The Stopped Clock Bookshop
Anita found the flyer when she collected the post. It stood out among the junk mail scattered on the porch mat: printed on heavy cream paper that looked antique, although it had clearly been designed on a computer. At the top was a drawing of the seventeenth-century clock in the town square. The hands of the clock in the drawing stood at the exact time of the real clock: eleven minutes past eleven.
The Stopped Clock Bookshop, she read. Specialists in historic editions, signed copies, and books from the libraries of famous readers. Come and be transported! 9 Market Square. Opening Saturday 29 February, 11:11.
Someone must have finally bought that shop on the square that had been empty for months. Not a local person, she thought, looking at the picture of the clock. People who’d lived there all their lives found the stopped clock an embarrassing landmark. Every other week, someone wrote to the local paper complaining about it.
Quickly, Anita sorted through the other mail. Aside from the junk, there was a parcel for Mum with the unmistakable heft of a book. No invitations or anything that might upset her. Good.
Mum was typing in the study, the curtains partway drawn to let in a ghost of winter light. Anita stepped around a wall of books and deposited the parcel atop another pile of books on the desk. ‘Something’s come from America.’
‘Thank you, darling. This must be Pangborn’s new study of workplace violence. We disagree on many things, but I always value reading him.’ Mum unpacked the book, a hardback with a photo of a police cordon on its cover. ‘Now I just have to read it… after all these others...’
‘This came through the door.’ Anita laid the flyer on the desk. ‘Might be interesting.’
‘A second-hand bookshop in town! Civilization must have come. Or we have delusions of grandeur. It must sell online as well, or it could never survive.’
‘It’s just a mile up the road.’
Anita tried to make that sound cheerful, not challenging. An offer of service: I could pop over there easily! She remembered going to bookshops on day trips with Mum. How long ago had that been? So long ago she’d always scooted to the kids’ section to avoid the dull things Mum wanted.
Mum resumed typing. ‘I’ll have to give you a commission.’
When Saturday came, Anita equipped herself with Mum’s wants list and a bundle of waterproof bags.
‘I’ve written by each what I’m prepared to pay. Enjoy the walk,’ Mum said, returning to her desk.
Her voice was strained. The previous day, Anita had stayed home from school with a stomach bug, and they’d spent the hours till dusk getting on each other’s nerves. In the evening, when Anita had started feeling better, Dad had called; they’d chatted for half an hour and he’d made her laugh. Mum had been upset. She’d accused Anita of being happy with Dad, miserable with her; and Anita had closed off, feeling unjustly treated and unable to use the retorts that sprang readily to mind. Though they’d apologized before going to bed, the row was still fresh.
Anita, who hated discord, made herself appear willing to attend the opening of the bookshop. ‘Hope work goes well,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring you back a first edition of the Bible, or something.’
In the gardens she passed were signs of approaching spring. Crocus spikes thrust from the earth alongside clumps of snowdrops. As Anita walked, she thought of when Mum had last left the house. It had been for Grandma Carling’s funeral; the taxi had come right up the drive so only a few feet of space separated it from the door. That had been February, too. She remembered the heads of snowdrops shaking by the taxi wheels.
On the square, the new bookshop stood out among the other shops: the bakery, the mini-market, the ladies’ boutique that hung on somehow. Its woodwork was freshly painted scarlet. Around the gleaming windows fluttered red, white and blue bunting so faded it might have been from VE Day. The glass was filled with books whose covers faced outwards, tempting whichever passers-by had fifty, a hundred, two hundred pounds. The sign read The Stopped Clock Bookshop in old-fashioned letters. Beneath the name were an entirely modern website address and Twitter handle.
Anita glanced at the clock (eleven-eleven, as always), and pushed open the door. A silvery bell rang inside.
The shop was less cramped than she’d expected. The second-hand bookshops she’d visited with Mum had always had stock jammed into every possible space, forcing customers to twist their bodies like cavers between the racks. This shop was full, but neat. The books were corralled on widely-spaced shelves, with light sifting between them. Gold signs hung from the ceiling announced: ‘First Editions’. ‘Historical Association’. ‘Famous Owners’. ‘Curious Lay-ins’. Not the usual set of categories. And something else was different. The smell, she realized; there was none of the usual musty bookshop smell. All she could smell was paint and varnish.
