Words
The
book, ancient by his standards, wiggled its way into his clumsy hands from the
bottom of a precarious pile in the back of the dusty shop. Not even bothering
to parlay its contents, he was nonetheless contented by the cover, by the
coarse green cloth bound and tattered, by the silent mildew which climed its
spine. “The Book,” the spine read and he was on his way. After the requisite
bartering that always accompanied such a find, he concluded, “We’ll take this
one,” as he left a crumbled five-dollar bill and a pile of lusterless change
upon the counter in its place. The single-lighted door creaked as he opened it,
tripping a bell that chimed once and then again behind him as he left with his
treasure perched below his damp armpit.
Unfazed by the immediate transition of his environs from
dank cool wood and words to the boundless and horizonless street onto which he
stepped, his immediate concern was with the trove of yellowed and creped pages
that awaited his anticipatory gaze. He was unaware that the sky was blue and
that the sun beat down upon his young skin. He was unaware of pedestrians in
his midst, of cars whirring by, of others watching him—reading him. He
walked, head down, being read and waiting to enter the glory of words which
became part of his haplessly zigging and zagging body.
When instantly the shock of his new surroundings
approached him in the form of a piece of unleveled sidewalk, he tripped forward
without a hint of mitigation. As his face careened unimpeded toward the hot and
cracked square of concrete, his book fell from its perch and his hands—at
perhaps the last possible minute—decided to take the brunt of gravity’s
impertinence. His hands, bloodied by the fall, only very partially protected
his face from complete devastation. A rosy abrasion welted upon his cheek, his
already disheveled hair lashed directionlessly, and a scowl that matched the
pain writhed through his entire body. If there could be an end to this moment,
he thought, it must come quickly and with numbness.
Searching around for his book, he noticed that it, too,
had been victimized by the fall. It lay complicatedly fanned out upon a stretch
of grassy verdure which glistened from an earlier sun shower. He noticed the
different greens as they juxtaposed themselves in a way that even the most
astute modern visualist could not have anticipated. The leaves of grass were of
the shade that inspires children’s dreams of green: the green of crayons and
simplicity, the green untainted by jealousy or greed. The coarse green of the
book’s cover was dingy and mossy, seeming not even green in comparison,
certainly not imbued with the green of life within which it lay. An aged green
lay among the painted green of the manicured streetscape. Where the greens
contrasted, the book and grass shared their wetness, a wetness that seemed as
natural to the former as it did grotesquely unnatural to the latter. The book
awaited retrieval, again wiggling in a light breeze that blew the
street-scented heat over a prostrate body and through riffled yellowed pages.
With abrazed hands, he pushed himself upwards. His elbows
popped inaudibly beneath the weight of a thirteen-year-old frame as he lifted
his head toward the vast sky. He paused and lifted his gaze from the ground
which had consumed his leisure and pride toward that vast blueness that swirled
colorlessly around him. In
his suspended movement, he inhaled a breath of consternation, a reverse sigh
that filled his lungs with anger and staleness; his nostrils flared with the
effort. Now, looking up and down the sidewalk and side to side, his perspective
rose with his body as he positioned his feet below his center and continued his
upward movement. He saw calves then knees then thighs and, at once, faces of
concern washing past him. Appraising his abrasions, he dusted his knees and
slapped together his blood-blistered hands and finally exhaled with an
exasperation matched only in severity by his anger with a body more prone to
gravity than erection. His evolution complete, his hands free of everything but
pain, he regained his trajectory and walked on, more determined than before to
get to that indeterminate somewhere he sought.
In its place among the grass and dollarweed, the book
stayed behind, neither whimpering nor flitting in its newly attained freedom. Mostly
unhurt by the fall, it was nonetheless abandoned, a new fixture in a new
context against which it would eventually proclaim a new and less dramatic independence.
For this and subsequent moments, however, the book remained and proclaimed in
its static postulation, a decoration: an intrusion into nature by man’s
beneficence, a sullying force among an equally contrived paradise. Open to
nature, the words physically connected with the leaves of grass that tickled
the crunchy pages. Where no human fingers or squinting eyes had interacted with
these pages for ages untold, these manicured blades of grass exacted a
relationship never intended by authors or publishers or editors. As if to end
the dalliance with a single blow, a pink, scraped hand righted the binding and
closed the cover around the pages and words as it lifted the book into the air
and placed it, again, under a sweaty armpit.
Booked and bookishly, together, they
tripped their way back down the sidewalk, across the street, and out of view.
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