THE FICTOGNOSTICS WANT THEIR BOOKSHOP BACK (One-Three)

ONE

She knew he was lying.

“I just – I mean, I just don’t think that I love you. We’ve changed. I moved – moved to the city, went to a new school – and I changed. Anyone would change. It’s just natural and – I mean, the distance hasn’t exactly helped, has it? I don’t know… I don’t know what to say. I don’t love you anymore.”

She was right. He was lying. He did still love her. But school was finished, and it was November: November was the time when his biological clock shook him by the shoulders and told him he needed a new mate, lest his precious seed go to waste. Sometimes, most Novembers, this would manifest via him developing an extremely small adoration for another girl.

He never courted them. He barely spoke to them. That was irrelevant.
After, bathed in guilt and dressed in self-hate, he would remain mentally chaste for the next eleven months, and then the cycle would continue once more. But sometimes – sometimes he made mistakes.

This particular spring, he’d brainwashed himself into thinking that this particular girl wasn’t good enough for him. It was deceit of the greatest quality – not only did it fool others, it fooled himself.

Five years – high school sweethearts – thrown away.

“I just don’t understand why,” she said, through the sobs. “I just don’t – you were fine yesterday! I know we were fine. We were happy. We’ve fought a little lately, yeah, but I – I – I don’t really know, why? What made you feel like this? Why?”

She stopped trying to hide it. Tears streamed down her face, but he couldn’t see that. He’d broken up with her over the phone. He could tell, though, that her body was being wracked as she wept. He knew that wracked was the right word: most dictionaries defined it as ‘a state of intense anguish’.

She truly loved him.

TWO

Justin wandered into the eccentric little bookshop – the sign claimed that it sold TECHNICAL MANUALS AND EDUCATIONAL BOOKS SECOND HAND. He tried to suppress the thought that next sprung to life within his mind, but didn’t quite succeed. Did the bookshop sell technical books and educational manuals as well…?

Another sign: REED’S BOOKSHOP.

And another: PART-TIME STAFF WANTED APPLY WITHIN.

Justin had shown up, resume in hand. He’d written it himself. He was a little proud.

The shop didn’t look successful enough to hire a part-timer, and the man behind the cluttered desk looked a little ill. Perhaps terminally. His eyes were shot with the red scars of the habitually under-slept. The little hair that the man had left was grey and caught in the process of withering away. His clothes were eccentric. Brown on brown - with a matching brown tie. Highly peculiar in the dullest of ways.

The man didn’t look up as Justin wandered through the bookshop, feigning interest in the encyclopedias, atlases, and text-books; he didn’t have much time for non-fiction books, himself. Work was work, though, and a bookshop was a bookshop - and he was very much in love with the smell of old books…

“What do you want?” asked the man, almost conversationally. It sounded very much like, “How might I help you?”

“I, uh, well,” said Justin. “I’m just having a look, thanks. Actually – um – actually, I saw your sign, and I’m wondering if you’re still accepting applications…”

“Is the sign still up?”

“Well, yes, and I…”

“Splendid. Give me your resume.”

He said ‘splendid’ the same way most people would say ‘funeral’ – dry, flat, as if he himself were locked, without chance of release, within a coffin.

Justin stumbled a little, fumbled a little, mumbled a little as he searched through his backpack, but he soon had the stapled sheets out. He passed them to the man.

“I’m Reed,” said the man, through grunts of acknowledgment, as he flipped through Justin’s unimpressive resume. “You can call me Reed. Or Daniel. Resume’s… a little interesting. You say you can write?”

“I’d like to, um, study journalism or editing or something. I’m hoping Melbourne University. Don’t know if I got the marks, though – journalism’s hard to get into… need a score of ninety, I think.”

An eyebrow rose accusingly.

“Says here you write short stories,” said Reed.

“Yeah… mostly short stories. Finished a novel last year.”

There was a smirk.

“You wrote here that you graduated this month from Northcote High. That’s quite clever.”

“Oh? Is it -?”

“Yeah. Didn’t realise Northington was out already. What’re you messing about with journalism for? There’s a whole world out there, maybe a few for someone with clever eyes, like you. Clever words, too, but you’re a bit of a fool with them. You don’t need the job. Go get crazy, like the rest of them, and go make something.”

Justin felt himself be taken upon a strong current of confusion. He knew that he would soon drown within bewilderment if he didn’t say something soon.

“Um.”

“Well?”

“I’m sorry, Mister Reed -”

“Reed.”

