Mr. Linden understood. He selected dusty encyclopaedias with fantastical lies and he tore pages from newspapers to arrange in a thread of mystery which crinkled mischievously before her eyes. He chose leather books with handwritten pages and long, typed accounts of remote geological tragedies. He set up a room for his Book Girl in the back of his shop and when she was too tired or her eyes ached too much to trace the line of the road for her bicycle, she slept.
Mr. Linden was an old, old man. One hundred and fifty long years and a million moments were drawn in faint white tattoos on his crimson skin. He was utterly bald with a round head that expanded when he was agitated and wide grey eyes that had once been blue but had been drained of all their colour. He no longer knew how to love. But he cared for Asmara deeply. He saw the distant ecstasy of his imagination reflected in her simple wonder about the world, from the grandest mysteries to a simple speck of dust.
He watched her one night as she explored the lofty walls of bookcases, and when he saw her spidery white fingers skim the spine of the book that had stolen his heart, his ashen lungs shook in his ribs and he hurried to muffle her curiosity in the thrill of a new memoir he had picked the day before. But Asmara’s eyes flicked back to the rows of old books, and the forest green writing pulled at her truth with all its might. And Mr. Linden, because he was incapable of love, did not remember very powerful the magnets are in this world. He had warned her about the book. And now it was too late.
She opened it when the old bookkeeper was curled into a fetal position with his fingers clenched in a quilt while taking his weekly siesta. As was her ritual, she flipped first through the pages, taking in the diaphanous density of the fibres and the scent of woody acid. The font was perfect; Asmara slipped into the words soundlessly and Mr. Linden’s left hand jolted to scratch at his thick brows, but he did not wake.
Chapter One drew a long straight picture of a desolate beach with sharp waves and black rocks caressed lovingly by the fleeting high tide. There was no visible main character, only the overwhelming thickness of solitude that was so very present it prevented Asmara from realizing who, in fact, the solitude belonged to. She stole glances at the sun, which was a deep deliberate orange and hung in the grey sky behind translucent clouds. Every other aspect of the horizon felt lost and apologetic – pieces of another character’s busy plot line propelled into the wrong setting by a hole in time.
“How do I find my way?” Asmara asked the sun, which by now was not so much of an irresistible magnet as it was a smothering comfort. She didn’t really need to know her way; it was irrelevant. She needed to know what existed on that infinite beach besides her and the stones – what prevented her from sitting down cross-legged and staring at the sun forever.
Mr. Linden’s voice groaned grittily from the earth. “I’m in too many places at once, Asmara. I’m watching too many perpetual sunsets with cloudy eyes at too many different moments in time. There’s only a wonderful moment left before I don’t exist in the Present anymore. Or maybe two.”
She didn’t want to be like him, dividing her heart amongst frozen illusions in the way that a delirious gambler divides his possessions amongst impossible dreams.
“Will it be very cold?” She asked the sun, and then she stepped forth into the black water, because it was the only horizon that couldn’t continue on forever in one colourless circle.
The ice on her skin struck like a room full of mirrors; she didn’t know where to look that didn’t ricochet back and forth and halfway and upside-down to the pain, the immobilizing pain, the slivers and needles and punches and throbbing, pulsing waves of terror. When she could finally grasp her temper beneath her electrified senses, she screamed and cursed at the sun with a fury that was almost cat-like, because she had loved the sun and he had let her die.
The sun, realizing of course that Asmara was quite alive, smiled protectively at the possession of the girl’s furious yet fervent love, which despite not curling up complacently on the shore raced in futile circles beneath his constant glare. And so a piece of Asmara was left behind.
