The Book Nook

35

 I didn't understand. The series of occurrences that had happened one after the other were just too strange.

Alexandria wasn't moving from the bottom of the stairs so I went down to her. My foot felt fine, even though I knew I had badly hurt it the moment I hit the jutting edges of the stairway. With my luck I could have even broken it, which wouldn't be surprising whatsoever.

"Did you see what just happened?" I exasperatingly said, reaching the bottom of the steps. Alexandria watched me step down onto the dock where she still stood. She glanced down at my foot then back up to me.

She nodded.

"You did? You saw it? So I didn't dream it? You saw me fall down those steps, right?"

"I heard it, then looked back, yes."

"And the rest of it? The man? Him putting his hand on my foot?"

"All of it, yeah."

"So I'm not crazy?"

"No."

She remained so extraordinarily calm that it perturbed me. She had seen all the same events just play out and her reaction was almost non-existent. I felt like shouting, like I should call the media and tell them a miracle just happened.

I told her about the seeing-eye tree, about her glazed over distant look as she stood at the edge of the water, then the two events we had both witnessed - the absurd behavior of the geese and my startling rescuer after my incident on the stairs.

"I think I need to sit down", she said and turned to go down the dock.

I stood there, mouth open incredulously. "You think you need to sit down?"

The water was high enough on the dock that a person could dip their feet in while sitting on the edge of the wooden landing. Neither of us took our shoes off, so Alexandria crossed her legs underneath her and I sat down sideways next to her, my knees bent, feet on the dock and my back to her left shoulder.

"I hate stating the obvious, but some things have happened here that are very strange," I said, facing the water away from Alexandria.

"I can attest to that," came her response.

"I will point out, however, that being around you results in one weird thing after another." This was unequivocally true.

"Thanks."

"No, but - Ah, I don't even know how to explain it."

I went silent and she did not choose to speak further neither.

I mulled over my thoughts as we sat there. The conclusion that I had come to, after thinking back on all that had just happened, was that it felt like a scene out of Alexandria's novel.

The basis for this theory was all there. In her novel, the Alexandria character has unexplainable events routinely happen to her, ones that grow ever more increasingly bizarre and supernatural. From the very beginning, I thought these happenings were metaphorical but then they became very real, or at the very least extremely real to the book's protagonist. All along, I had the conviction that these events in her novel were somehow metaphorical exaggerations of her real-life personal feelings. Never would I have thought that they actually indeed were grounded in reality. But after the series of odd events that had just played out, I was firmly beginning to finally question all of that.

Here's the thing: Alexandria's fictional self had peculiar things happen to her and around her. I, moments ago, witnessed a peculiar set of events that struck the same tone as many events depicted in her novel - perhaps not quite as out-of-this-world as many described in her book, but still somewhere on the scale of Twilight Zone-ish.