“Reed – I’m sorry, but I don’t quite get what you mean. I mean, thank you, but… I’m just a guy who graduated from Northcote and is looking for some part-time work. I write – I mean, that’s what I make, if that’s what you mean.”

Reed’s eyebrows – archetypically wizardly – fell suspiciously. His thin mouth, caught in stubble, frowned. He looked - long and hard - at Justin.

“You’re not from Northington.”

“No, I went to Northcote – inner city -”

“You’re in my store, and you’re clever, but nothing special.”

“Sorry.”

“Hmmm,” said Reed. A smile broke his face. “You know what? It’ll probably kill me, but you’ve got it. You work to my schedule, right?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. Two or three shifts a week?”

“Um, fine, thank you.”

“Forty-five dollars an hour?”

Forty-five dollars an hour?

“That – sorry?”

“I can pay forty-five dollars an hour. Fifty, even. Is fifty enough…?”

“Thanks. Thank you. That’d be great, thanks. Um.”

Reed looked at him. The brown suddenly looked a very menacing auburn. Justin felt that the man had eyes like a tiger – but he’d never seen a tiger that close, and had no special inkling of what their eyes might look like. The analogy, however, stuck.

“You can come in tomorrow. Five-thirty till, say, three.”

“In the morning?”

“Yes, damn it, in the morning!”

“Okay, um. Okay. Until three in the afternoon.”

“Yes. That would be around five hundred dollars. That should be fine.”

“It is, um, thanks. It’s fine. Thank you.”

Reed smiled once more. It was a librarian’s smile, bitter and thin but genuine.

“Now get out of my shop. We’re closed.”

“Yes, right, thank you…”

“Five-thirty.”

“Right.”

By the time Justin made it home, it was dark, and the moon was slowly rising in the night.

THREE

In the late afternoon, Daniel Reed closed the curtains and emptied the cash register – he’d made fifteen dollars, which wasn’t so bad considering most people couldn’t even find the place. He usually strived to eat dinner and be in bed by seven, in order to get enough sleep for the second round of customers, who typically popped in just past one in the morning.

Reed was determined, however – he had personal business to attend to. He would suffer Chinese for dinner and deal with an hour’s less sleep.

There was a fourth sign upon the shop window: CLOSED.

“There’s a new one coming,” said CLOSED, rather quietly and in a language most cannot understand, to his brothers.

“That was the chubby-looking boy?” said REED’S BOOKSHOP eagerly.

“Can’t be,” said PART-TIME STAFF WANTED APPLY WITHIN.

“What would you know?” TECHNICAL MANUALS AND EDUCATIONAL BOOKS SECOND HAND snarled.

“Haven’t been here long,” said CLOSED, feeling rather hurt.

“Certainly not long enough to be making comments like that.”

There was muttering and arguing amongst the four. The consensus was this: it was highly unlikely, yes, that the boy was the part-timer, but CLOSED wasn’t a liar or an idiot, and he knew what he heard. The boy wasn’t fictional, no, not in the Gnostic sense, but…

“Found the shop, I guess,” said PART-TIME STAFF WANTED APPLY WITHIN, defeated. “Definitely counts for something.”

There was a rustling from inside, and a creak as the door was opened from the inside. Reed stepped outside, still in his brown coat, and whispered grumpily to the signs.

“It’s nighttime, little facts, and time for your master to go to sleep. So be quiet. Quieter. What if a passerby heard you? What would they think then? Go to sleep, little facts! You may talk in the busy day!”

“Is it true that you’ve got a new assistant? I don’t think it can be true, because he was very real, and couldn’t be a very good assistant, boss, but CLOSED thinks that you have, and I told him he was an idiot, because -”

PART-TIME STAFF WANTED APPLY WITHIN stopped talking. Reed was watching him with the tiger’s eyes, a silent growl caught within his throat. TECHNICAL MANUALS AND EDUCATIONAL BOOKS SECOND HAND whimpered.

“Don’t need you anymore,” said Reed, tearing PART-TIME STAFF WANTED APPLY WITHIN from the window. PART-TIME squirmed invisibly, squealed silently. Reed crumpled the sign into a ball, ducked back into the shop. The other, more permanent signs could hear PART-TIME’s screams. There was a whirring sound. They knew what that meant. That meant the shredder.

CLOSED shuddered.

The screams stopped. Reed stepped back out.

“Sleep, my little facts,” he said, and the remaining signs went quiet.
They were all very scared of Master Reed.