Imagine you work the night shift stocking shelves in a grocery store with seven other misfit insomniacs. It’s a new job in a new town. You are still fairly young; a bit green and romantic (if you were ever those things), though you like to believe you’re not. The store opens at 6. A dark summer’s morning lingers outside. The overhead music has looped. You know this because Don’t Get Me Wrong by the Pretenders is playing for the second time that shift. It’s 5:15 AM. Time to ditch. Once outside you leap on your bicycle, peddle up that first hill, then ride straight downtown like a dewy arrow into the town’s slumbering heart. The town is quaint. Quiet. There is still a quality of discovery for you here. At the large pond near Town Hall you dump your bike in the grass. There is a gazebo that seems to float, strung with a tangle of white lights, and the moon is an 8o watt bulb hanging in a mirror of water. This is your reading room. You’ve been following this routine since you started your new job. You are nearly finished One Hundred Years of Solitude. Later, when the sun peeks a reddened eye over the tree line and the first twisting scents of breakfast steal over the sidewalks, you will find a Diner. But for now, you open Marquez’s novel and think ‘this book might as well be bound in a jacket cut from magic carpet’. You feel its gentle tug, playful, and in your hands it catches the tail of a zephyr and suddenly you’re like one of Chagall’s exalted figures rising over the town, or the Dude led by his bowling ball above the city of Los Angeles; only the environment you see below is a labyrinthine village constantly reshaping itself . You are flying in circles above this village and its inhabitants at about the height of the smallest mountain (which is pretty high indeed), and there are tiny tornadoes and dust devils starting to form on the ground. In the air there is a fall of tiny yellow flowers and a butterfly that’s all up in your face. The village people *cough* are looking up, pointing at some marvel in the sky that isn’t you after all, but a passing airplane. The book sputters in your hand, as if it had an engine and you fall a few meters before you catch another current of air. Must be running out of magic juice. Below a train rolls past filled with oversized bananas (when you see this you wish you could take people from other books and place them in the one you’re reading, for instance, poor Vardaman would shit his pants seeing all those bananas!). The villagers have gathered around a light bulb and you notice that you’re in a tailspin, but luckily there are plenty of hammocks to fall into. Instead you hit the dirt in the courtyard. The town seems a lot less populated than you remember and the dust storm is worsening. You run into a home, where on the floor, ragged and pale, a few carpets shuffle doggedly around. On a table there is a very modern blender which you jam the book into, hitting the button marked ON (why you would do such a thing isn’t really certain; though you are known to be a bit of a whack job). When you’re satisfied it’s been mixed for long enough you empty the contents on the table and discover a mound of tiny metal golden fish. Having finished, you close the book and look out over the pond and the slants of rooftops in the foliage of the town. A new town. A new life. Grab hold, before it's only dust in your palm.