Tell Me a Story.

“Tell me a story, Jack,” she said looking at me through the tiny slights created below the bottom of her upper eyelid and the top of her lower eyelid.
“Ok. (time passing) Lets see... (time passing) Give me second here to collect myself,” Jack half spoke, half motioned, setting his task aside. Simultaneously he ceased chewing his mustache and commenced tapping his foot absent-mindedly.
A few seconds passed, but neither Jessi nor Jack felt it as such. They both felt much more time pass but also it seemed only a sliver of time in some other queer way. It is a tough thing to understand exactly unless you had been Jessi. Or Jack, I suppose.
Eventually he, he is Jack, get it together. She is Jessi, to be fair with introductions all the way around. My apologizes, I was never one good with introductions of any sort. Someone once said, “Men don’t introduce themselves, it is a strange thing, but men can be friends, of a sort, for years and never learn each other’s name. We are blessed to have a language with so many words that can fill in where a Christian name ought be.”
Now, now…full disclosure here, I am----you know what? Lets leave that bit out for now and move into The Story for Jessi, on a Particular Eve.

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In a world, not greatly unlike the one in which we presently dwell, there was a Purveyor of used books. Day after day He toiled away in His dank, dusty, and all together desolate book shoppe, The Book Shoppe as the neighborhood knew it. He loved books, there was no other task at which He loved more than lording over the Shoppe, continually buried in volumes all in different tongues, tones, and times. Now as one can well imagine, He had read more pages than the whole of Harvard University collectively since inception. I kid you not (and I am not one prone to exaggeration) after-all; He was a very old Man.
It came about that on a certain summer eve, as closing time was drawing near, He finished a particularly unsatisfying tale and was not keen to settle His night with such an unsavory read. As was His rule (His general rule) He did not take works from the Shoppe home with Him. He was very conscious about mixing works. Yet, as I have said, He was quite put out of sorts by His recent pages, so much so that He slammed the book down, collected His hat and pipe curtly, and made a straight line for the (seemingly) rarely utilized portal that ceaselessly (when utilized), creaked on its hinges. Just as He was passing through He glanced an ‘unsort’ as He called them, that struck a chord in His Great Heart. This chord had not been heard in a dragon’s age. (The ‘unsort’ books are books yet to be sorted, no great word-smithory here though assuming makes an as---nevermind. Oh, and a dragon’s age is a very…long…time, write that down!)
The book that, drat, what was His name…I have missed that introduction too…boy, I really was never much for names. It was a rich, grand name, fills one up like hot chocolate does the tummy after a long night of skating on a stiff forest lake. Nonetheless, I digress. Rest assured, if I come to recall it, I will tell It at once. More than likely it will come to me when I least dwell on it, that seems to be the case, more and more as the time, unyieldingly, marches on. My Oh My how my tongue needs a tighter leash!
The book! Yes, The book was named…Oh dear…not again! No! Here it is! It was hidden in this little nook of my brain, the book was named, “The Tale of Jessi, Queen Over the Three Hills.” As aforementioned, He had read most of the books ever to be written, but not this one, what’s more, this book promised a Fantasy, which touched a well hidden soft spot in His heart. Hurriedly, He shuffled home skipping dinner, after all, what was wine and bread next to The Feast “Jessi” promised? The beginning was more or less the boilerplate type of fantasy, only very well written. There was, of course, Jessi, who was a princess (of course), in a vast, prosperous kingdom. There were two sisters, who one could only imagine were the other ‘two hills’, and there were the usual merriments surrounding life in a fairytale. As the pages passed the story moved more from a well worded, fantasy into a darker/deeper story of Love, turmoil and introspection. (along with the occasional lack thereof.)
Our Reader was One who could read at pace, He could digest the syntax even faster. No time was needed to ‘mull it over’ as commonplace, coffee chugging hipsters often claim, in desperate attempts to sound wise. (curses to wicker park and their hipster poison) The same moment that the words crossed His eye it was already through His brain and observed from more angles than an average human could observe in one hundred of our years. Again, I am not overstating the breadth of this Beings intellect…shear madness by all measure. “Jessi” was growing into a delicious Banquet, He felt all time before had been ‘a Fast’, just for this event. There is no word in our tongue to classify his disgust when He turned the next page, about one third of the way through the book at this point, to find nothing but white staring back at Him. “A colossal publishing mistake!” He bellowed, for at this point He truly was, utterly engaged. He scornfully rolled His piercing eyes and whipped to the next page as if it was yet another unfit application in the hand of a scrupulous dean of admissions.
Another set of pages sat and smirked at Him. There was nearly an audible chuckle from somewhere in the binding. Without a moments delay He hurled “Jessi” across the room, knocking His cap clean off its nightly storage place atop a bust of Winston Churchill.
It was late, He sat for three minutes, then went to His quarters and settled down to sleep.
“Jessi” lay on the floor near the entryway. The questionably audible chuckle had long since faded and was questionably replaced with what sounded like very quiet, muffled sobs. The kind that people let out while hiding in their closet because they do not want to be asked by anyone, “What is wrong my dear?” (Yet, it nearly seemed that “She” grew ever so slightly bigger through the bawling. The book actually would not have fit onto a shelf that previously it had just squeezed into)
He was up early. Two poached eggs and two slices of toast for breakfast. On His way out the door he stooped to pick up His waylaid hat and saw “her” lying there. All was quiet now. He picked “Her” up gingerly, slipping “Her” into His satchel. He only had half a mind what He would do with “Her” but there was clear air outside and eight blocks to consider it. When He arrived at the Shoppe, He decided that any book that had caused Him such a fit was un-fit for resale, nay; it was far too precious a treasure for some brute to buy, undoubtely with a mind slightly above that of a german shepard.
“Jessi” sat in the safety of His Backroom. The company was good. There were not many volumes in this part of the otherwise cluttered Shoppe. A child of Israel would have seen this section as something akin to the ‘Holy of Holies’ of The Book Shoppe. Organization of the Backroom was impeccable, this and the fact that there were only the choicest of volumes in this backroom, were the main differences between It and the rest. And whether one chooses to believe it or not there were a handful of other volumes that He had run across that too sat with pages unfilled. He filed “The Tale of Jessi, Queen Over the Three Hills” next to “The Tale of Jack, The First.” He filed these two volumes next to each other with more than half a thought. One should not be so simple to think that it was not was due the first ten characters of their titles matching. I said He was organized; not alphabetized. All of His precious books are placed where they will be written best.

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I get ahead of myself though, and no more comes into this story at present…


djmase
01.26.08