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It would be nice to sign his name rather than being a number in a system.
A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.
He still cannot sleep. Now it is three a.m. and Zachary is in the back of his closet, a version of his favorite reading spot when he was a child. A comfort he has not returned to in years and never in this closet, which is ill-suited for such sitting.
Zachary will not admit to himself that he is hiding from it, in the closet where it cannot see him.
But if he’s in a story within a story who is telling it? Someone must have typeset it and bound it in a book. Someone somewhere knows this story.
Reading a book four times in one day is perfectly normal behavior.
He could adjust his route to pass his old dorm but he does not, he always finds it strange to look at a window he used to look out from the other side.
Yeah… like the saying you can never go back home.
vetiver
“Everyone is a part of a story, what they want is to be part of something worth recording. It’s that fear of mortality, ‘I Was Here and I Mattered’ mind-set.”
And there are always those who would watch Alexandria burn. There always have been. There always will be. So there are always guardians.
“Then how do you make sure any given audience member sees the whole narrative?”
Always three sides of a story yours, mine, and the truth.
Drowning Ophelia
He is ninety-four percent certain that Patience and Fortitude are the names of the lions outside the New York Public Library, only a few blocks away.
escutcheons
Book places tend to be more receptive to doors, I think it’s because of the high concentration of stories all in one place.”
A single doll. He wipes the soot from it with his sweater and holds it up to the light. It’s a girl doll, maybe the daughter of the original doll family, painted and porcelain. Cracked, but not broken.
conflagration
“I think the egg was a metaphor.” “Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few metaphors,” Mirabel says.
“Think of time as a river,” he says, drawing a line in the air with his finger. He wears several rings and they glint in the light. “The river flows in one direction. If there is an inlet along that river the water within it does not flow the same way as the rest of the river. The inlet does not follow the same rules. You found an inlet. Sometime, months or perhaps years from now, this girl you speak of finds the same inlet. You both stepped out of the river of time and into another space. A space in which neither of you belonged.”
bibliomancy
“If you were a man lost in time where would you be?” Zachary asks the cat.
“If you were a man lost in time where would you be?” “Don’t you mean when would I be?” “That, too,” Zachary says, smiling despite the realization that the whole locating-a-man-lost-in-time quest might be far more difficult than he’d thought.
Dorian picks up Sweet Sorrows, flipping back and forth between both books. “Who do you think is the pirate?” he asks. “I think the pirate is a metaphor.” “A metaphor for what?” “I don’t know,” Zachary says. He sighs and looks back at the man in his painted cage surrounded by so many keys.
“Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately. Which was your favorite?”
Virtual reality isn’t all that real if it doesn’t smell like anything, a voice remarks in his head.
(Occasionally Fate can pull itself together again and Time is always waiting.)
“Change is what a story is, Ezra,” Mirabel says. “I thought I already told you that.”
The branches of a tree, the canopy of a forest of cherry blossoms, star-sparkling with lanterns and lights though all of that is background for the centerpiece: a tree stump covered in books dripping with honey under a beehive with an owl sitting atop it, wearing a crown.
“It’s important to you, isn’t it?” Eleanor asks. “Yes, it is.” “Important things hurt sometimes.”
She picks up one corner of the pile of paper on the table and attaches it to a hook hung from a rope on the ceiling. She does the same with the other corners and turns a pulley on the wall and the map pieces lift up, attached to each other with ribbons and string. It rises in layers, fluffing up like a multitiered paper cake. The topmost levels are filled with books,
“I’m not trying to get back to the place,” Dorian says. “I’m trying to get back to a person.” Admitting it aloud feels like an affirmation.
She somehow found a pair of boots that fit him, tall and cuffed and quite piratey. They are almost comfortable. Along with his star-buttoned coat he looks like he walked out of a fairy tale.
“We are the stars,” he answers, as though it is the most obvious of facts afloat in a sea of metaphors and misdirections. “We are all stardust and stories.”
“We are words on paper,” he says softly, turning the book over in his hands. “We are coming to the end.”
“Be brave,” she says. “Be bold. Be loud. Never change for anyone but yourself. Any soul worth their star-stuff will take the whole package as is and however it grows. Don’t waste your time on anyone who doesn’t believe you when you tell them how you feel.
They also didn’t like that my answer to “What were you texting him about?” was “The Harry Potter scarf I knit for him.” “Aren’t you a little old for that?” one of them asked me in that you are far too old for that you entitled millennial overgrown child tone.
scabbard.
About the man who broke his heart in such a long, drawn out process that he couldn’t discern hurt from love and how whenever he tries to sort out how he feels now long after the end of it the feeling is just a void.
“In an Arthur C. Clarke sufficiently-advanced-technology-is-indistinguishable-from-magic type magic or actual magic-magic?”
I was a twenty-something in a cocktail bar who never feels old enough to drink so I said, “I don’t know.”
I accepted because mysterious ladies offering bourbon under the stars is very much my aesthetic.
I remember wondering if this story was an analogy about people who stay in places or relationships or whatever situations longer than they should because they’re afraid of letting go or moving on or the unknown, or how people hold on to things because they miss what the thing was even if that isn’t what that same thing is now. Or maybe that’s what I got out of it and someone else hearing the same story would see something different.
“Better now. He didn’t think I’d let him have a happy ending. I’m kind of offended.” “Perhaps he did not believe that he deserved one.”
