And, of Course, the Fairies
"Books may well be the only true magic." -Alice Hoffman
The minute she entered, her soul quivered. Then it stilled, in an echo of the more human emotion of surprise, and then it leapt joyfully past her skin, stretching out its tendrils in all directions, trailing along the multitude of floor to ceiling shelves that were lined with books. She smiled. This was home.
It wasn’t a store that she had been in before. In fact, this was her first time stepping into the building. But she didn’t need to recognize the paint-job or the layout; her soul had felt the thrum, the power, of their magic the moment that she had stepped in, before she had even seen the place in all its glory. And even as she walked into the bookstore, still talking with her friend and fellow classmates, her soul was reaching out, stretching, a cat suddenly placed in the perfect beam of sunlight. It shifted, rolled, and basked in the warmth, the magic, of being among so many beautiful objects.
And she walked slowly, eyes trailing along books, in an echo of what she wished her fingers could do. What her soul was already doing. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply in the air of the bookstore. There was that particular smell that always seemed to hang around older bookstores, musty and full of possibilities. But that wasn’t why she took a deep breath, holding the air within her lungs for a few moments. No, she wasn’t enjoying the smell of the bookstore… she was enjoying its taste. There, on her tongue, were millions of words and thousands of worlds. All there, drifting in the air around the bookstore, like the specks of dust that one can only see in sunlight. There, for the tasting, for the magical feeling, if one only knew how.
She supposed, at her age and what with her being in college, she wasn’t supposed to believe in magic anymore. But she did. She absently wondered how people couldn’t believe in magic when standing in a room like this, the taste of a thousand worlds on her tongue and the flutter of the potential beating in her ears. Something fluttered in the corner of her eye and, compulsively, she looked. She had yet to actually see a fairy, full on, but she caught glimpses of them, movements out the corner of her eyes. And this place was full of them. She couldn’t see them, granted, but the beating of their wings was the fluttering sound she heard in her ears. If fairies were real, and she whole-heartedly believed they were, this is where they lived, thriving on the possibilities that all these books created.
This, she thought, her control breaking for a moment and a hand lifting, trailing gently along the bindings of the books she watched past, was her dreamless wish. The thing that, though she knew it wasn’t realistic, she still buried deep in her heart as a wish, not quite made dream. A library of her own. Full of books from floor to ceiling. Thrumming with the power of thousands of worlds. Just for her. And, of course, the fairies.
Created: September 2007
Last Edited: 24 December 2008
Notes: Written for a college course. I was supposed to write something inspired by a book reading we went to, but the book wasn't all that interesting in my opinion. But, oh, the bookstore... it was so beautiful and wonderful... well, I said it all in the text, didn't I?