It was the front page that, in the dreams of journalists, visited in the image of a demon. Their toes, their fingers, their eyes, it nibbled them all until they awoke drenched as a sponge. It haunted and it delighted. How else could one splash words right into the eyes of passerby’s. But, of two-hundred journalists at The Great Curd Times, only one was gifted full front-matter access. The Great Curd Times was a battlefield, choked with reams of smoke and pickle juices, armed with pens and shots of typewriter keys delivering blows to virgin papers. The smoke came from the cigars, the pickle juice from the large sandwiches from the deli down the street, which you could hardly hook a jaw around. Eyes were bitter, glances so sharp they could cut. At the day’s end, doctors and medics hung around the front door of The Great Curd Times, for there was always demand.

The Great Curd Times’s response? They hired copy-editors, then copy-copy-editors, and then a train of managerial positions: copy-editor director, manager of copy-editor director, and senior managerial copy-editor senior director II. Each came with a whip of their own shaping, and lashed the conflict at its core. But none could balance the brawl for the only page on the newspaper that was worth throwing a sock at.

Eventually someone was struck: a young intern (they are always young for reasons that tales misconstrue innocence and brilliance). Early to the office for a breakfast bagel, the intern was about to stride into The Great Curd Times when, as luck would have it, he found himself in the flight path of a blue, floral dress. The dress had taken it upon itself to unhook from the wire of a third story laundry line and, with the marksmanship of a caffeinated sparrow, had timed its descent so as to strike the youth right between his two eyes. Before contact, the youth was deeply ruminating on one subject: cream cheese. Being in a state of cream cheese cognition, he escaped from under the dress, found his feet, and slapped them around until he was at his desk, where stood up, cleared his throat, and spun to face the faces around him. “Why?” did he say, “does there have to be just one front and the rest the back, or the middle, or the drab bits that cling together and we must employ a pair of tweezers?” And here was the real nut of the fruit: “Why not everything, every story, short or long, all the eulogies, destinies, fortunes, mails from fans and mail about fans, car reviews, movie previews, or even some parts made see-through – why not all of it on one page! Front first, front last!” The faces were shocked. First, because an intern had spoken without being spoken to. Second, because one of the managerial senior-drirectors-cut copy-cutters managers did not bend to tradition and saw the vision straight off. He declared, “Front first, front last!” The voice of such an esteemed employee carried weight. A choir of “Front first, front last!” began and did not stop for an hour and another two.

That day and that night it took twenty men and twenty glue sticks to assemble the paper. But they did it while shaking hands and sharing smiles, for every one of them had made it on the front page. One would point a finger at the paper and say, “Look there, that’s my piece right on the front,” and the other would say, “Ah yes, so it is! Well done. And right next to it,” and another finger saddles up by the side, “Mine too,” then both would grin and sup their coffee which was brown dirt with hot water really.

They put this together, this single page with only a front, and when they stood back to admire it they had to climb up to the rafters to see it in one glance. But what a thing it was. There the words: “BREAKING: The King Claims Himself Dead.” And right next to it: “Beautification Through Transhumanization – Come and Get a Free Spritz!” And a rant above both of these on why the virus, gulcroxifoxica, which exclusively collapses the lungs of seagulls in seconds, should be released on the shores of Cornwall. If that was not to your delight, taste this: the face of a man with a third ear right where his nose would have been and the text, “Abomination? Or Orifice Miracle Listener?” Who could not help but look all over that one? And to read it was impossible from where they were sat, up so high, that they had to pass around a big magnifying glass of which they only owned one. Each took their turn to admire it in elevated magnification. It took two days, correcting for the time that Rupert, the lead copy-editor undirector, slipped from the rafters and tore off the column on the “Flat Galaxy Theory.” But they reprinted that part and patch it with a seam that only someone who knitted with electrons might scrutinize.

And this feat, this affront to front-pagism, they were so proud of it that all of them, hand-in-hand, with a corner a-piece, as the page was a thirty-two-sided polygon, they carried it down to the first newsagent on the corner. The owner greeted them excitedly, for he was a geometer in his free time, and he provided detailed proofs on how to move it through the door, around the corner, and over to the newsstand. But when they got there it was clear he had miscalculated. The owner had failed to factor in constraints for the newsstand itself. For, no matter which way they turned it – and they tried all thirty-two sides, twice to be certain – the all-front frontispiece just wouldn’t fit. At crowd had followed the paper parade inside. Someone from it said, “Why not remove the other papers on the newsstand to make room?” This, the newsagent owner scolded and said that that he would not do, for he ran an impartial institute.

The band of writers and editors and directors and managerial junior squatters, like a reception of elated coffin couriers, backed out of that store in reverse, intent to try the next newsagent. But again the same problem faced them there. And with every place they went to, not one of them had a stand with a space big enough for a paper so large. After their fifty-first store had rejected them, dejection finally set in and then they became hungry. They considered returning to their office for sandwiches and a plan, but it had started to rain. Trapped inside the store, they considered drastic measures: the paper, yes, would sustain them all for an hour. They agreed to start at the corners and work their way in. Before the first teeth could sink deep, a shadow cast over them all.

At the door to the fifty-first store stood a sodden figure. A trench coat that was a drenched coat wrapped his shoulders, for the coat was a false brand and advertised water-resistance as water-proofing. The figure had no eyes to see, for his eyebrows had grown into brushes which had swept them away and, it appeared, swept the rest of his face away because all the parts were so small. When he spoke, which he did now, the editors looked from forehead to chin for where the mouth was but gave up. What he spoke was one word, but once it was spoken it could not be unspoken, such is how the way it works when others are around to hear you speak. He spoke thus: “Origami.” And the ground shook like a thousand hot suns. The walls rattled like they were made of snakes a-hundred. Somewhere a sound came from everywhere and from another realm and it was both angelic and unclean. In the crowd, someone fainted. And the newspaper, the one-page front-pager, it began to ripple like a great being had collected all the oceans in the basin of a drum and thrummed a tune within, without concern for the safety of its fingers. The ripples were of all types: short and long, they had amplitudes and frequencies, perturbances and disturbances, periodicities plenty, and if one counted them you could feel how golden their inter-ratios were.

Faces all along the page bent under this rippling, the mouths folded in crinkled valleys and one eye would grow twice the size of its counterpart. It was grotesque, but it did impress! The editors clung with their fingers but they were so fearful of tearing the paper by holding it that half of them had to let go. This caused a curious phenomenon which the man with only eyebrows watched with pride. When sixteen corners of the paper were released, whipped by the ripples, they arced like a spine of a circular organism, to come to rest exactly where the other sixteen corners were. Again a great whip shook eight more corners free, and these rested where the other eight corners, now four-papers deep, stood. And the paper became a lasagna before their eyes. It folded almost twenty times and each time doubled in height so that soon it higher than their noses.

Everyone was astonished and the owner of the fifty-first store ran outside and away to the local river to bathe himself. He believed in ghosts and the afterlife and these unclean powers he feared. But look now, the soaked people outside and the dry people inside were saying, and everyone looked. What before had been one paper was now a stack of many, each a-hundred times smaller than the paper they had birthed from. Then the editors looked at one another, exchanged very editorial nods, the writers met eyes, traded pens, the directors discussed in silence, shared serious looks, the copy-editor managerial directors – only two of them – shed a tear, wiped away the others. And they all knew exactly what to do. Each held out one ring finger, their thirty-two fingers together supporting the width of that folded paper. They carried it carefully – for it was fragile – and placed it in the one spot on the newsstand where it could fit. It fit well.

The applause that followed lasted until the moon rose.