Don’t think about Eli. Just count. Stack, slot, move.
Maz adds a tattered book onto a stack. Ahead, as The Frayed Spine, the bookshop entrance swings inwards, and with it, the rusted brass bell above the door bobs as if trying to ring. It musters only a single note of a one-way whimper. Maz’s ears still manage to prick up from where she stands behind the counter.
Monotonous footfalls enter the shop, and the floorboards respond with gentle creaks.
“Morning, Maz.” A man’s voice, soft and bookish, accompanies the steps.
“If you say so,” she whispers to herself before adjusting her voice.
“Hi, Ron.” She lets a smile slip and looks up.
It’s not his fault that this place is… this.
She takes in the shop’s impression of a morning around Ron. Warped black oak and bleak varnish hold onto any hint of brightness without allowing it to reach the corners.
The tall glazed door, flanked by wide display windows, lets the street add its drizzle of insult to injury. The wind outside picks up. It slaps loose, curled leaves in bronze and rust against the bowed frames. Daylight presses against the panes so dim that Ron appears nothing more than a shadow.
Maz rolls her eyes at the strip lights hanging on chains too far overhead to be helpful. They claim power no more than to flicker in pulses until the paper dust in the air looks like falling ash.
Stop it. It’s just today’s masterpiece by the feeble fluorescent gods. They’d very much rather change the subject on you.
Ron ambles past the display table, tall bookcases that form a dark maze of aisles, and pushes through the ‘Staff Room’ door to the side of Maz. He lets the door shut behind him with a soft thud, making the cover of a paperback flutter by Maz’s elbow.
With a smooth sweep, she takes the book. Before she can add it to the stack, her hand trembles over the cover, her thin band of a ring that feigns silver sliding down her narrow finger. The letters of the title squirm and lean on one another. She watches them scramble until they blur into gibberish. They then begin to blend together, turning into what should be words that might make sense at any moment.
She shakes her head, and the title returns to normal, as if nothing had happened.
Her hand slowly comes around to what she can label under ‘plausibly under control’. She huffs at the pale green stains that the ring has left on her finger.
Call it a sign of life. Yep. Corrosion would be silly, if not too condemning. Keep counting. Don’t get weird about it.
She counts.
Three minutes, since he’s been talking to her. Five days since you last halved a scale together. Seven since you promised to stop. Assuming you actually believe time has anything to do with anything anymore.
Her nose crimps at a sudden whiff of a scent that rides on the cusp of honey and metallic rot, striving to be both at once, if the air will allow. She looks up at a tiny square of a vent grille set into the ceiling, a cavernous height above.
Next door’s at it early today.
The smell grows pungent and starts to fill the shop. A draught drifts through a gap in the door, enough to send a chill to Maz’s shoulders but too weak to graze the thickening stench.
She throws half a glance at the door, where its latch leans on the frame to keep that threshold hanging ajar, as if it would rather wait for a better offer; Eli’s laughter slipping through turns out to be the best it gets. Through the streaks of rain on the window behind a display table, Maz spots him.
Outside, Eli leans against a bollard, wearing tired on hunched shoulders, casual as the face of it. Drizzle sways his amber curls across his brow. As his field jacket, which remembers being black once, flaps open in the breeze, he brushes off ash from his cigarette. He pulls his collar up part by part with one hand to cover the headphones slung around his neck.
A woman stands a couple of paces to his side. She keeps talking while he finishes her sentences with lazy laughs.
Maz’s hands carry on with their slight jitter as she reaches for the next book.
Legs for days, books for… You bet she’s after anger management titles again, but why would any of that interest him? Stop it. Internet-fed willpower and bad coffee won’t give you the energy for hate.
Her fingers reach down to her jeans pocket, half believing, all muscle memory. They run across the ridges of a mint tin that poke through the black denim.
Just half. Just to take the edge off. You can quit again tomorrow. No. You’re in control.
A packed bus outside barrels through a puddle and throws a spray of mud towards Eli. He makes a show of having to stretch, flings one leg out of the way, and the splash smacks the bollard instead.
Maz presses her lips together in a failing attempt to conceal a snort.
You could punch him for not even trying hard to be literally one step ahead all the time. Or just bite his stupid hip bone if he moves like that again.
Ron walks out from the staff room and reaches the counter in three slow steps. A coin rolls across his fingers in an endless loop, index to pinky and back, as if it were a natural extension of his skin.
He sidesteps a box labelled ‘donations’ in red marker on its side, eyeing it.
“Was it always this ambitious, or did someone annoy Meg again?”
Maz’s quiet laugh answers first.
