Lost and Found in the Old Corner Bookstore

part 2

It's engineered old school. Nobody does late 19th century aesthetics like new school architects.

 What's old is new; what goes around comes around; starve a fever, feed a cold. Or is it the other way 'round? "Lol," I crack myself up. The book I'm reading, more like perusing, is a reconstructed Dickens' tome. Nobody now remembers 'Dickens', but if they could read they would certainly know his work: his words have been burgled and regurgitated in countless bastardizations over the centuries. No, my little shop isn't really patronized by the educated so much as by home décor specialists looking to fill space between tchotchke on oak veneer bookcases. Nothing original exists anymore, not from that era. Unless it's in an underground refrigerator off limits to anyone without white gloves and a chrome loupe.

I'd just about given up on the wordy bleakness of Bleak House, when the quaint bell tinkles gleefully the arrival of company. "Welcome, let me know if there's anything I can...".

"I like what you've done with Betty Lou," she says, sweeping her gaze thoughtfully over the surfaces. The glare damping, concave edges of the mega-space-crawler's shuttle were now hidden by scavenged shelving and musty hardcovers. "Could hardly tell your shop is a spaceship the way you've built up the façade. Though technically, this is Moon State property. Just saying."

Uh oh. "Like, you know." I'm always glib when trouble walks in. I shelve Dickens, then I take him back down because I have a feeling I might need something lengthy and acrostic over the impending... doom, doomness, unbearable time and distance? "We're in mothballs now, or can't you smell that through the static you're wearing?" You can recognize a Moon State Tech operative simply by the brand of chrome they garnish their jackets with.

"Will it help if I buy something? What about that there, it must be very good the way you're fondling it." She reaches for my Dickens. Alicia Tenweight, MST operative extraordinaire. She debriefed me - sorry for all the double entendres, seriously, there was, is, never will be anything other than business between us - on my return from the Eleventh Door. As if the trip back to the solar system wasn't bad enough.  "Oh my...".

I snatched it back. "Mine! Besides, you couldn't appreciate Mrs. Winklebottom. Now, Ms. Tenweight, my original unfinished question remains...".

Obviously these modern times had become precarious. But isn't that what happens when someone cracks Pandora's Box wide open? The Ten Doors were no longer uncharted territory. They were established thoroughfares to exotic new planets in otherwise unreachable systems of the Milky Way Galaxy. Going through the portals was easy, and scientifically sound. And everything on the other sides could be explained and a lot of it lived with and brought back. The Ten Doors weren't the problem.

Alicia gave up on Dickens. Just like she'd given up on me those many months ago. She turned to the shelves across from the counter and brushed a fingertip along the spines on a stack, then stopped at a particularly worn one and pulled it down. "Your Moles are making a mess of Jupiter, though I suppose it will come through no worse for wear. But the havoc they've brought from beyond the Eleventh Door, that's something else. Steven, you should never have come back."

It was true, quarantine rules were not followed. The Moles had no use for our rules, and the Moles didn't give me much say. I had become their prisoner, and their pawn. "We've been through this, and I'm more than sorry. But for now I have nothing left, but this decommissioned ship-shop, and my books," here comes my feline accomplice, whom I allow to rub up against my arm, "and Sally here. And Linus who detests customers... as do I." Sally purrs and slinks off, probably to pester her peevish brother.

“Nevertheless,” Alecia says. And she turns to leave, shelving the book. “A truck is on the way, Steven. And boxes,” she says and the tiny bell tinkles when the doors swings open. “Lots and lots of boxes.” One door opens, and another door closes.