Life's Bone

Adam King entered the old bookstore, and walked the aisles of random books. The place was in great disarray. A nice place to wander through, on a rainy, cold day. Here was a book on diseases of cattle, next to a novel by Tolstoy. And a bunch of National Geographic maps of Central and South America, sloppily folded, and bound by a fading rubber band. Over there, was an archeological treatise on The Evolution of the Trilobite, leaning up against a well-worn copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover. A small box of baseball cards. A shoebox of old postcards. A stack of thin monographs, the writings of such as Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss, Sartre, Marcuse, and Richard Sennett's weighty text, The Fall of Public Man. A table full of torn and tattered sheet music from the early 1900s.

And then there was the staircase. And the sign with the arrow that said, 'More Books Downstairs'. It smelled dry and musty, as he descended. The smell of pages yellowing to brown and brittle, on their way back to dust. The steps down were littered with paperbacks. And the lighting was dim. At the bottom, he looked about at a large dark space of hanging bare bulbs. It was quite surreal, the piles of books. They were like rolling hills, or, haystacks in a field. No shelves, anywhere. Just mountains of books.

As he meandered through the piles of books, he soon realized he was not alone. There were dozens of people nestled into the hillsides of books. Leisurely leafing through pages that seemed to be disintegrating in their hands. Some had carved cavernous niches into the hills, and were sleeping in curled up balls, open books clutched to their chests.

Adam found a hillside less occupied. He pushed the books about with his hands, making a shallow seat for himself. He reached lazily over his head and pulled a book from the pile, as he settled in. It was some dog-eared piece of cheap pulp fiction, from the fifties. 'They Also Serve, Who Only Sit and Die'.

It got exciting in the second chapter, when the author introduced a new and startling character. It was a guy named Adam King, same name as his own! And it got better, as it went along. Adam King was in love with a beautiful woman. A woman so enchanting, he was easily persuaded to kill the woman's treacherous husband. And then, in the next chapter, he actually did it. He killed the asshole. And now, he, Adam King, had the beautiful woman, and all her husband's money too.

Then came Chapter Four.

"They rolled around on the bed, as in some orgiastic reverie." And then, came the sharp, searing pain of her knife in his side. He was being killed off in Chapter Four! He was, but a minor character in one of many sub-plots in a story that went on without him.

The seemingly ageless proprietor, Mr. Joseph Hillman rustled his keys about in his pocket, and tapped his cane shakily on the dark stairs as he stepped slowly down to the basement. Time to close up for the day. He fanned the flashlight around at the piles of books.

"Ah,There's another one." he said, as his light fell upon the lifeless form of Adam King. He walked over to the body, and raked the overhanging books down over the corpse.

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