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Nightfall in the Garden of Deep Time

By Tracy Higley

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PROLOGUE
LOCATION—FROM THE STREET:
A wasted city lot, hidden behind a blank wall of
moldering brick, empty of all but scrabbly weeds grown tree-height and the wind-blown detritus of several apathetic generations. The empty lot presents only a single wrought-iron portal: a gate so rusted one wonders if it ever swung in welcome.
Beyond the gate, the woody stalks of weeds reach for the sky, and for the adjoining buildings, and for the bars of the iron gate, tendriling through empty spaces between the bars until only rusty iron fragments appear through a verdant wall of greenery, admitting no one.
A vacant lot. Abandoned, forgotten, ignored.

INSIDE—UNSEEN: Life.
Music and Art.
Poetry and Story.
Truth and Beauty and Goodness. Waiting to be discovered, to be seen.
To be given—as benediction. But also as rebuke.
As a means, or perhaps as an end.
Waiting for those with eyes to see, for him who has ears
to hear.
Waiting for Kelsey, as she jogs her way to the bookshop,
balancing a steaming coffee in one hand, gripping a paper sack of oversized chocolate cookies in the other, writing words in her head...

ONE
When glimpsed through the eyes of imagination, a city on the threshold of spring holds promise and potential in its asphalt fingers, daring the cold weather an attempt to slither back from its recent retreat, marshaling pedestrians who’ve shed jackets and drivers unrolling car windows as fellow soldiers in
the battle toward warmth and leaf and birdsong....
Nah, that’s no good.
It’s a weather opening. The laziest of all ways to open a scene.
And how late am I?
I force my focus from the cracked sidewalk’s dangerous ridges and valleys and rotate my wristwatch to catch the time.
My coffee threatens to spill even though the motion is too gentle to activate the display. It must be nearly three. The students could arrive any moment, with all the inherent impatience of teens. I need this time with them, especially today. For our brief hour together, I can set aside the obsession over my current dilemma.
As usual, I’ve lost track of time while at the diner, stocking up on chocolate cookies for the bookshop’s front counter and brainstorming with AnaMaria about my latest marketing idea, borne of desperation. And it doesn’t help that I’ve wasted time succumbing to the composing of a ridiculous ode to spring, slowing my walk homeward.
“Wool-gathering,” Gran would call my imaginative notion of the city and its people soldiering together to bring a new season to the world. She’d include a wink and a smile, but still. I have too many real-life disasters to fix to be running down fanciful mental paths.
Imagination doesn’t pay the bills.
I’ve covered three blocks since AnaMaria’s diner, through my lovely Lincoln Village neighborhood. I pass the Rhythm & Wonder Music Shop, then the blank red-brick wall of the vacant lot beside the shop before, finally, the entrance of the Chestnut Street Book Emporium...once-upon-a-time the Chestnut Street Theatre. The sculptural facade, looped and scrolled into the cornice over pedimented doors, hearkens back to the building’s origins. A muscled Dionysus lounges suggestively overhead, raising a goblet in honor of the merriment of theater.
Switching the white cookie bag to my teeth, I free a hand to drag the door open and set the bell overhead jangling.
“What are you, Kelsey—some kind of Scottish terrier?”
Lisa’s nasal voice pierces the spring warmth, followed by Lisa herself reaching to take the bag from my teeth.
“What time is it? Are they here yet?” I retrieve the bag from Lisa and set the cookies and my coffee on the burnished mahogany of the front counter.
“It’s only like 2:30.” Lisa scrunches her eyes and juts a chin toward my arm. “Don’t you look at that fancy thing on your wrist?”
She says “that fancy thing” like she’s seventy years old, though she’s closer to forty, even if life has aged her unmercifully. Jagged, blunt-cut brown hair hangs in a lank frame around her deep-set eyes and mouth, and today’s yellow
scarf only accentuates her sallow skin. She looks as though last night went late.
“I was—the coffee—” I shake my head. Arguing with Lisa is pointless. Besides, she’s on a punctuality streak, and as my only employee, I don’t want to ruffle her feathers.
Instead, I shred open the bag, remove the waxed-paper- separated cookies, then unlatch the glass case on the counter and layer them like cottage-roof tiles along the top shelf, ready for a swarm of hungry after-school teenagers.
Lisa retreats to whatever task she was doing, or avoiding, in the back room behind the counter.