‘Good morning.’
The woman behind the desk might have been any age from a prematurely solemn thirty to a youthful fifty. She wore an expensive leather jacket over a long, fluted ivory dress. Her silver-blonde hair stood out around her head like daisy petals.
‘Hi,’ Anita said. ‘I’m just browsing. This a lovely shop.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’ The proprietor smiled. ‘My name is Celestine Wayte. Let me know if you need help.’
Anita pulled out Mum’s list and headed into the stacks. She made nearly a complete circuit before pausing. Most of the books on the list were about sociology, but there was no section called ‘Sociology’ or ‘Social Sciences’ or anything like that. The closest thing was a section called ‘Ordinary Lives’. This, when she investigated, proved to contain a curious assortment of books, from the diaries of seventeenth-century parsons to the memoirs of party girls from the sixties. As far as she could tell, all the authors had in common was being too obscure for ‘Historical Association’ or ‘Famous Readers’.
Idly she picked up one volume, which had nothing to do with Mum’s list but caught her eye because its author was improbably named Torquil. Leafing through the pages, she found accounts of various animals the author had shot on safari.
She jumped as several pages flipped over at once, hitting her finger. She glanced towards the door, thinking someone had let in a gust of wind; but the door was shut, and she could hear no one but Celestine Wayte tapping computer keys. Her nostrils twitched at a strong, blue smell of tobacco.
She sniffed hard. The smell was coming from the book. Mum always complained about books previously owned by smokers; the pages turned yellow and the smell lingered for years. These pages were cream-coloured, though, and the smell was more woodsy than the sour one of old cigarettes.
Hastily, she put Torquil’s memoir back on the shelf. As she turned away, she thought she saw a patch of blue haze, dissipating in the air. She blinked and shook her head.
Anita peered down several more aisles - ‘Heraldic Bindings’, ‘Library Fires’, ‘Incunabula’ (what?) - before deciding to seek help. Celestine Wayte looked up from her computer screen, smiling, as she approached the desk. ‘I see,’ the proprietor said, ‘that you’re looking for something in particular.’
Anita showed the list. ‘Could you tell me if you’ve got any of these?’
‘Give me a moment.’ Fingers flew over keys. ‘I’ve none of the academic books, I’m afraid. Books like that are worth only the information they contain. They are not my business. But I do have — .’ She pointed to the bottom of the list, where, after the books she needed for her work, Mum had put some long-standing wants for her personal collection. Celestine’s finger lay on the title of a rare work by Mum’s favourite poet, Sylvia Plath. ‘That.’
‘Really?’ Mum had been after that book so long, Anita had assumed there were no copies on the market at a price affordable by normal human beings.
‘Her husband, Ted Hughes’, copy.’ Anita blinked again. ‘I’ll show you.’
Leading Anita into the section called Famous Readers, Celestine pressed a thin volume into her hand. ‘Lyonesse. One of 90 copies. Printed by Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes’ sister and Plath’s sister-in-law. Unfortunately, Mr Hughes didn’t write his name in it, but I can verify it comes from his personal library. You can smell the farmyard.’
Anita tried to smile at what was apparently a literary joke, and opened the cover. She wished Mum were here. Mum would have been thrilled to handle something like this. But Mum would never make the journey, and the book would certainly be too expensive to take home.
It was a beautiful book, she thought. A shame it was a collectable and would need to be kept in a glass case. You couldn’t just read it in a deckchair with a cup of tea, listening to ducks and the far-off sound of cowbells, smelling the hay curing in the sun along with the undertones of manure that are always present in the English countryside…
What?
For a moment, Anita had pictured herself in a setting she’d never known except on long-ago holidays. But surely there was a hot summer smell of hay and manure? And hadn’t she heard something that might have been cowbells?
Realizing she was staring at the book like someone who couldn’t read, she held it out to Celestine. As she closed the cover, a small, mottled feather fell out and drifted softly to the floor.
‘The ducks must be in the yard,’ Celestine said.
‘Uhuh.’ Anita’s eyes flicked to the door as she decided it was time to leave. In fairness to Mum, though, she had to ask the price of the book before making her escape. There was no price written inside.
‘To you? Fifty pounds.’
Anita’s jaw bobbed up and down. Fifty pounds was less than the maximum price Mum had written on her list, and a lot less than she’d expected. A book that rare, owned by a famous person, should have cost much more. There didn’t seem anything wrong with it other than there being feathers inside.