She watched her bare feet scrape across the ocean floor and came to the conclusion that the water was not empty but actually full of thousands of almost microscopic fish and dolphins and octopi, all buzzing around her toes busily and with a grand rhythm to their chaos. Forgetting in that moment the way that the sun felt when it warmed her frozen cheeks, she dipped under the water and immersed herself entirely in the glittering swarm of the underwater world. Boulders encrusted with great metropolises and a million interlaced journeys rotated before her eyes and spun around something that seemed to radiate extraordinary magnetism. As she began to see the same boulders, the same stones, the same ridges and fins and ancient mounds of rutted coral she started to wonder if they were not orbiting around her. She felt vast and magnificent and fascinated all at the same time, which allowed her without realizing it to willingly deposit quite a large fragment of Asmara in the memory of a world that was wholly hers. So complete was her paradise that when the tide came in and a long slow wave carried away the galaxy, she didn’t notice until the retreating water drew once more along the ocean floor, washing away the last lingering illusions of her joy.
Alone once more, but abandoned even of her dense emptiness, Asmara began to take in the modest little wonders of her surroundings. The beach held crevices of sand stuffed between the rocks, which pricked her with an icy heat that was neither aggravating nor comforting but simply hot. The tide bubbled from some deep cavern as it sung from the resonating core of its lungs. The smell of wet earth; of rotting and sprouting, was pungent in her nostrils. A sparrow tap-danced happily among the stones, somewhat confused but thoroughly enjoying the game. As it tapped closer and Asmara’s senses adjusted to the dull grey spectrum, she could see that it was not a sparrow at all but an old and active woman who had been alive so long that she was simply going to shrink into non-existence. It was a daunting future, and the woman seemed to have adopted the sparrowish ways to surround herself with a whimsical relevance. She wore many tattered layers of scarves wrapped around her body from her ankles to her haughty, bird-like neck, and the bones of her face were like daggers pointing sharply to a fierce pair of emerald eyes with feathery brows. Her loose grey hair was piled on top of her head in plumage that glittered with salt. She looked up and Asmara had the impression of looking through a telescope at a celestial body which existed so distantly that even time had to shuttle back and forth to reach it.
The sparrow-woman said, “What are you made of?” and then she sat down and tilted her head back to stare uncomfortably at this odd creature.
Asmara was taken back; she had no ready response and her guilt brewed defiance. For the first time her solitude felt as though it did not belong to her at all, but to the sparrow-woman with a greedy question that she could not wrap her mind around.
“The same thing as Mr. Linden,” said Asmara stupidly, and then she realized that Mr. Linden was made of something fine and silvery like the lines that traced his skin, but she was a hard shiny rock and layers of coarse rust.
“Have you met Mr. Linden?” Asmara asked the sparrow-woman curiously, and the sparrow-woman shook her head slowly.
“Yes and no. I mean to say; here but a very, very long time ago. Is he still so very old?”
Asmara nodded knowingly.
“Ah, yes. I thought he might be. I’m often right. Do read his books?”
She nodded again.
“Fine books, fine. The odd crucial error and someone gets left behind, however. Do you know what I mean?”
Asmara did. The sparrow-woman made her feel as if everything up until that point had been little more than a poorly envisioned and desperately uninspired fantasy, like the ones she had dissolved into during childhood except much more focussed and flawed. She had thought about asking the sparrow-woman where to go from there but now it seemed a silly thing to ask, as the sky and the stones were only randomly placed elements of a falsehood. And so she walked. She walked for a long time, embracing the infinity that she had rejected only two moments ago because of its impossibility, which was now very much the point. When she had walked for one hundred and fifty years and was still the same person, Asmara examined the imprint of her breath on the clouds and the grooves in the bottom of her feet, and realized that she had been walking along a trail that resembled exactly the patterns on the back of Mr. Linden’s sunburnt neck, which meant to her only that there were still lines and lines to follow, for perhaps another millennium, if nothing changed and that particular spot in time went on forever.
One day, as her feet began to clamour along the sloping foreign letters below his left ear, Asmara stopped. Her fingers had once – not so long ago – been able to completely encircle a black stone, and her wrist had been able to snap the stone far out into the water. Now with each stone her fingertips stretched but could not touch, and her muscles ached beneath the weight before collapsing and tossing the stone to the earth.
