The last chapter is not an amazing story, though it feels like it.

How do adventures suddenly appear in one’s mind? Writers who love their work say that the mystery is a part of the magic. No explanation.

Imagination is an old soul. Someone whispers in the spirit, speaks softly of a bright world and the creatures there with joys and sorrows and despairs and victories, the tale finished and beautiful except for the words. Writers swirl images to match the action they see, remember the dialogue from beginning to the end. Simply insert letters, periods, and commas, and the story is ready to ski down the slopes of booksellers.

Stories are wrought not with committees and grammar, they spring from a mystery that touches our own silent imagination. Questions hold us puzzled for years, then a storm of answers come sudden from the unknown, arrows from a bow we’ve never seen.

So it was for me. When I stopped writing the fourth part, the story of Jonathan Seagull was done.

I read the fourth part over and again, at the time. It would never be true! Would the seagulls who followed Jonathan’s answers kill the spirit of flight with ritual?

That chapter said it could be. I didn’t believe it. Three parts told the whole of it, I thought, doesn’t need a fourth: a desert sky, dusty words to smother joy, almost. It doesn’t need to be printed.

So, why didn’t I burn it?

Don’t know. I put it away, the last part of the book believed in itself when I didn’t. It knew what I refused: the forces of rulers and ritual slowly, slowly will kill our freedom to live as we choose.

All that time passed; half a century, forgotten.

Sabryna found the story not long ago, ragged and faded, squashed under useless business papers.

“Do you remember this?”

“Remember what?” I said. “No.”

I read some paragraphs. “Oh. I remember, sort of. This was . . .”

“Read it.” A smile for the antique manuscript she’d found, which had touched her.

The typewriter’s letters were faded. The language was an echo of mine, though, way back then, a sense of what I was. It was not my writing; it was his writing, the kid from then.

The manuscript ended, and filled me with his warning and his hope.

“I knew what I was doing!” he said. “In your twenty-first century, hemmed about with authority and ritual, it’s strapped now to strangle freedom. Don’t you see? It’s planning to make your world safe, not free.” He lived his story, last chance. “My time’s gone. Yours isn’t.”

I thought about his voice again, the last chapter. Are we seagulls looking at the end of freedom in our world?

Part Four, printed at last where it belongs, says maybe not. It was written when nobody knew the future. Now we do.

—Richard Bach

Spring 2013