The World Ends at Five & Other Stories by M Pepper Langlinais

picture once more, he noticed a tapping noise. The girl was back, and she was tapping her foot. The author glanced down. The floor was carpet, but the tapping was pronounced, like the click of dress shoes on hardwood.
    “Will you cut that out?” he hissed.
    The reader in front of him drew back; she’d been reaching for the book he’d just signed.
    “Oh no, sorry, not you,” the author told her, offering up the book with a forced show of teeth that was meant to be friendly. The girl snatched it quickly, seemingly afraid of any actual contact. The author swallowed hard. He was really fucking things up.
    Or she was. He looked over again. She was blowing a gigantic pink bubble of gum. And still tapping.
    “Can’t you go away?” he asked her.
    The girl pulled the bubble from her mouth and held it by the gummy end that sealed it into a balloon. “You already know I’m not really here.”
    The author jabbed a finger at the bubble, but the girl pulled it away before he could pop it.
    “I thought you were bringing me a burrito,” he told her.
    “Yeah, but you already had one.”
    “But you should have been back here before the bookstore clerk.”
    “Um . . . Are you on another break?” the man standing in front of the table asked.
    The author turned. “No, not at all. Sorry, I . . . I sometimes get these dialogues in my head . . . Part of writing, you know.”
    “Yeah,” the man replied, although he didn’t sound like he knew at all.
    The author managed to focus on the book signing for another twenty minutes. But the girl started swinging her legs—he could see them out of the corner of his eye, rising and falling, back and forth. “Excuse me,” he said to the next people in line, a young couple. He turned to the girl. “Why are you hanging around here? What do you want?”
    She stopped in mid-swing, legs stuck out straight before her, ankles touching the lip of the table so that her feet were under the tabletop. “Look, you made me up, and you’re the one who keeps imagining me here. So what do you want?”
    “To be left alone!”
    “Then leave me alone,” said the girl.
    “Fine.” The author turned his head in the opposite direction so that he couldn’t see her. After timing a minute on his watch, he turned back.
    “You’re not going away,” he said.
    “Hello! Are you thick?” The girl reached over and rapped her knuckles on the author’s temple, hard. “I can’t go away! I’m not really here! Except that you won’t stop thinking I am!”
    “Okay,” the author said, and again, “okay. I’ll just focus on what I’m doing and forget about you. Then you’ll be gone, right?” Without waiting for an answer, and remembering to smile, he waved forward the couple. They walked up slowly, as if into the mouth of a dark cave.
    He made it the rest of the way through the line without further incident. But when he finished, the girl was still there. She rode with the author in the car to the hotel. And, so far as he knew, she stayed the whole night in the easy chair by the hotel room window.
     
    “There are stories,” the interviewer said, “about you, the storyteller, that are in a lot of ways very much like the fantastic fiction you write.”
    The author cringed inwardly. Two years had passed since the infamous book signing, and if he wrote in any other genre except fantasy/horror, the rumors might have dealt his career a detrimental blow. But as it stood, the notion that he was crazy had boosted his sales. His publisher loved him, even if Terri didn’t.
    “Is she here, right now?” the interviewer asked.
    The author sighed and thought about lying. But he really was tired of pretending to be normal. “Yes,” he finally admitted.
    “Where?”
    He pointed to the chair next to him. “She tends to be on my left.”
    “What does she look like?”
    “This really has nothing to do with my new novel,” the author countered.
    “But isn’t she your muse?”
    “No, she’s just a