“I am shrinking,” thought Asmara. “I am forever getting smaller and one day there will be nothing at all for me to do but walk and get tinier, since I am not a tap-dancing sparrow but a solid piece of stone.” The thought of forever as nothing but a linear conclusion terrified her, and with all the strength left in her exhausted body Asmara dared herself to find something to do besides walking.
A little speck of dust materialized on her shoulder. It seemed to be flitting, twitching there to a distantly recognizable pulse. Asmara raised a hand to sweep it off, but the speck spoke. The voice was clear and confident.
“Would you rather it be that you grew larger and larger each day? You would pierce the clouds with your eyelashes and your ears would drop off frozen in outer space. The ocean would be a great swimming pool, and then a black puddle, and then a drop of water not large enough to wet your tongue with. At least as I grow smaller my world grows smaller with me.”
Asmara didn’t want to grow larger and larger every day until she sucked in planets with her breath. But she was not prepared to shrink into the verge of non-existence, and she wasn’t sure that the world would, in fact, shrink with her.
“Can I simply stay the same?” She asked the dust-woman, who cackled with delight.
“Now that, Book Girl, is a very, very silly question.”
It was silly. Asmara sat down and her head throbbed.
“I don’t want to grow and grow and grow, but I don’t want to shrink and shrink and shrink, but I don’t think much about staying the same. I don’t think much about much anymore, actually, only walking or not walking or staying the same.”
She couldn’t tell if the speck pitied her or was simply annoyed, but it did not speak. Time took a deep breath, and then, for the first time in one hundred and fifty years, it grudgingly began to move, and Asmara was aware of how much of herself she had abandoned on that perpetual beach.
“How many moments do I have left?” she asked the dust-woman. “Do I still exist in the Present?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied. “At this very moment Mr. Linden is nearing the last minute of his siesta, and you are reading a forest green book in the library.”
The thought of Mr. Linden’s library evoked a fuzzy nostalgia, so that Asmara was not sure at all whether or not the girl reading the book was really her, and whether any of the written days with those bookshelves had actually happened. She looked down at the speck on her shoulder and wondered whether the dust-woman was reading a book at that moment in the Present, and whether there was an old man of threadlike silver who almost loved her. She didn’t think so.
“What are you made of?” she asked the dust-woman. Asmara wondered if she was made of sheer white gauze, with translucent skin and pink lips and a fluttering voice. She thought she might be made entirely of crimson oil paint; the colour of a red boat on a black lake. Perhaps wood, wrinkled with the passing of time drawn in layered circles on her heart. Strong black coffee, severe and aromatic. Any number of things, each of which left their unique flavour of wonder as they flitted through Asmara’s imagination.
But the dust-woman did not pause to let creativity brew.
“Why, dust, of course.”
Dust glittered beneath the light that landed on the false encyclopaedias in Mr. Linden’s library. Dust was here and there; the only difference was that here dust was a sparrow with a haughty voice who was forever shrinking, whereas there dust was a little palpable piece of nothing.
A fine thread of silver, like the peak of a wave, washed up on the shore. “I’m in too many places at once, Asmara.”
She drew in a long salty breath and the last sentence of Chapter One came to a slow stop as Mr. Linden took the last breath of his weekly siesta. And a little piece of Asmara remained waiting for Chapter Two, and a little piece raced under the sun, and a large piece commanded an underwater galaxy, and a piece walked Mr. Linden’s lines, and a black rock on the shore flashed gold and then rusted as one hundred and fifty years of waves caressed the stones.
Mr. Linden poured himself a mug of strong black coffee to shake off the fuzziness of sleep, and Asmara returned her forest green book to the dusty bookshelf.
My problem with this story is that this is the only way it makes sense to me, but I'm aware that I haven't written it in a way that makes complete sense to others. I'm supposed to write a short story for school and I'm not sure whether I should use this or start from scratch. Your comments would be very much appreciated. Thankyou
I think you really work well with words, adn can truly place a picture in the readers mind. I understood the situation the character was in, and never once felt as if you were telling me the story instead of showing me.