‘I’ll take it,’ she said, with a last look at the feather stirring in imperceptible air currents. She handed over Mum’s credit card and was reassured by the familiar ritual of the card machine. Yanking out one of the plastic bags stowed in her backpack, she wrapped the book carefully for its journey home.
She arrived home to find the blinds drawn in the living room, a sign Mum was having a bad day. She swallowed a sigh before carrying her bag through to the study.
‘Hi, my love,’ Mum said from behind the computer. ‘Thanks for going out for me. I was worried it would rain. What was the shop like?’
Although her voice was brittle, Mum seemed to be trying to forget yesterday’s row. For that, Anita was grateful.
‘It was interesting. Like, antiquarian, mostly. Not books just for reading. They didn’t have any of your sociology ones.’
‘I’ll get them online. That’s no problem. It’s just nice to shop locally if we can.’
‘But they did have — this!’ Anita flourished the parcel. ‘You can tick one off the list. And it’s lovely.’
Mum had it unwrapped in the shortest time compatible with care. ‘Lyonesse!’ she exclaimed. ‘What a find! My clever, clever girl!’
‘It was Ted Hughes’. He owned it, I mean.’
‘Really? His personal copy? Fascinating!’ Mum gently turned the leaves, looking for anything Ted Hughes might have written inside. The aroma of cows seeped out. ‘Pooh! It smells like it’s been kept in a barn. How much did it cost?’
‘Fifty pounds.’
Anita listened for the sound of cowbells. All she could hear was the minimalist music Mum played while she was working.
‘That’s all? It would be a bargain even without Ted Hughes. Was the bookseller sure this was his? There’s no bookplate or anything.’
‘She said so. She said you can smell a farmyard in it — which you can. Did he live on a farm?’
‘For part of his life, yes.’ Mum flicked through more pages. ‘Some of the pages haven’t been cut… No, they have, they just didn’t want to open.’
Mum put the book in the glass-fronted case where she kept her most valuable treasures, safe from dust and from falling off the tottering piles of books around the room.
That night, her attention wandering from the newest American teen drama, Anita picked up her phone. With a spurt of curiosity, she looked up the Stopped Clock Bookshop’s Twitter account.
She found several years’ worth of posts. The bookshop couldn’t be completely new, then; it must have sold online for a long time, or maybe moved from another town. Some of the tweets were routine. There was one about the store opening, another about a book fair Celestine had attended. But others, announcing stock the shop had acquired, made Anita’s eyes pop. Scrolling through, she began to realize that the rare Sylvia Plath was one of the less unusual items. You didn’t need to be a book collector to recognize the names that flashed by. They belonged to some of the most famous and infamous people in the world.
Just in: Winston Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (1932). Inscribed by author ‘To my darling Clementine’. £800
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818). First edition. Notes in hand of Percy Bysshe Shelley. IMO he didn’t understand it. £1400
Histoire Naturelle, owned by Marie Antoinette. In the distinctive binding of her library and exuding pastoral scents of Versailles. £500
There were dozens more like that. Were they real? Anita wondered. Or were the tweets a joke? If the books advertised were real, a serious collector would give his or her right arm for them. How could a small-town bookshop have so many items you’d expect to find only in libraries and museums, if at all?
The landline rang. Partly out of hope, partly out of frustration, she waited to see if Mum would answer it. After ten rings, she knew Mum wasn’t up to taking unscreened calls.
It was Dad. ‘Hi,’ she said with relief. ‘How are you doing?’
‘I’m very well. How are you?’
‘Fine. Just watching TV.’
‘Have you been out today?’
‘I went into town. There’s a new shop just opened. I looked round, had a coffee afterwards.’
‘Was that with — anyone?’
She shook her head, which was pointless, then gathered her voice and said, ‘No. But I’m going to the pictures with some friends on Friday.’
‘Good, I’m glad.’ Dad paused. ‘How’s your mum?’
‘Not great.’
‘Has she been out?’
‘No. The driver from the supermarket’s really getting to know us.’
‘One of my friends, a doctor, has a colleague in London who specializes in agoraphobia. I could ask him to make a recommendation — ’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Not right now, OK?’