“She’s sorting the retellings. Apparently section B’s tragic this week. Again.”
Without so much as a glance upwards, she points her chin at the shelves that line the side wall where Meg slides a rolling ladder into place. Its wheels spin on the floor, but the ceiling part, track or rail, and the top rows of books remain a collection of rumours left in the dark above the lights.
Maz watches Ron cross behind her towards the till. His glasses creep down his nose while he clips a pen to his apron.
He never does touch those glasses until there’s an emergency. Don’t stare.
“Never a time she doesn’t like a challenge.” Ron’s grin comes crinkled at the corners, dry as old receipts.
“For sure.” Maz’s fingertips ghost over the next spine, her chipped nail polish almost matching its drab, half-dead dust jacket and all.
“Some of these have more history than… what I can presume to have.” She taps on the counter and turns.
She takes another title from a trolley beside her. Another one for the stacks she builds in front of her. None taller than five books each and with her clipboard at the centre serving as a gate. They begin to resemble a barricade between her and whatever the day might spring up at her.
Ron leans on the counter, elbow first.
“Bold claim.” He catches her eye when he holds his coin out her way.
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
Maz looks away and at a timeworn novel with sigil art on its cover.
His voice does have a cadence that could coax exact change out of a lost soul.
“I’ll prove it. Here.” She nudges the book towards him.
“Page a hundred and fifty-three. They’re still not speaking.”
Ron’s thumb guides the coin to the centre of his hollow fist before he flips the book open.
Maz’s hair, a dishevelled knot of an updo in the same shade as the counter’s varnish, nests with a tie high enough to keep her fringe in a loose tuck. The bun leans further forward the longer she keeps her head down. A few strands from the front layer break free at last. They drop a dark curtain across her eyes. She tosses them back with the knuckle of her stained finger.
The motion wafts away the paper dust floating in the warm current of the ancient air conditioner behind her. It keeps whirring an eternal tropical scorcher against the frost radiating from below.
Cold pushes up through her boots. Heat shoves it aside around her temples. Neither ever wins. The whole thing makes Maz’s skin itch.
You don’t have to hurl a book at either. Stay. Breathe. Just get on with it.
Ron’s brow quirks up as he gives her a quick peer over his glasses.
“That’s restraint.” He lowers the cover onto the pages before letting it go to sail itself closed.
“In most of Meg’s picks, the characters would’ve eloped by page ten or called down a jealousy tribunal by eleven.”
“I know, right?” Maz gives a shrug with one shoulder and slides the novel back.
“Yeah, well, some of them seem to be enjoying the suffering.”
Ron’s smile softens as he turns to the till. The digital clock on it draws Maz’s attention.
The numbers lit in green skip and move past what they should show, as if they know another route towards a different moment. They slow, nearing a hold, and start to roll the hours backwards. The clock picks an arrangement only to blink it on and off, suggesting the day has hit midnight already. After briefly displaying the current time, it jumps forward by seven minutes and takes its last attempt as given as it stops there.
Ron lifts a hand to his glasses, aborts midway, and drops it to strike a button on the till once the digits go dark. When they return, the display dims too dark to see.
The cash tray opens with a ping. His hand snaps to it, catching it before he can see the coins inside, and pushes it closed. He taps his own coin on the side of the till and rests both wrists loosely on top, a relieved smile stretching across his face as his fingertips press against the back of the till.
Maz holds in a laugh and returns to stacking the books.
Time as predictable as a crossword set by a sadist, and he’s about to hug the thing.
The till drawer springs open again, but without making a sound.
A receipt comes flying out of the printer that Ron didn’t press any buttons for. He picks it up. The strip feels too thick to have ever been a part of the paper roll. He turns it over, back and forth. The words on the strip, looping and tidy handwriting, in an ink paler than any till would print. In the tick of a blink, his brow creases at the lettering that reads:
‘Owed: One return journey’
His eyes cut beyond the counter and towards the shelves on the left labelled ‘Poetry’. They land on a trapdoor hatch with an iron padlock in the floorboards, and his frown fades. He gives a stern nod at the receipt and folds it in half before sliding it into his trouser pocket without giving Maz another chance to glance at it.
The bell gives a muffled one-way whine when the shop door swings open, and a silhouette moves out of the corner of Maz’s eye.
Nope. No, thank you.
She angles her face at the stacks, and a shake of her head lets her fringe swing back down to hide what it can. Her knee, not getting the memo at all, gives way a little.
You’re not having that conversation right now.
Her hand squeezes the edge of the counter with enough force to persuade gravity to hold its end of the bargain as Eli steps inside.
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