At the Seams

Chapter 11: Day 1 - 6:48 pm

Chapter 11: Day 1 - 6:48 pm

Mary awakens in the Rabbit Hole. Her face, nose and cheek are sore from pressure, still buried in the familiar if not fragrant fabric of Nanna's baby poop yellow chaise. Her face feels wet, as though she had cried as she slept in this queer hideaway. Mary looks around, absently wiping the moisture from her cheeks. All her art is here, her hand-painted bistro table, even the fireplace, complete with a stack of wood and a box of matches on the hearth. Though Mary understands this room is but a figment of her imagination, the concreteness of the place strikes her. Everything is just as it should be and nothing is missing.

"Except my books," Mary murmurs, looking down at her hands as they twist and shimmy in her lap. She wonders despondently how she will pass the time. Her idyllic refuge may very well become her death of boredom.

Weary of dwelling on new miseries and her hands’ tortured snaking, Mary rises to her feet with a huff. She paces in front of the fireplace, watching her feet. She glances casually toward her stepchildren, shrieks when she sees they have moved to accommodate a row of bookshelves, now lining the walls where her closet doors should be.

Mary heads for the first bookshelf, her unease dissolving in a wave of gratitude. She plucks the first book—all of which are arranged alphabetically by author and title, just as they are in her office—from the first shelf and riffles the pages under her thumb. The breeze from the stuttering paper lifts her hair from her face, filling her nose and throat with that wonderful, bookish odor, the hallucinogenic perfume of wood pulp and wonder. The smell lifts her, unburdens her for the first time since this whole ordeal began.

Mary replaces the book and moseys further down the row, running her fingers along the edge of the shelves, and stops at her favorite section. She eyes this bookcase, devoted to a single author, through a film of tears. Some of these books have kept Mary sane through some seriously sticky wickets. She hasn't read them all; though this writer generates a great deal of work, he is also old, and Mary wants to discover him anew until the day she dies. She enjoys these books as she does her cigarettes—infrequently, intensely, and all the more because they are part of a game she plays with her own mortality.

Mary puts her arms out and presses her body against the case. She realizes the absurdity of hugging a bookcase, but the comfort like warm sunshine emanating from the bindings and the one, repeated name is undeniable. Mary relishes her strange embrace, her contentedness, her warm weeping. Finally, she steps back and chooses a book, one that had rested, half-read, on her bedside table, just last night.

Mary reads the author's introduction, the neighborly warmth in his every word refreshing her tired heart. She smiles as she reads, enjoying the familiarity in his address. She revels in the peculiar sense of telepathy she sometimes gets when she reads this author's work—that queer understanding that one may only achieve in the uniting of imaginations. Mary finishes the introduction and kisses the page, happy to be happy.

Mary flips to the story she had last been reading, then sets her butt on the closest chair and dives into the living waters of language. She has already read the beginning, but she likes it, and decides to savor it again. It’s a twisted tale about psychology and the reality she has until recently taken for granted. The story’s opening and the foreknowledge Mary now possesses chill her spine.

Mary loses herself in the snaky plot, the ethereal description. Pages flick by beneath her thumb. As Mary nears the story’s end, her butt hangs by a thread on the edge of her chair. Just as the therapist in the story finishes the last session with the patient—exactly where Mary had left the story last night—she stops dead. Halfway down the page, the paragraphs turn to garble, just groups of letters that spell no words. Her breath catches in her throat as she turns the page to find whiteness more lonely than a blizzard in the mountains. The page is empty. There isn't even a page number.