The Manuscript I the Secret by Blanca Miosi, Gretchen Abernathy

been stretched out reading, she was shocked to see a crab burying the glasses under the sand. In the blink of an eye they disappeared, and though she swept the sand away, dug down, and jammed her hand into the hole left by the crab, she could not find them. She sat and wept in frustration. She did not have another pair, and she could not work without them. She could not do anything. She cursed the nasty creature and cursed herself for having gone to the beach to read in the first place.
     
    Linda stopped reading. His great novel was about a burglar crab? She made a herculean effort to control the guffaw rising in her throat. What about Mengele and his formula for eternal youth? Nicholas was so full of shit. So this story was her supposed rival. She had no desire to keep reading. She was, in truth, a terrible reader. Linda preferred TV, going to the movies, or anything besides wasting hours in front of pieces of paper. She thought it was the most boring thing in the world, a complete loss of time, though her habits were hardly any more noble. She wasted time on one trivial activity after another.
    She put the manuscript back where she found it and returned to the room Nicholas had assigned to her.
    As soon as he awoke, Nicholas looked for the manuscript. He sighed with relief to see it was still open on the desk. He was afraid the story he had been reading would have disappeared; at the same time, he was surprised it had not changed yet since that seemed to be the manuscript’s pattern.
    He yawned, stretched, and grabbed the manuscript to keep reading. It was blank. His heart skipped a beat. He flipped the pages back and forth, but there was nothing, not even one line. He closed it, hoping to repeat the ritual from the beginning, but when he opened it again, it remained blank. There was no other story; everything had simply vanished.
    He stumbled out of the room and ran into Linda.
    “What’s going on?” she asked, seeing him as pale as if a vampire had sucked all his blood.
    “It got erased.”
    “What?”
“The manuscript got erased.”
    “Had you written a lot? Don’t you have it on the computer?”
    “No. I don’t have it anywhere. It was the best novel, the novel of a lifetime...”
    “About the burglar crab?”
    Nicholas stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
    “Oh, nothing.”
    Nicholas grabbed her arm and studied her face. “What are you talking about? What have you done?”
    “Me? Nothing. I just went to sleep. I don’t get it. How can you write a novel and not have a copy in your files if it really was, like you keep saying, the best thing you’ve written?”
    “I don’t have a copy! The novel got erased! What part of that do you not understand?” He stormed into his room, grabbed the blank manuscript, and waved it in her face. “Look, there’s nothing here!”
    Linda took it from him and flipped the pages. “That’s unbelievable. The stuff I read isn’t here. Are you sure this is the same manuscript?”
    “Did you say ‘stuff you read’? Linda, if you did something to my novel, I swear I’ll...”
    “Nicholas, calm down, it’s ok. Last night I went in your room to get the manuscript. All I read was one paragraph about a crab that hid a woman’s glasses in the sand. It didn’t seem very good to me, so I put it back where it was.”
    “Oh, God, so it was you...”
    “I swear, Nicholas, I didn’t do anything to it. I left everything like it was,” she insisted.
    Nicholas wheeled around and shut himself in his room. He had to, to keep himself from committing some atrocity. He looked at the manuscript on the desk. The sheen of the silver green binding seemed to mock him with a wink. He went up close and studied it. He closed it, opened it again; but nothing changed. He went out and found Linda.
    “I need you to leave right now.”
    “Nicholas...I don’t have anywhere to go.”
    “Please, don’t make me kick you out. I need to be alone, completely alone.”
    “Just