The Bookstore

She sat looking at the window with a cup of tea, too tired to smile. Not even enough energy to focus on the people walking beyond the glass or cars that zipped by with no mind to the speed limit. 

Finally, she had made it. A shop of her own, her own little bookstore on main street. Her lifelong dream: complete.

She thought back on everything that it had taken her to get here. 

Never missing a day of high school, though her freshman year had taken her mother by car accident and her junior year had taken her little sister by an overdose. Not one day of high school did she miss. Not one assignment left uncompleted. No extended dates, no exceptions. 

And college. Turning down the man she had known for years, her closest companion and perhaps the only one she had ever loved like more than a friend in her long life. Taking on two part-time jobs while earning her bachelor's degree, to help to pay. Lord knew her poor, shattered father couldn’t pay for it. 

Missing her older sister’s wedding. Because she couldn’t find the time around work and college. 

Then the birth of her nephew. She frowns as she thinks of this. Did she ever learn the boy’s name?

After college, her degree got her nowhere. Got her nothing. She worked four jobs at a time just to save up. Eventually she was fired from two from falling asleep on the job and failing to show up on time two weeks in a row, respectively. 

Now, only 28. She had lived the longest life in the shortest amount of time. Unmarried, not even a possible lover in sight. An estranged sister, a father she hadn’t spoken to in years, a useless degree in library science that had gotten her nowhere and a nephew she didn’t even know the name of. 

Hell. She can hardly remember the name of her brother-in-law. How long would it have been till she had forgotten the names of her sister and father? Of her late-sister and her mother? How long would it have been till she had forgotten her own?

All these things she missed, all these important, beautiful, life changing things she had missed. For a small, dusty, two-room shop. 

But it was her’s now. Her dream, she had reached it. She had touched it, grasped it, taken it to her chest and refused to let it escape; only now it had turned on her and taken her in it’s cold, stone grip and choked all the drive from her lungs and stolen all the life from her veins. 

Only 28 and she was so tired. 

All these things she missed, and strangely she had not missed the man in the coffee shop. 

Dressed in a plain sweater, modest slacks and slip on shoes the man was not a sight for sore eyes. Dirt brown hair pulled back into a loose ponytail that hung limp against his neck and features so close to that of a mouse he might as well have been one. 

But he had caught her attention just as vividly as her dreams and pulled her in. She found herself in his booth, sitting across from him and knowing exactly what she wanted to say and simultaneously knowing it was better to not say anything at all. 

The Mouse Man looked at her. He stared for a long time as something in the back of her mind pestered her. Since when did she stop for anyone? Valuable, money making time was being wasted on this one sided staring contest. 

And yet she did not stand. She did not walk out to her junk car just outside the shop window and drive to her job. 

For once in her life she waited. She wasted her time and she waited for him. 

Eventually he spoke up. “I know what it is that you want, Ms. Manea Breen. And I can give it to you. But I wish for you to ask for it before I do.”

Her breath had caught in her throat, choking her much like her dream, but she did not let it stop her. “My store. I want my bookstore.”

“And what would you do to get this bookstore?” His voice was nothing like his face. It covered her like a heavy blanket, weighing her down, immovable, inescapable and somewhere in her mind someone was begging her to stop. To stand and walk away before it was too late. 

“Anything.” The word came out broken, her voice cracking, her emotions spilling out over her lips and into the air between them. His thin, beady black eyes watched carefully, managing to be blank of emotion even more so than his face. “If I was to have my bookstore, I would give anything. It is all I ever wanted. I could die happy.”

The last edition was whispered like a sin to God. 

“If I was to have my bookstore, I could die happy.” She completed her thought out loud, and when she did, saying it for all others to hear for the first time in her short, long life, the voice that had told her to run cursed her. How stupid to throw away everything for a room of paper. 

But he was gone before she could take it back. 

The next day she went back to the coffee shop, to get her coffee and hopefully see the man. He was there. 

Wearing the same as before, hair hanging limply, the only difference was his eyes. She sat across from him, and saw they were no longer black in their irises. They were gold. Gold that danced and spun and gleamed, teasing her, and dread rose in her throat. But, when the Mouse Man slid a piece of paper across the table to her, her dread was all but obliterated. A deed. To the exact shop she had her eyes on since she had moved to this town. 

She looked back to the Mouse Man. “This is a deed.” She echoed her thoughts, dumbly. 

He nodded. Manea frowned, “Is it… is it mine?”

He nodded once more. 

The Mouse Man reached into his pocket and placed a shiny bronze key on the deed. 

And he was gone, “I will see you soon” whispered on the breeze of his departure. 

Ms. Manea Breen leaned back in her chair. She had finished her coffee. It had not woken her in any way, her eyes still heavy, her soul still withered, her brain and heart still gasping for breath in devastating harmony. 

Her zombie-like gaze fell to the window sill. On it sat a small knife. One made for the kitchen. Not sitting on the windowsill of a would-be-bookstore. 

If I was to have my bookstore, I would give anything. It is all I ever wanted. I could die happy. If I was to have my bookstore, I could die happy.

She picked up the knife, replacing it with the coffee cup. 

It was light in materialistic weight, but heavy in representational weight. 

How fitting that it was her obsession that gave her life and took it away?

She positioned the knife over her heart, and the voice that told her to run, the voice that told her to shut up, it was now screaming. 

But the hands were not hers, the force was not hers, the only thing her own was the blood that spilled around the knife, and the hollow gasp that followed the piercing of her chest. 

This force, these hands pushed and pushed till she could feel the serrated knife sink into her heart, and straight through. The force, these hands stopped. The knife could go no farther, the handle having stopped it. 

Manea’s head tilted back, eyes fluttering, throat constricting, hands twitching. She was dying. 

In the corner of her vision a man of gold entered her view. 

At first she thought him an angel, but her swimming eyes managed to focus for just a second, and she saw him. The Mouse Man. His sweater and slacks were replaced with a shining gold suit, his slip-on shoes replaced with golden Oxfords. His limp hair fell around his shoulders, free-flowing no longer the color of dirt but the color of a pure sapphire. 

His mousy features were the same but his skin had been given a glow that forced her to turn her eyes away. 

He reached her, and as Manea’s life blood bubbled warm and thick over her lips, much like her words had before, he placed a soft hand on her head and began to stroke her hair. 

“It was an honor making a deal with you, Ms. Manea Breen.” He whispered into the metal soaked air, but her eyes had already glazed over.