The Bookseller

The imagination, it turns out, is a remarkably clever and hardworking creature.

So invitingly polished, those elevators—so safe, like big metal wombs.

Nothing ever goes my way, I would say to myself, more morose and downtrodden than any Dickensian character had ever been.

So here I am, where it’s nice and quiet and I have private jokes with my cat. Back in the genuine, real world.

A dream inside a dream. A dream of a minor—albeit pleasant—incident that never happened. All inside a dream of an entire life that never happened.

I do not want to wake up from this dream-within-a-dream.

What I’ve learned, what we’ve both learned over the years, is that nothing is as permanent as it appears at the start.

We saw a lot of evening customers in those days; people loved to browse our bookstore at night, no doubt hoping to meet a mysterious beauty or handsome stranger among the stacks.

I read each Narnia novel as it came out, and I’ve read the entire series at least half a dozen times since.

Nonetheless, this is not my typical sort of dream. My nighttime forays tend toward the fantastical, toward dreams that place one outside of conventional time and space. This, I have concluded, is because I read so much.