I take a moment for a mouthful of chocolatey cookie and a sip of Peruvian Blend as I lean against the counter and allow myself the luxury of scanning the bookshop, bathed in the honeyed afternoon sunlight spilling through stained glass windows set high in the wall to my right, above the murals of famous authors. Dust motes dance in sunbeams to the soft strains of Vivaldi, tiny Tinkerbells darting through Neverland.
Despite everything going on, I savor this moment in my happy place, grateful for this bookshop that is everything I love stacked and bundled and shelved into one cavernous and glorious space with a hundred mysterious corners. For a girl whose genealogical tree holds nothing but blanks, the shop is home and family and life.
Subtle hints of its former use as a community theater are obvious to those who know the city’s history or stop near the entrance to read the captions under the sepia-toned photos. The multiple levels of the shop once served as a stage at the rear of the building, balcony seats running above my head, and backstage rooms with lightbulb-rimmed makeup mirrors and stuffed costume racks instead of bookshelves marked ART HISTORY and INTERNATIONAL PHILOSOPHY.
It’s been more than sixty years since Gran combined her love of theater with her love of books and purchased the doomed building to make it her own bookish paradise.
And it is the books, not the theater, which I adore. From the fresh-ink smell of glossy new releases to the dusty mildew of used leather hardbacks waiting for someone to love them back to life, nostalgia and happiness waft from every book. I never fail to press the pads of my fingers into the sharp corners of recent arrivals or skim my palms over the velvety softness of used volumes with their frayed cloth covers and gilt-embossed titles that cross my desk.
A bookshop holds a thousand-thousand portals to other worlds between the pages... worlds of love and longing, joy and sadness, of questing and mystery and destiny. The stacks wrap the walls of the building and the days of my life in an embrace that is both consolation and intoxication.
Sixty years of book lovers patronizing the Chestnut Street Book Emporium.
All of it about to be destroyed by my staggering ineptitude.
The cookie turns ashy in my mouth, and I circle the counter to deposit it underneath, beside the marketing book I’ll take to my apartment upstairs after closing tonight to pore over for inspiration.
The bell above the door jangles again.
I turn to the melody, expecting my Tuesday-Thursday group which I’ve joyfully named the “Creative Writers of Tomorrow.”
But the new visitor chases the smile back down my throat where the coffee now sits bitter and acidic.
I say nothing, waiting for him to state his business.
As if I don’t know.
He looks down his nose—actually looks down it—from
behind horn-rimmed glasses he must believe make him look intellectual. Behind the glasses, his eyes are greenish gold, the creepy eyes of a cat in the shadows.
“Ms. Willoughby.”
I nod with mock respect. “Charles Diamond Blackburn.”
I’m rewarded for my sarcasm by the angry crease between those eyes. But a man who insists on the pomposity of using three names deserves to be addressed thus. And what’s with “Diamond”? Did his mother burden him with that middle name? Or is it a fabrication, an affectation designed to impress?
I glance at my watch. 2:57. Unsurprisingly, Lisa’s time estimate is wildly inaccurate. The digital second-hand matches my heartbeat. I have three minutes to convince Blackburn to retreat. He absolutely cannot be here when the kids arrive.
I circle the counter, extending a hand toward the glass door. “I’m afraid it’s not a good time. I have a class to teach—”
“This won’t take long.”
So, everything about this man irritates me. His hundred- dollar salt-and-pepper haircut and expertly trimmed matching beard, the tiny white triangle peeking out of the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
I straighten my shoulders, twitching against what feels like bugs crawling down my back. “In fact, it will take no time at all since there is nothing new to talk about.”
“Oh, but I’m afraid there is. I’ve received a fascinating bit of information from the City Tax Office.”
I tighten my lips, clamping down on the rapid-fire repetition of unpleasant words in my head.
He smiles, a predatory smile, with a row of capped teeth gleaming like ivory headstones.
“I was greatly surprised to hear of this, Ms. Willoughby, but in my recent conversations with those officials with whom I must deal on a day-to-day basis, I was bound to uncover these facts at some eventual point in time.”
Loquacious. It’s the label under Blackburn’s imaginary Polaroid pinned to my mental cork board, a longstanding habit of hunting for the perfect descriptive term for everyone I meet. I debated between loquacious and verbose but preferred the sound of former.
