(idea) by antikythera Fri Feb 09 2007 at 2:28:56

At night, after the customers leave, the books, so sleepy during the day, wake up. With the rustling of a thousand leaves in a late autumn wind they go about the clumsy, gentle, meandering business of book-courtship--shy, sly book love that doesn't, granted, burn (oh anything but that), but which is complete and complex and long-lived; both bold and fragile. They use their best lines on each other--their attention grabbing first, their open-ended last (a book never wants to close the book on love).

HIM (for convenience's sake--books have no gender):
"It was love at first sight. Dreams of rivers, like scenes from a forgotten film, drift through the night in passage between memory and desire. You don't know me, without you have read a book. Light of my life, fire of my loins--call me Ishmael, never let me go."

HER:
"Riverrun? I would prefer not to. The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but this, also, has been one of the dark places of the earth, and Alice is beginning to get very tired of being borne ceaselessly against the loving tide rushing to meet her with its impetuous embrace. There is no scatheless rapture and the idea of eternal return is a mysterious one. I am the recording angel, doomed to watch. At the first gesture of morning, we'll wake up from a night of troubled dreams--please imagine an explosion on a ship, the madness of an autumn prairie frost, sky the color of television tuned to a dead channel, the reproductive dust of existence--to the miserable split-up, and the feeling that everything is dead. Again. The worst of times. A screaming coming across the sky. I'll settle back to await the crying."

HIM:
"I'm telling you stories. Trust me. Yes, I have had my vision. Listen to my last words anywhere. To be born again, first you have to die. I am dancing, dancing. I say that I will never die."

In the stacks, covers are spread and pages turned. Here and there among the bolder, brasher hardcovers: dust jackets torn, or tossed carelessly into the aisle. Shelves creak and moan. Ink smudges or runs, perhaps. Some pages end up with extra words. Some gleam blank and white at dawn.

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