He hangs up the phone and curls up right there in the bathroom.

After a good ten minutes of that, he stands up, snaps his shirt, and gets to it.

He starts writing. He has a pen in there and he doesn’t stop until every square inch of the bathroom is covered in script, each word building on the last until it becomes a humming musical spell. He uses every language imaginable and some that aren’t, and all the words join together and merge into one another somehow so that they all become sections of the same word. The word is one that has been scattered and hidden all over every language of the world, but he knows what it is, he knows how it feels in the mouth, he knows what it does, and he knows how to recreate it.

He goes on writing all night, making sure every dot, every curl, every serif, every leg to every letter is just right, because it’s not so much knowing what the word is or how to write it down, but the exact way that it’s written.

Light eventually starts to peek in through the window, blue and cold like it’s filtering through the bottom of a lake.

With the final few letters, everything begins to change. Not just inside his own head or inside the bathroom, but everywhere in the world. Trees and rocks begin to move slightly, buildings recognize the movements and move as well. Roads and towns and cities and rivers and mountains and oceans all move

just

so.

And everything is where it should be. Everything’s ok. Everything’s working just fine and nothing is where it shouldn’t be anymore.

That’s how the story is supposed to go.