“I see from your reaction, Ms. Willoughby, this information regarding the tax situation is not unfamiliar to you.”
I grab a rusty polishing cloth reeking of Lemon Pledge from the front counter and crush it into the mahogany as though I’m Lady Macbeth trying to erase guilt. The cloth snags in a scratch along the lip.
“I don’t need your help in running my business.” I yank the threads from the wood’s grip and trace a finger along the fissure. Is the crack growing? Will it spread across the surface like some kind of evil wizard’s curse, break the whole counter into fragments?
Blackburn chuckles, the sound as ridiculous as a cartoon villain, while showing all those capped teeth. “Business advice is not the offer I’m making, as you well know.”
Yes, I know.
I toss the rag to the counter and face the sooty gray of Blackburn’s pinstripes, like a prisoner before a firing squad.
“I’ve made a promise.”
I’m not going to let that sweet woman down. Not after all Gran’s done for me, and especially not now. Something like ice hardens the core of my spine.
Gran’s entrusted me with her legacy, like someone handing off an injured bird she’s been cradling in her palms, asking me to care for it, to nurse it back to life.
If only I knew how.
He chuckles, the sound humorless and condescending. “You’re quite young, Ms. Willoughby. If Elizabeth were here—”
“Don’t speak of her like you know her. She would never sell.”
Lisa emerges from the back office and sidles up beside me, hands fluttering at the black-and-yellow scarf at her throat, which suddenly seems oddly reminiscent of police tape.
“Oh, Mr. Blackburn, I didn’t realize you’d stopped by. What a pleasure.” Three fingers reach to sweep hair behind one ear.
I suck in a breath through gritted teeth. “I’ve got this, Lisa.”
Lisa runs her fingers over the glass case. “Would you like a cookie? They’re fresh baked, and I’ll bet you could use a pick-me-up.”
“No, thank you, my dear.” Blackburn pats his suit jacket buttons. “Watching my figure.”
Lisa laughs, a little trill which I have only heard in this context. “Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that.”
I step between them and look Blackburn squarely in his cat eyes, one definite perk of my above-average height. “Okay, then, if there’s nothing else—”
“Ms. Johnson at the tax office has graciously and informatively given me to know that significant time has already elapsed since your last notification.”
The bell clangs again, and a stream of students tumbles into the shop, shoving and laughing.
I pinch his elbow, slide him to the door. “Thank you for your visit, Charles Diamond Blackburn, and for the very many words which you have formulated, assembled, and delivered to kindly and graciously inform me of all the information to which I was already privy. But as you can see, I am quite busy.”
I hustle him through the still-open door onto the side‐ walk. There’s no way I’m letting him speak another word where the students will hear. I’ve worked too hard to build the fragile trust necessary for them to open up creatively, and if they knew the truth, they’d be gone. Not to mention how much I need the small stipend the school pays for the program.
Blackburn sucks in a sharp breath and raises his tweezed eyebrows at the insult—that of being pushed outside. I doubt
he’s registered my attempt to mock his delivery. He plants his feet on the concrete.
“Ms. Willoughby, perhaps you should spend less time with books and children and more time focused on your crisis. I’m giving you one last chance at this opportunity. I’m afraid you will soon regret your reticence to make the best of your untenable situation. There is nothing sacred about this place, and there are worse things than selling.”
Is that some kind of veiled threat?
I fold my arms and stare him down. “Not for me there aren’t.”
“Ignoring the truth will not make it go away, Ms. Willoughby.”
“Perhaps. But will ignoring you make you go away?”
I don’t wait for an answer. And barely resist the urge for a sarcastic flip of my long hair in his direction. Gran would be horrified at my “cheekiness,” but there seems no other way to deal with the man.
The bluster is a fake, though. The scaffolding devouring the row of Chestnut Street stores, mere shadows of their glory days, scream that he’s probably right—I’d do better to spend my time on practical efforts than dreamy thoughts of books and beauty and springtime.
Even though the wannabe writer inside me whispers that fighting the Big Bad Hotel Developer is a played-out story line.
Deep breath, Kelsey.
Tell that voice to crawl back into the shadows. Focus on what’s important.

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