‘All right. Listen, I wanted us to make holiday plans for this year. What do you think of one week with your grandparents, and another week in Mumbai?’
‘That sounds great.’
‘I was thinking of hiring a bungalow with a pool.’
‘Will I get to meet gorgeous Bollywood stars?’
‘I’ll put out some feelers. I’ll let the gorgeous Bollywood stars know my beautiful daughter is visiting from England. I hope your mum won’t have any problem with you coming.’
‘I don’t think so.’
He started telling her a funny story about a salesman in his company, who’d got some information confused and sold a hotel chain a miraculously efficient but nonexistent kettle. The company had had to invent the kettle over a weekend so the hotel wouldn’t make a stink and pull out of its contract. Anita laughed while part of her mind thought about going to India. Even though it meant dealing with Dad’s new wife, it would be lovely to travel again and to see her grandparents for the first time in two years. But she couldn’t help feel guilty about leaving Mum.
As the conversation wound down, Dad asked, ‘Do you need any money?’
‘No, I’m good. Thanks.’
‘Are you sure? Just ask me if you need any.’
‘OK.’ This was a routine exchange. Dad imagined Mum spent all of their money on books, leaving nothing for Anita. She could never convince him otherwise.
‘Nita!’ Mum came running into the room. ‘I’ve seen the strangest thing — oh, you’re still on the phone.’
‘It’s Dad,’ said Anita, moving the mouthpiece away.
‘Hello, Amil.’
‘Mum says hello.’
‘Send her my love and tell her I’ll call for a proper talk tomorrow. It sounds like you need to go.’
‘OK. Bye.’
‘Love you. Bye.’
Anita put down the phone and looked at Mum. Mum’s eyes were bright and abstracted. ‘What’s the weird thing?’
‘Come down to the study — or may I use your computer?’ Anita — trying to remember what was in her browser history — nodded, and Mum slid behind the keyboard. ‘I looked up that bookshop’s online catalogue. After your find this morning, I was curious to see what else they had. And look at this.’ She ran a search, then leaned aside so Anita could see the screen.
Sylvia Plath, Lyonesse. No. 2 of 90. An interesting association copy, formerly owned by poet Ted Hughes and also containing the bookplate of sociologist Sophie Carling (acclaimed author of Crowds in the Age of the Internet). £100
‘Your copy?’ Anita rubbed her eyes and looked at the screen again. It still said the same thing. ‘But it’s downstairs! How can it be for sale? I only bought it this morning. Did you have another copy before?’
‘No. I’ve never owned that book until today.’
Mum leaned on her elbows, her head next to Anita’s in the glow of the screen. Her eyes were more alive than they’d been all day.
‘This says your bookplate’s in it.’
‘I was going to put a bookplate in it. I’ve run out, though. I need to order more.’ Mum stood up. ‘Intriguing, isn’t it? Some kind of hoax, do you think, by the seller? I shall have to do some research.’
After Mum retired to her bedroom, Anita went down to the study and opened the glass-fronted bookcase. She took out Lyonesse. At first the cover seemed to resist her, like in the shop when she’d felt pages move in the contrary direction to her fingers. As if someone else was trying to close the book at the same time she was trying to open it.
Inside was Mum’s bookplate. It was unmistakable: her name beneath the figure of Sophia, representing wisdom, that an artist friend had drawn. The paper was softly faded, its edges crinkling.
‘Mum?’ she called through the bedroom door.
‘Uh-huh?
‘Did Churchill know someone called Clementine?’
‘Yes, his wife. Why?’
‘Just something on TV.’
Anita stared at the bookplate some more. Then she took a photo with her phone, to prove she hadn’t imagined it. She replaced the book in the case and hoped Mum wouldn’t look at it for a while.
The following Saturday, Anita entered the bookshop at eleven-eleven. Celestine Wayte smiled at her. ‘How nice to see you again! Your mother liked her book, I hope?’
‘Yes. How did you know it was for her?’
‘Who else?’ Celestine’s smile widened. ‘I can show you some lovely items of similar interest.’
‘I’m just browsing, thanks.’ That was how Mum had got rid of clingy salespeople back when she still went to shops. To make the claim true, she ducked into an aisle at random.
The gold signs placed her at the junction of Famous Readers and Interesting Lay-ins. So many books with known and unknown names, so many spines in a spectrum of old colours. Which would give a clue to the nature of the shop’s business? Finally, she closed her eyes and randomly pulled out a squat volume bound in leather.
