This story by alumnus Alicja Madloch ’15 was written during the summer before her freshman year of college.
SOMETHING
She was one of the few people who actually looked up words she didn’t know in books. She’d lift the ancient Oxford dictionary that lived on the crusty table in the back of the bookstore, banging it against the surface unforgivingly until it landed in her lap. The table was covered in indentations caused by these endeavors. She could feel them as she ran her hand over it absentmindedly, immersed in a book.
This was her library, her people lived here inside the pages. They would live on as she traveled away to college, a girl without any friends past the bell attached to the door at the front of the shop. The little kid inside her thought it was unfair that her dad was making her go to college. There was unfinished business here, unfinished books. She bet they did not want her to leave anymore than she wanted to leave them.
Her mother had always said that book was a perfectly adequate substitute for reality. Then again, her mother was dead. She felt a shiver when she realized that she received the announcement of her mother’s death in a very similar situation. They were supposed to move from the town, away from the bookstore and their two-bedroom shack of a house, but after her mother drowned in the bathtub, there was nowhere else for her to go. The checks from her dad kept on coming; he didn’t particularly want her to live with him.
This, this was home. But now was finally the time to go. She closed the dictionary and Grapes of Wrath (newly banned from her school reading list and therefore intriguing) and pushed back the stool she was perched on. She was to move into Sarah Lawrence College tomorrow and she hadn’t even bothered to start packing yet. She got up, but before she could turn off the bare bulb that provided the illumination she needed to read her novel, it turned off by itself.
Something must have short-circuited… her thought trailed off; she didn’t know how anything like that work, who was she kidding. There were no employees in sight but just as well, she wasn’t going to read any more anyway. The hallway in front of her stretched in the dim light that was coming through the window in the front door. The logo of the bookstore seemed splayed across a nearby pillar; a mirror replica of it present deep inside the skin of her wrist in ink.
A shiver of nausea rippled in her brain making it hard for her to see. She was prone to migraines, but this was something different altogether. She struggled to find the place from which she’d taken The Grapes of Wrath before replacing the book on its shelf… and somehow missing. The book flew from where she had sandwiched it between two other volumes and collapsed unto the floor in a dull explosion. She grabbed her head in both hands, inexplicably frightened by the sound.
An ominous feeling was creeping its way down her spine, her feet getting heavier as she shoved her way forward against the surprisingly thick air. Her heart pounded as though she were running a marathon and breathing was becoming more difficult, as though the thick air was paralyzing her lungs, preventing them from properly performing their function. She’d had anxiety attacks before but nothing like this.
Reaching the door, she wrapped her pale fingers around its curved silver handle. The door didn’t move. She pushed. The door remained closed, as if something heavy were jammed against it. Looking out its window, though, she couldn’t see anything that could be having that effect on it.
She was exhausted, drained from her attempts to… could you call this “escape?” The people passing by outside the street did not even spare her a glance. How could things be so normal while she was so terrified. She mustered up the rest of her energy and banged against the glass. Nothing. No response, no gazes, no indication that anyone heard her attempts to communicate at all.
That was it, all the strength she had in her expelled into the world with no answer. She’d have smiled to herself if she had the capability to move her face. After all those heroic stories she’d read, after all the fights she’d imagined, after all the thoughts she’d had whilst picturing herself as her favorite heroes and heroines, this is how she behaved when something out of the ordinary happened.
It was rather funny in a sad sort of way.
Jeff came back from his lunch break. He’d taken the liberty of an extra hour at the coffee shop
with that new barista with the purple hair, but no one came into that all bookstore anymore
except for that skinny blonde chick and she’d never steal anything. He was rather in a good mood
too, 10-digit number crinkling in his jean pocket.
He saw her when he unlocked the door, the brass bell chiming over his head. It was the girl. The
skinny blonde girl was lying on the floor, maybe a foot from the entrance, prostrate on the floor,
one hand curled in a fist.
And she wasn’t breathing. Jeff didn’t see her chest rise or fall and, mustering up all the lowlife
courage he had, he even checked her pulse.
Nothing. Not. A. Thing.
She watched the boy come inside and look at her body. Or rather gawk, turning almost as pale as she was. Funny, she used to think he was kind of cute. She didn’t feel anything now.
Except a book. Those she could touch.
This might not be so bad after all.
Jeff heard a book fall to the floor from an aisle near him. Without even thinking his fingers were
fishing out his cellphone and dialing 911. In his panic Jeff didn’t realize that the screen was dead.
If he tried to use the landline next he’d get only dial tone.
Then again, some company would be nice, she thought. Making her way towards the boy.