Too Many Miniatures

 The word-keeper as pen-sharpener looked askance at his creations laid end to end on his work table. He had carved so many words they had spilled and spelled onto the floor, and some were still spilling and spelling, then making a flattened tower of babble with once meaningful sounds. A surface of sharpened words. Yet, the words he had left to him to create on the work table were in relentless supply, and he employed the time remaining to form them into a new pattern of kept words, hand-shuffled from the edge of the work table before there was another sudden rush for a floor covering centred around a carpet. So, he maintained a targeted rescuing of ‘carpet’, time and time again, as it was honed and bored from his pen-keeping. He knew no word creation, especially a very short one, however many miniatures he managed in a lifetime, could possibly start with a carpet — even Henry James would find that difficult whatever words this writer stuffed into lengthier lengths of paragraphing. Meanwhile, our pen-keeper or word-sharpener figured he knew of one such work, still residing on his shelves, safe from spillage to the floor’s latest spell of magic, and he picked it carefully from between two other books and started reading it as inspiration, and was shocked to find it did not in fact start with a carpet, but with a prelude that pre-empted any mention of the carpet, a prelude he had quite forgotten having created and now it was becoming a potential epilogue to his life, so he went straight back to the very start of this current active word preservation and inserted it thus above as the actual title, even if the context could not possibly be co-opted to support its anticipated thematic usage at that point. Then he noticed he’d colloquially left his slippers upstairs and had walked here in bare feet, and was thus marooned forever at his work table and he set about deleting ‘carpet’ from wherever it appeared in this latest creation, starting at its beginning.