Vestavia Hills

"Ah ... yes, good morning. This is Robert Red, I wanted to speak to Miss Tricia, Tricia Thompson. "

"What is this regarding, sir?"

"Here, you see, she is editing my book, so ..."

Before Robert could say anything plausible, or implausible, the secretary went on: "Yes, sure, I understand. I see if I she is available. Would you kindly repeat your name? "

Robert did so and waited. At least he had gained a few moments to think about a reason why he had called and what he could say to the woman once she answered.

At least a couple of minutes passed. Then the voice on the other side of the line returned to replace the music: "I'm sorry, Mister ... Red, Miss Thompson is busy right now. If you can be kind enough to try again later ..."

Robert said something vaguely condescending, mumbling a little and, then ended the call. Better that way, it was just an intuitive gesture dictated by who knows what.

He would not have felt so relaxed about it if he had known that, at the publishing house, Tricia Thompson, was busy reading some drafts written so badly that she was racking her brains. So at the message that a certain Robert Red was looking for her, to talk about his book, she simply said she had never heard of him and, and not to break her balls.

Robert returned to his studio flat with a sense of inexplicable euphoria. If walking had that effect, he could consider doing it more often.

He sat at the kitchen table, after roughly having cleared it. He turned on the notebook, waited for the operating system to load, already foretasting the sound of his fingers on the keys.

He felt ready to write quite a few pages. The ideas would come to him; he was sure of it.

The literary café and the thought of one of his books showing off on shelves like them. The strange sensation he felt in there, which he could only interpret it as a kind of warning sign. The music of the Mug & Ball. The air of the city that had woken up.

Everything helped to give him the fibrillation he felt at the time.

The operating system had loaded; the background of his desktop, a Caribbean beach God knows where which winked at him like a beautiful girl just to make fun of him, was staring back at him with the usual monotony.

The pages written already were in files that Robert, for convenience, had not included in any particular folder and, therefore, dotted the sea and, the palm trees of the Caribbean with white documents.

He opened the most recent one.

... illusory as the last of his dreams, the metal sky above him. He was so small compared to so much immensity: how could he think he was worth something, that he was part of a larger design, the gear that made the mechanism work at its best, a mechanism so complex that escaped even his highest understanding?

Robert reread the last words he had written down the previous evening, before going to bed. They did not satisfy him: they had a severity that did not suit the drier style he had used pages before.

He had to fix it.

The syntax ...

Or maybe it was the choice of words that could be improved?

Maybe it was more appropriate to rewrite everything.

He reread again

so complex that escaped even his highest understanding?

The words sounded strange to him.

The rhythm of the phrase, which Robert spelled several times, moved him inside.

And what he felt was very similar to the feeling he had in literary coffee.

Now he could have called it by the name all too abused of déja-vu: he did not like to follow the words of everyone, but he could not find any other name for it than that.

He reread those words yet another time and, they changed in front of him: they twisted, pulsed, detached themselves from the page as if wanting to jump on him, and then they fell again. The syllables and letters spanned again, swirling like a spiral. Robert, initially confused by that hallucination, tried to rub his eyes; then, he kept them closed for a few moments. When he opened them again, the words seemed more stable, but now they were cloudy, fuzzy, they got bigger and bigger, looking scary as if they were black bubbles about to explode.

Then it all ended, and the letters went back to being impalpable and monotonous signs on the computer screen.

THERE AND BACK FOR JOHNATHAN ABBLEPOT

2.

Vestavia Hills, 1858

Mrs. Evelyn Archer had just opened the door of her antique shop. She never arrived early in the morning: the hustle and bustle of people in Vestavia Hills only started around 9.30.

An elegant maple door carved no less than by her Bob, the husband who had left her a few years earlier, had been double locked. Ms. Archer put the key in and played with the lock a bit, as she only knew how to do it. The humidity probably swelled the wood so much that the lock no longer slid as easy as it did before.

And then she is in.

Just under the entrance porch, she put Rose on the ground, the cat that had kept her company for several years. Rose patiently waited for her owner to tinker with the door and then preceded her inside. It only meowed a little bit, but once inside the shop, it always made a noise, as if greeting the various knick-knacks present, its companions in the endless sleepy afternoons shut in there.

The interior of that shop seemed to be made especially for cats, and Rose might have thought: countless corners to explore, many shelves or objects to sleep on, such a mass of stuff that you could lose yourself in it without the fear of being disturbed.

Evelyn Archer had accumulated all those things in almost forty years of activity. In the beginning, it was Bob who had traveled to nearby or larger towns in Alabama to retrieve old or recent items, to be repaired or still working, which they then resold in their shop.

After some time, she, too, had acquired the skill that was needed to find what was possible to sell by separating it from what no one would ever buy.

Over the years, as the objects in the shop had grown, so had and the arguments between them.

Sometimes Evelyn just couldn't stand Bob, and she was happy when some errands kept him away for a while. She couldn't stand the person Bob had become over the years. And that's certainly a big deal in a wedding. Then one day, just like that, he was dead.

A heart attack had taken him away.

As for Evelyn, she cried, of course. But her newfound freedom didn't take long to calm her sadness.

"Mrs. Archer! Good morning!"

An older man just entered the shop. He stood in the doorway for a moment, as if waiting for the owner's greeting as permission to enter.

Evelyn Archer had already figured out who he was and thought, "Stingy Bastard! Yet again today, you will come in and buy nothing. You have been walking by here for months without spending a penny. You could just stay outside then!"

Then, with a smile that seemed sincere, he said, "Mr. Gardner. Cheerful as always! "

The man replied: "Eh, at our age, it is better to be happy, right? You never know when the time to cry will come!" To end his sentence, Mr. Gardner let out a laugh that turned into in a phlegmy cough fit. "Yeah, you are right," Evelyn said, expecting to see the man do what he always did.

As she predicted, Mr. Gardner looked around, as if he did not know, after all his weekly visits, where all the objects in the shop were.