The Echo of Old Books

by Barbara Davis

It was a thing she had, a gift, like perfect pitch or a perfumer’s nose. The ability to read the echoes that attached themselves to certain inanimate objects—books, to be precise.

instead to offer a refuge when things between her parents became unbearable. It was a kindness she’d never forgotten.

stale masculine energy felt strangely at odds with its romantic title, proof that a book’s echoes had little to do with genre or subject matter. Rather, a book’s energy seemed to be a reflection of its owner.

There’s nothing more personal than a book, especially one that’s become an important part of someone’s life.”

“Books have feelings?” “Books are feelings,” he replied simply. “They exist to make us feel. To connect us to what’s inside, sometimes to things we don’t even know are there. It only makes sense that some of what we feel when we’re reading would . . . rub off.”

In short, she was a kind of empath, but for books.

It was the downside of her so-called gift. Not all echoes were happy. Like humans, books experienced their share of heartache—and like humans, they remembered.

Without a reader, a book was a blank slate, an object with no breath or pulse of its own. But once a book became part of someone’s world, it came to life, with a past and a present—and, if properly cared for, a future. That life force remained with a book always, an energetic signature that matched its owner’

But never had she come across a book missing all traces of its origins.

Books were safe. They had plots that followed predictable patterns, beginnings, middles, and endings. Usually happy, though not always. But if something tragic happened in a book, you could just close it and choose a new one, unlike real life, where events often played out without the protagonist’s consent.

Grandma Trina, who had once grumbled that her son-in-law was never more than one ruined dinner away from burning down the house. The last thing he needed was an accelerant.

She had chosen death over her family—over her daughter.

Something she’d done or not done, some awful, unforgivable flaw. Like a disfiguring birthmark or faulty gene, the question had become a permanent part of her. Like the scar on her palm.

Each restoration was a labor of love, like a kind of resurrection, a broken and discarded thing given new life.

But sometimes you do see the blow coming. You see it and you stand there and let it knock you down. And later—years later—you’re still asking yourself how you could have been such a fool. You were that kind of blow. Because I saw you coming that very first night. And I let you knock me down anyway.

One of its princesses has gotten herself engaged to one of its princes, and I’m here to witness the well-wishing—and to get a look at the princess in her natural habitat.

eyes roam about the room, they catch mine. It’s a strange moment, as if some unseen current has passed between us, like the pull of a magnet. A force of nature.

should know it then and there, in that instant of icy incandescence, that you will always hold some part of yourself from me. But I don’t see it. Because I don’t want to.

Sympathy is an indulgence men in my line of work can ill afford.

“Everyone needs friends in low places, don’t you think?”

“It means that in my experience, a rough exterior often masks something quite fine, while a sheen of respectability frequently disguises the opposite.”

delusion I cling to because it’s easier than admitting I could ever have let myself be so thoroughly deceived.

But then I suppose when you’re as rich and handsome as young Teddy, you needn’t be clever. The world will always be forgiving for an Adonis with a trust fund—however thickheaded.

of

It’s in this moment, this fleeting, evanescent instant when the veil slips and you’re briefly exposed, that I realize I’m truly lost.

I’m seldom careless, especially with a thing as perilous as the truth, but you have a strange effect on me. You make me forget what I’m about—and why I’m about it.

We read not to escape life but to learn how to live it more deeply and richly, to experience the world through the eyes of the other.

He said all truly good writing—fiction or nonfiction—has a heartbeat, a life force that comes from the writer, like an invisible cord connecting them to the reader. Without it, the work is dead on arrival.”

Eleven years on, and it still feels like yesterday, the wound still raw, still festering.

In the happiest times of my life, I have reached for my books. In the saddest times of my life, my books have reached back.