It was a copy, in French, of Candide by Voltaire. A slip of paper tucked inside the cover informed her, unsettlingly, that the book’s one-time owner had read it while in a cart travelling to the guillotine. ‘The corner of page 67 is still turned down, marking the point at which the tragic Philippe stopped reading in this mortal world.’ Turning to page 67, she saw the dog-eared corner, creased as sharply as a knife.
The air was suddenly acrid in her throat, and thin as though she could never breathe enough. Her thumb pressed the folded corner. Forget the baying of the crowd. Forget what reared ahead. Must mark the place, as always; lay the beloved book beside the basket and resume reading in eternity…
She closed the book, carefully, and as she did her spine shuddered. Dark droplets glistened on the cover.
Anita held the book until her breathing returned to normal. She resisted a need to touch her heart and make sure it still worked.
Carrying the book, she crossed to the desk. ‘You’ve found a fascinating item there,’ said Celestine. The proprietor’s gaze barely rested on the spots of liquid, as though they were no more remarkable than the title. ‘Do you read French?’
‘There’s blood on it.’
Celestine winked. ‘That’s what happens when someone’s head is taken off nearby.’
‘It looks fresh.’
‘Sometimes it is.’
‘The book I got for my mum,’ Anita said, ‘has her bookplate in, even though she didn’t put one in. And the book’s being advertised for sale in your catalogue, with Mum’s bookplate, even though it’s at home in our bookcase.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t control things like bookplates, inscriptions and the odd stain.’ Celestine plucked the blood-spattered book from Anita’s hands and laid it on her desk. ‘There is some instability in the bubble. I can guarantee that a book bought from me will last for the lifetime of the buyer without crumbling to dust, even if in other circumstances it would have crumbled to dust already.’ Her eyes flicked to the section called Library Fires, where Anita could see fraying scrolls stacked on shelves alongside the bound books. ‘Not that that would be a problem for the book you bought. Decidedly modern.’
‘How do you do it?’ Anita took a step backwards. ‘Like, books with blood on? Selling the same thing twice? How come you have so many things that are really valuable and unusual?’
‘It’s the simplest way of doing business.’ Celestine tossed her starburst of hair. ‘The problem with the book trade is that the things people really want, the things for which they’ll pay real money, are very rare. Unique, even. There’s a one-of-a-kind volume, held by an exclusive seller, offered at a price that only one, possibly mad, collector is willing to pay. Once the obsessed collector buys the book, it disappears into their library and becomes useless to anyone else. Until the collector dies and the whole process starts over. Would most people find that a good business model? I don’t think so.
‘What I do is simply to eliminate the exclusivity of ownership, the ability of one person to tie up a rare book for years so no one else can enjoy it. Of course, there’s still only one copy, because it’s impossible to replicate it. One can’t increase the amount of matter in the universe. But if the copy exists outside the flow of time, then several people can own it at once, even if they sometimes get in each other’s way. All my customers get to have and keep the things they want, and my inventory never goes down. A good arrangement, don’t you think?’
Anita digested this. It would have been easy to laugh and say the woman was mad. But she’d seen the blood appear on the book, smelled smoke that wasn’t in the room, felt pages resist her finger as though someone else were holding them down. Those things had felt no less real than the ordinary laptop thrumming on Celestine’s desk, or the glimpse through the window of the clock eternally stuck at eleven-eleven.
‘You have, like, a time machine,’ she said finally, ‘and you use it for selling books? Is that all?’
‘I have to live,’ said Celestine, unruffled. ‘I’m meeting a need. And it’s not a machine, precisely.’
‘Whatever.’ Anita eyed the older woman. ‘Aren’t you cheating people?’
‘Why? They get what they pay for. At a very good price, too.’
Anita held out her bloodstained fingertips. ‘What about him? Aren’t you selling his — his death?’
‘I sell time.’ Celestine drew herself up as the bell jangled and a customer entered. ‘Time used to belong to God, people thought. Now everyone can have a piece of it. Even Monsieur Philippe there. He’s still alive sometime in my bubble, you know, perpetually marking his place as he steps on to the guillotine.’
