CHAPTER THREE of An Unwanted Inheritance: Speculation and Prediction.
~ 1k words. Armani goes to the library, peoplewatches, and talks a little to the reader about his mother.
Libraries are living things. Not in the poetic sense humans referred to them long before properly interacting with faeries, but quite literally alive. Faren rushes through their walls. They get angry when their insides grow stagnant. It’s for this reason, among many, that it only costs thirty cents for a library card, and late fees are only five cents. The libraries need to be entertained.
Despite how easy it is to describe them as looming, gloomy affairs, the library was also the best place to be if it was summer, you hated the heat, and had friends who at the very least wanted to check out the periodical section.
Alex and I sighed with relief as we entered through the airlock, allowing the cool, paper-scented air to wash over us. We stood just like that in the lobby for a moment, before going about our business.
I returned the books I’d already finished to the re-shelving cart. Alex approached the librarian at the counter to check on a book he had on hold. He and I both looked at the summer recommended reading display in the middle of the lobby. We dragged each other to look at the nonfiction section for each of our separate interests. We flipped through an encyclopedia of fungi together, gawking at mushrooms and mold and close-ups of spores. Alex checked the flyers section for a fiber arts competition he’d heard about at the post office once and never again. I checked the flyers section for a doll exhibition I wanted to visit. We checked the physical media section for music we could copy onto our computers and move to our phones. We checked out our books. We found a cozy spot to sit, right between the reference and romance sections. We read.
Peace is easy to disturb, when it is found in a place everyone else has access to.
After the first ten pages of a terrible novel I picked up, someone sat at one of the worktables parallel to ours.
I looked up briefly.
Behind Alex’s head and the remarkably large, square book he was reading, I caught sight of overstyled blonde hair.
I promptly looked back down at the novel in my hands and hoped the stranger from Dad’s shop hadn’t seen me.
Alex lowered his book just enough to look at me. “What is it?” He whispered. We were already whispering, it was a library after all, but this was a whisper for secrets instead of a whisper for volume.
“Guy I met at the shop. Horrible. Don’t need to talk to him.”
He didn’t need to talk to me, either. I watched him check something out at the counter, talking just too loud with the librarian. He left promptly, leaving behind the smell of manly-scented products.
Alex and I made eye contact. “Suppose he just recently moved in?” He asked.
“I hope not. I barely said ten words to him, and he managed to be rude throughout that whole conversation.”
“Impressive. Maybe he’s a tourist.”
“Maybe.”
Dad clapped a hand on my shoulder to greet me. I jumped, slapping my book shut. “Saav’est. Thanks for bringing me lunch, ‘Maa’ni.”
I looked up at him, shrugged. “No problem. I was going to stop by the shop anyway.”
“I thought you were going to hang out with Alex today?”
“I was. He had to go home to do more post office work.”
“He’s a busy kid.”
Dad sat down next to me on the couch I’d migrated to—an old leather thing someone donated. “Watcha got to read?”
I held up the cover to show him. He examined it, nodded. “Seems interesting enough.”
I shrugged. “Keeps me entertained.”
He nodded again, offering no response. He didn’t need to.
I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I didn’t know what to do with my eyes. I stared straight ahead and squeezed one hand between the book’s pages.
“It’s been a year,” I said.
I wanted him to respond. I wanted him to offer something fatherly and warm.
Dad inhaled deeply. “The wounds will heal, but they will leave scars,” he recited. Scroll seven, chapter three: The Crow and her Chicks.
I nodded. My vision grew foggy and wet. It didn’t feel like I’d done much healing at all, really. Every time I opened my web-mail to learn that the police had done nothing to find my mom, my mom, I was scratching the scabs on my knees.
He sat up straighter and pulled me into a one-armed hug. “We love her still.”
I nodded again.
I was seven years old. I watched my mom kiss a man I’d been reluctant to call dad in a kitchen that wasn’t familiar to me as he stirred a pot of something I had never tasted. I couldn’t remember any other kitchen, or any more familiar food. My mom smiled at me. What a wonderful man we’ve found ourselves, my ‘Maa’ni. When you cut the first syllable off my name, it meant priest-ruler in Faelic. She wasn’t religious, but she said the name suited me.
Dad clapped my shoulder again and stood. “Curry for dinner?”
“Sure. Sounds tasty.”
I was fifteen now, sitting in the same kitchen, watching the same man cook the same dish. The room felt too large without her.
My dad and I knelt in front of the stone idol we’d erected in her name behind the house. The Fae and the cicadas and the crickets sung all around us. We left an offering of a few beads, a few pieces of soap, and a bowl of curry. Dad prayed aloud for the both of us, his voice echoing into the warm, sticky night.
I stood in a field, the same Star I’d always known reclining before me in his throne of gold and iron. The wind whipped my hair left and right, little droplets of water stinging my eyes.
The Star grinned, took a draw from his long, thin pipe. “Your luck will come in due time, Maa’nin’en.”
I jolted awake in bed, squeezing my stuffed wolf. I groaned and rolled over to go back to sleep. Stars were so… You know. Starrish. All cryptic.
