Leaving spaces open for her to respond.
Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasure and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will effect them in ways they can never predict.
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices plastered on lampposts and billboards. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.
In this significant moment, if the boy turns the painted knob and opens the impossible door, everything will change. But he does not. Instead, he puts his hands in his pockets. Part of him decides he is being childish and that he is too old to expect real life to be like books. Another part of him decides that if he does not try he cannot be disappointed and he can go on believing that the door could open even if it is just pretend.
A few include disturbingly worded marriage proposals.
He glances at the book in his hands. The Secret History. He has quietly longed for relationships with the type of intensity within its pages, regardless of the bacchanalian murderousness, but never found it and has now reached an age where he expects he never will. He has read the book seven times already but he does not tell the waitress that.
As long as there have been bees, there have been keepers.
It is one thing to put two competitors alone in a ring and wait for one to hit the ground. It is another to see how they fare when there are other factors in the ring along with them. When there are repercussions with every action taken.
Even if winning the game is just ending the story.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins stares at the miniature versions of the same symbols he once contemplated in an alleyway behind his mother’s store and wonders how, exactly, he is supposed to continue a story he didn’t know he was in.
They seek each other our, these people of such specific like mind.
He wanders alone but safe in his loneliness, confused but comforted by his confusion – a blanket of bewilderment to hide himself under.
Elena laughs and one of the other librarians shushes her. Zachary gives her a wave as he leaves, relishing the librarian-on-librarian shushing.
One is proud, one collects one’s receipts, and even if one is a bit melancholy, one moves on.
Disoriented and woozy, his mind a second behind his body, like pulling himself through crystal-clear mud. As though he’s still drunk but doing it wrong.
Maybe everything is burning, has burned, will burn.
The entire compartment looks like an explosion in a library, piles of books and paper amongst the velvet-covered benches and polished-wood tables.
Some, but not all, will figure out that perseverance is more important now than performance.
Should have brought a book, he thinks as he always does while waiting somewhere without one before he remembers and reaches into his jacket.
He isn’t certain about anything. He isn’t even certain that he minds not being certain about anything.