Next

It could happen to you anywhere at anytime, and you will never see it coming. You could be at the library sitting on the thin, gray carpeted floor with your back pressed against the stack of books reading Anais Nin " Delta Of Venus, and you look up, and he looks down at you with an, “I’ve read that, smile on his face.” He is not just looking at you, he is watching you, and you think somehow he knows all of your dark secrets. The secrets that you rewrite in your mind to make them less shameful, so you can stay off the opiates that nearly killed you. You smile back and move the book closer to your face as if it is an invisibility cloak that will hide you. He sits down next to you, and you close the book, embarrassed that you are reading erotica in the public library on a rainy Tuesday at 8:00 a.m., alone, wearing the only clean jeans you have that never fit right around the waist. You start obsessively wondering if your underwear is sticking out the top of your jeans and how to adjust yourself in such a way that he will not notice. You cannot stop yourself from talking incessantly because the five seconds of silence you just experienced caused your heart to race faster, and you have always been paranoid of having a heart attack. One little flutter, and you see yourself lying in the coffin, with your friends and family telling half-true stories of how good you were like when you took in the stray, half-feral cat who dug her claws in your face everyday for a month, but really she saved you, and that part of the story will never be told. So, you tell him an almost true story about the time you had a goat and lived in the woods while wishing you had taken the extra minute to put on the brown belt with flowers engraved in the leather.  He laughs and you do not sense one ounce of nervousness in the sound that echoes through the book you were minutes earlier quietly reading alone, held tightly in your damp hands, and the upper right corner now bent and worn thin from your fidgeting revealing your insecurity. The book that maybe a hundred hands have held, each person reading a different story, and expecting different endings. The book that did not save you from this moment and the next tragic love story that has begun, and all you do is sit there on the hard floor trying your best to not look as neurotic as you really are, wondering if you remembered to put deodorant on in your rush to get out of the house that Tuesday morning. You inch your anxious body a little farther away from his just in case, as he is one upping you with a taller tale of the winter when he lived in the car outside of his house. You are impressed that possibly, just maybe, he is weirder than you. You do not ask him why he did this, you just giggle like a schoolgirl, and hate yourself when you hear the strange noise come out of your mouth. He slowly reaches over your arm and unloosens the book from your fingers one-by-one. He is holding your book in his large masculine hands with little scabbed over cuts on his ring finger. He feels the soft, wet cover, and watches you again. His eyes scanning your forehead, your nose, your lips, and he says not one single word out loud. He takes out a red ink pen from his perfectly pressed, white dress shirt pocket and writes his name and cell phone number on the last page of the book at the very bottom in tiny letters and numbers that you have to squint to read. He calmly hands you the book back, looking at you as if he is looking for something in your hair and softly says, “Enjoy your day. “ He does not tap his pen on anything or mispronounce any of the goodbye words. You watch him walk across the room in his shiny black shoes, pen still in hand, one foot in front of the other causally like any other normal person would walk. He opens the freshly Windexed glass door of the library leaving smudges of his fingerprints and walks out, gets in his tan SUV, and drives away, and all you can think is, thank god! You catch your breath and stand up too fast making yourself lightheaded, quickly checking to see if your underwear really is sticking out, and it is, but you are relieved that you do indeed smell like baby powder and warm summer rain. You think of your laundry pile in the basement, your shower that needed scrubbing a week ago, the tire on your car that keeps going flat, and how your hair is oily in the morning when you wake up. You put the book back on the dusty shelf and pull it out again fighting with yourself on whether to check the book out and call him or to put it back on the shelf for someone else to find. You imagine an older woman in her 70’s with gray hair and black orthopedic shoes finding your book wishing she could be one of the women in an Anais Nin story. She will spend days savoring each erotic word, playing Nina Simone records, and drinking a dry red wine in bed as she reads. She will sadly get to the last page and notice the red ink at the bottom. She will get her magnifying glass out to read his name and number, making up her own fantasy of how it got there. She will have her own internal fighting on whether she calls him to tell him she has the book with his name in it. You pull the book out one last time, look at it like it is going to say something to you, and all you hear is the sound of traffic driving by. You decide to check it out, and bring it home with you.

Reviews

[Cher]

Decidedly lovely, and most of the little details you include don't make the story tedious. Instead, they add to its charm.
Do pay attention to the font and paragraphing though. A large chunk of text in teeny font does put readers off.