite right with her, but she got me where I needed to go and that was all I cared about. On this night, I was grateful for the warmth. The green lights lit up on the dashboard and radio, and I saw what time it was.

“Damn it.” I’d promised my boss I’d call her by nine. I work full time managing a local movie theater, but my district manager had said she wanted to discuss something with me. It was almost midnight. I made the decision to call her in the morning. A thirty-minute drive home and five Fall Out Boy songs later, I shuffled up to the door of my small apartment. I opened the thin door and was greeted by a huge mound of fur.

“Hey, Lucy!” I scratched between her brown and black ears. “How’s my big girl?”

“She’s really sweet.”

I jumped ten feet into the air. I hadn’t noticed the woman sitting at my dining room table.

“Who the hell are you?” I backed against the wall. I looked down at my dog patiently sitting, her tail wagging slowly back and forth. My sole purpose for getting a Doberman was for protection. So much for that.

The woman stood up. She had on a leather jacket and dark jeans. Her boots looked better suited for a man than a woman. “You really don’t recognize me, Nathan?”

“H-how do you know my name?” I reached into my pocket for my cell phone.

“That really hurts. One look and I thought you’d know instantly.” She took a step towards me.

“Don’t come any closer!” I held out my hand and showed her my phone with the other. “I’m calling the cops.”

She held up her hands. “Ok,” she started off slowly, “Ok, I can see that you’re a little frazzled. Take a good look at me. Really look at me. Notice anything?”

I studied her face. She had long dark hair. The deepest shade of brown right before being classified as black. Her skin was the definition of olive. She had soft full lips that had a deep shade of perfectly applied lipstick. As I said these things to myself in my head, I realized something. I’d heard these descriptions before, but where?

She moved a stray hair out of her face and I gasped as the answer came to me. “This isn’t possible,” I whispered. “There’s no way.”

“What’s not possible?”

“Maria?” I choked out. For as long as I can remember I’d been writing. Whether it was poems or stories, I was always putting the intricate thoughts of my head onto paper. Maria was one of the first characters that I had ever created. She was the lone girl in a band of brothers in an adventure story. She could hold her own, was quick witted, and funny.

She smiled. “Nice to meet you, Nathan.”

“B-but…you’re a…a…character! A fictional, written out, character! You’re not real!”

“Trust me, I’m just as freaked out as you are. I’ve been waiting in this house for a couple of hours. Now can I sit down, or do you still want to call the cops?”

I put my phone down. “I guess you can sit down.”

She crossed the room and sat down on the couch. As I moved to sit in the chair across from her, I tried to remember all I’d written about her. She was around twenty-three years old and was part of a small, close-knit family of which she was the only female. She and her brothers would ride around the country getting themselves into trouble either with the law or worse. In the short story that I had written she and her brothers had gotten entangled in the Italian mafia while partying in New York.

“I need your help,” she said. I sat down and Lucy lay down at my feet.

“With what?”

“I need to go back into my story,” she said bluntly. She stared straight at me.

“How?”

“By finishing my story. It’s the only reason I can think of that would explain everything. You never finished writing. One moment I’m about to try and break my brother out of an underground bunker and the next I’m in your living room.”

I shook my head. “I would love to, but I don’t even know where your story is. I wrote that years ago. It was just a little short piece. A one and done.”

“Well then write it again because I’m not spending the rest of my life stuck in this damn universe,” she snapped. A chill ran down my spine as I realized that there was a very real possibility of this woman having a gun on her and was most likely not afraid to use it. But would it work even if she technically wasn’t a real person? I wasn’t going to try to find out.

“Follow me,” I said standing up.

“Where are we going?” she asked. She followed me into my bedroom and to the closet. I reached up and pulled down a couple of boxes from the top shelf. I dusted them off and opened the brown cardboard on one of them. “What are these?” She picked up one of the papers. I saw the title of one of my high school papers on the top.

“Some of my old school stuff from high school. There is a very small chance that your story might be in one of these,” I said.

We started taking everything out. Some of the stuff brought back memories. The Shakespeare paper I’d been so proud of. My language arts teacher had thought I’d captured the meaning of the “To be or not to be” speech perfectly. I found my young writers award that my school gave out. It was for a poem I had written about the anxiety of being a teenager. Creative writing had always been my thing. My go-to style of writing form and expression.

“You’re really good at this stuff,” Maria said. She was right. I’d gotten my undergraduate degree in English and was going to school to get my master’s in Journalism. “It looks like, I mean, why’d you stop writing stories?” She looked at me.

“I didn’t want to. I really didn’t. But writing novels and stories is hard and it’s even harder to make a living out of it.” I pulled the last couple of papers out of the box and started putting everything back in it.

“So, what do you write now?”

“Articles mostly. I’d like to work for The Wall Street Journal one day.” I opened the second box, some pieces of it ripping as I pulled at the tape.

“News. Sounds like a blast,” she quipped.

“As long as it pays the bills,” I said.

“Amen to that.” We started going through the second one. After a few minutes of paper rustling and silence, I heard the sharp intake of a breath. “I found it!”

She handed me the faded piece of paper and I quickly read some of the lines. In messy, teenage boy handwriting, were the words detailing Maria about to execute her plan to rescue her brother Ryan. I looked at her and she looked at me.

“Start writing.”

“Yep.” I rushed over to my desk and got out a pen. “Ok, so how do you want this to pan out?”

“Well, I’d like to survive if it’s alright with you,” she scoffed.

“I know, but how?”

She thought for a second. After a few minutes of concentration, she took a deep breath and began to tell me how she’d execute her plan. I started furiously writing, stopping her whenever I needed to fill in stuff.

“This is trippy,” she said once when I had stopped her to write a little bit.

“What is?”

“Well, I mean, when do you get to just plan out your life?” She looked down at the papers.

“You know I didn’t think I’d written you this philosophical.”

She playfully shoved me and laughed. “Just keep writing.”

A few hours later I was finishing up the last few sentences when she put her hand on mine. “Thank you,” she said. “For believing me.”

“Everything about you is exactly the way I imagined you would be. Down to the way that you walk. I had no choice,” I said.

The corner of her mouth lifted a little. “Well thanks anyway,” She crossed her fingers. “Let’s hope this works.”

I wrote the last couple of words and put my pen down and I looked at her. Nothing happened. I looked back down at the paper.

“Maybe there’s something-” I turned to look back at her but all I saw was my closet. The sunlight was beginning to crawl its way up the doors. I began to try to process what had just happened. I had stayed up all night with one of my characters. One of my characters appeared in my apartment and I was forced to write her back into her story. I shook my head and looked at the clock. Six a.m. I might be able to get a few hours of sleep before calling my boss. I shrugged and walked into the kitchen to feed Lucy.

While I was pouring the food into the bowl my mind was going over the conversation I’d had with Maria while going through the boxes. Spending time with her and writing a story again had been the most fun I’d had in weeks. Maybe her coming out of her world had been for more than just because her story wasn’t finished. I remembered seeing at least seven other unfinished works of fiction. Lucy finished her meal and came and put her head in my lap.

“Think I should finish some of those stories?” She looked up at me. “Yeah, I think so too.”