It was another bad day. Anita came home to find the curtains drawn, the phone unplugged, and Mum not even working, but propped on her bed reading Agatha Christie.
‘Good trip into town?’
‘It was OK. I didn’t buy anything.’
Anita could hear how forced were both their voices, but felt unable to change the mood. The energy with which she’d argued with Celestine had ebbed on entering the house.
‘What would you like for tea?’ Mum said.
‘Whatever you want. I’m not all that hungry.’
‘All right.’
Mum’s mouth quivered and she yanked the book up to her face. Anita cursed herself and felt her cheeks heat, hating herself for not responding to the effort, and hating Mum for being like this in the first place.
In her room, she gave way briefly to tears before lecturing herself on patience and kindness. It was an old pattern. She was tired of it.
The computer’s standby light winked green. Blinking back at it, Anita remembered something. Something else she’d seen about the French Revolution before encountering poor headless Philippe. The Revolution… and plants. Pastoral scents of Versailles.
She searched for the Stopped Clock Bookshop’s online catalogue. Yes, the book she’d seen on Twitter was still for sale. Of course it was: nothing Celestine sold was ever gone.
Gripping her phone like a flotation device, she texted Dad and asked him for five hundred pounds.
‘I’ve brought you something.’ She’d carried the book under her coat, wrapped in three layers of plastic, to protect it from the rain.
‘Not more Plath?’ Mum looked up from the computer, interest brightening her pale face.
‘No. This belongs — belonged — to Marie Antoinette.’
‘Marie — .’ Mum blinked. ‘She had a well-known library, but it’s never occurred to me to collect her books. They must cost a fortune. How did you get it?’
‘Oh, I have my ways.’ Anita laid down the leather-bound Histoire Naturelle, which smelled of oil and floral perfume. ‘Apparently she read this on a farm. Did she have a farm?’
‘A pretend one. Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court would dress up and play at being shepherdesses.’
Mum picked up the book with careful fingers. A coat of arms was stamped on the cover; she tilted the book and blew invisible dust from the design.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘It’s — trembling?’ Startled, she withdrew one hand and held it up before her face. ‘It’s not me.’
‘Maybe Marie’s haunting it after having her head cut off,’ Anita said cheerfully. ‘Are you going to open it?’
As Mum lifted the cover, the edges of the fine, heavy pages quivered in a silent breeze. A scent filled their noses. It was the smell of wide fields and flowers under the sun, the smell of all one’s childhood summers. Across the paper moved shadows of leaves, outlined sharply by sunlight.
‘This book — .’ Mum’s eyes were wide. Now her hands were trembling. She looked at the rain filming the windows. She turned pages, flashing through dense black type and delicately coloured, cross-section drawings of flowers. Out spilled daisy petals, whirling to the carpet, and the faint sound of laughter.
‘Don’t ask me how it works.’ Anita kept her voice low, afraid of shattering the spell. ‘But I think it’s a kind of window. On the past. On the world.’
The walls of the study became transparent. They were still there; if Anita focused hard, she could see the bookshelves and Grandma’s photo hung in the one clear spot. But they faded, letting through a vista of green and gold. On all sides stretched acres of countryside, softly rolling fields strewn with flowers, drenched in sunlight and heavy with the sound of bees. The ceiling became a blue sky chased with puffs of cloud. In one direction — where the door would have been — was a distant view of buildings whose many windows glittered in the sun.
Mum’s breath hissed. With her free hand, she clung to the corner of her desk, which was now a picnic table of bleached wood. Anita heard her counting softly. The breeze blew the scent of lavender over them as the laughter came closer.
With another sharp intake of breath, Mum looked up.
They were sitting on low benches on the gently sloping meadow. Around their feet grew blue flowers which Histoire Naturelle, lying open the table, identified as gentianes. They weren’t alone. At the edges of their vision, bright, blurred figures ran. Women and men in peasant costumes that rustled with silk, their bodies insubstantial as gossamer. They played with a ball, tossing it around a circle, laughing as they threw and laughing again as they dropped it.
Mum and Anita sat for what felt like hours. The figures took no notice of them. The sun never changed position. They each held a corner of the book, holding the world of another time open between the covers.
Laughter floated on the air as the sun shone and the flowers swayed above their shadows. It was the laughter of children without cares, the laughter of children who didn’t yet know that their game wasn’t real. But for the moment, it was happy.
