Wild Fiction

‘I’m a bit tired,’ he confessed. ‘I think I’ll come as far as Possum Lane and then go to the cottage. I feel like a proper bed tonight. I’m sure you’ll be just fine with Conrad as your bodyguard.’
Riter W. Doog was sitting on a stool at the bar staring at the door when she entered The Rising Sun. His face lit up in a smile when he saw her. She looked around the shabby room decorated with Guinness posters and shamrocks and saw a few people clumped together drinking. The stained carpet covering the floor was worn through in patches and from it the odour of years of spilt ale rose and mixed with stagnant cigarette smoke.
Without looking directly at him she walked up to the bar and took up a stool next to him.
‘Would you like something to drink?’ he asked quietly.
‘Guinness,’ she replied.
‘Half a pint of Guinness,’ he said to the barman.
‘Pint,’ Rebecca snapped at him.
‘Sorry, pint,’ he said turning back to the barman.
Neither of them spoke while they waited for Rebecca’s drink. Rebecca could feel the barman’s eyes on her and squirmed in her seat. The barman served her drink and moved away to attend to a tall skinny man with an equally skinny and even taller woman. Rebecca turned her head towards Retir. ‘I’m listening,’ she said.
‘You’re fictional aren’t you?’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m a member of the Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Fictionals, or SPCF for short. We’re very small and very few people have ever heard of us. Most authors that write books are not capable of making their characters come into the real world and interact with us. Apart from your creator, there is only one other that has come close in the last fifty years to developing their ability to do that.’
‘Who?’
‘J.K.Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. She’s hinted in her books about the connection but to date she hasn’t actually made it. Her characters, brilliant as they are, have still not made the jump into our world.’
‘The stuff she writes is all fantasy though, that doesn’t belong here in the arena of Real Fiction. We don’t have wizards and magic and dragons.’