fixated by…whatever it was he looked at.
She lay down on the floor. Keeping one toe pressed firmly against her dad’s workstation as instructed, she stretched out on her stomach, her tiny fingers reaching out for the big old book.
“Darn, not quite enough,” she grumbled.
Her eyes flashed about like fireflies, desperately trying to figure out a way to reach the book, which hovered just a few inches beyond her grasp. But there was no way to stretch any farther without running the risk of tearing her skeleton loose from her skin, and Neve certainly didn’t want to do that. Her back was already getting sore, and she relaxed her posture a bit. No one was going to help her; that much was certainly clear.
With sudden clairvoyance, Neve reached the only decision available to her, and quickly chucked poor Clarice at the book, knocking it down from the shelf with a loud ‘Whop!’
A gale of ‘Shushes’ flooded her ears as she was buried under a tsunami of dirty looks. “Neve, be quiet. Don’t you get that we’re in a library?” her dad snapped.
Neve scooped up the book—and Clarice—with her toes still grounded firmly against the desk, and shimmied giddily back. Success!
Sitting up with her back against the hard old desk leg, she nestled the heavy book in her lap, placed Clarice comfortably in view just above it, and opened it up.
Neve’s mouth hung open as she took in the incredible, double-page panoramas. Tremendous clusters of stars spread out before her; entire galaxies scattered over the blackness like spilled marbles, and foreign planets beyond count were pictured within.
She gasped. “It’s all so big!” Scrunching up closer to the desk leg, Neve held her breath as she flipped the pages. She remembered again the lady she’d spoken to in the religion section, and how moved she’d been by what she was reading. “There’s something for everyone here I guess. There’s certainly room for it,” she finished, flipping the pages eagerly.
With such a humongous universe out there, it seemed nearly impossible that there could be any certain answers to all the strange things people wondered; just an ever-expanding list of questions. Neve pulled Clarice closer as she read about how all the stars she could see in the night sky existed in only an itsy-bitsy little portion of their single galaxy.
“It sure makes you feel small, doesn’t it?”
“You still there, baby?” her dad asked from just above her. It sounded like a world away.
“I’m still here Daddy,” she answered quietly.
Neve had a lot of questions herself: Who would she play with at recess tomorrow? Why wasn’t she allowed to do anything by herself? What did her parents always used to fight about? Where was her mom anyways?
Looking at all the thousands of stars, and all the great empty spaces between them, Neve realized that she’d kind of given up on getting answers for them anyway. ‘But sometimes,’ she thought, ‘the stories here are even better. Answers don’t seem so important when you have a good story, after all.’
Gazing at the big bright pages in amazement, Neve remembered another story she’d read once. She hadn’t understood a lot of it, but she’d gotten bits and pieces. It was about an astronaut on a big spaceship, flying through the stars to discover…something.
She’d thought he must have been very lonely, drifting farther and farther from home all alone.
He did have a robot he could talk to, but it didn’t really seem anxious to help him or make him feel better. It just wanted to do what needed to be done for the mission, and never cared what the poor astronaut needed for himself.
“Can’t I go get another book, Daddy?” Neve asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Neve. I’ve got to keep my eye on you, that’s a dad’s job after all,” he replied. The façade of his cheery tone was entirely transparent to the whip-smart young Neve.
Neve slouched down, closing the big book in her lap and looking at Clarice. “That astronaut did his job, even though he had that stupid old robot to deal with. I guess I have to too,” she declared. But Clarice didn’t answer, and Neve tossed her down onto the floor.
She was too old to talk to dolls anyway. Doll didn’t have brains like people. Clarice couldn’t answer all the questions Neve had. Clarice couldn’t talk or think or even ask questions for herself.
‘No’, Neve thought, ‘only people can do that.’
She remembered another story she’d looked at once, sitting down next to her dad in the big old library. It was a long story, and there was a whole shelf in the library to hold all the books it took to tell it. She didn’t get through very much, but flipping through the old yellow pages, taking in that happy, musty smell, she’d managed to catch enough.
It was a fantasy story, like so many others she’d read. It was about an amazing world full of beautiful elves and terrible goblins and all sorts of strange stuff like that. But the world was dying; all the magic was disappearing and all the good people were going away, leaving the world to darkness and decay.
It made her sad then, and it made her sad thinking about it now. She looked over at Clarice folded in half on the ground and sighed. “The people in that story didn’t believe things could go back either, not to the way they used to be,” she whispered down to her hopeless friend.
Neve blushed, but a quick glance up to her father revealed that he hadn’t been listening—still absorbed in the cool blue glow of the screen in front of him.
‘They’d still tried though,’ she remembered that much at least. The smallest and most helpless had stood up to undo all the hurt, and carried the burden even though they couldn’t possibly understand what it all really meant.
Neve liked that.
Sometimes as she read one book or another, she felt like it had been written just for her. It was weird, because that made her wonder how anyone else could possibly understand it, since they didn’t know all the things she knew. But they did understand. Everyone found something in those books, and that’s what made them so great.
“Only people can ask questions, and only people can imagine answers.” Neve sighed, and pulled Clarice back over to her side. ‘It must be easy,’ she thought, ‘to be a doll and only worry about doll things: How you sit on the bed, what dress to wear—those things are easy-as-pie.’ Other than her one missing button-eye, Clarice had the best life Neve could imagine. And the missing button-eye didn’t even seem to bother Clarice.
Clutching the doll tightly in one hand now, she imagined the tiny weight was unbearable, just like the magic ring in the book she’d read. She crawled slowly; dragging Clarice along the worn carpet, fearing that at any moment the watchful eye of her father would settle upon her and end their adventure before it even began.
But no scolding came, and Neve slipped silently away into the aisle marked ‘Classics’.
She’d been here before too, so she took no time at all locating her favourite book. There was a silly drawing of a naked yellow man on the cover, and Neve had to bite her little lip to suppress a giggle. She had to do that every time.
The man seemed to be drawn on a pot, but Neve could never figure out what that had to do with the stories—which were all about the ancient gods of Greece, and the strange games they played with people.
Sometimes, Neve wondered if that’s how Clarice felt—manipulated against her will by a giant girl she could barely comprehend. That made Neve feel awfully powerful, and every time the thought entered her mind, she vowed to ensure she treated Clarice with all the respect she wanted for herself.
The gods in these stories weren’t like that though. Not at all. They killed and tortured their people, and gave them impossible labours to do, and then punished them if they did any of it wrong.
It all seemed so unfair.
Neve peeked around the corner to make sure her dad hadn’t caught on to her absence. He’d be awfully mad if she didn’t sit still in the place where she was told. But he just gazed at his screen, oblivious and fully occupied with whatever worried adults.
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nbsp; She flipped through the book cautiously. She didn’t want to stumble on some awful drawing again—once she’d seen one of a bird eating a man’s guts, and that had put her off her thanksgiving dinner, which also made her dad angry. All the stories in this section were terribly gruesome. In fact, Neve had avoided the section for a long time after discovering what it contained, but eventually she grew curious, and finally began to visit it again.
At first, she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to read something so awful. When she was younger, Neve only liked happy stories about beautiful princesses and magical times.
But at some point or another, those things began to feel a bit silly.
They were nice to imagine, and Neve still liked it when her dreams were happy, but she couldn’t deny that sometimes she liked those darker stories. She wondered about the people who wrote them. Mrs. MacNeil had talked about the ancient Greeks once, and although Neve didn’t know much, she knew they were from a time long, long ago. ‘Probably even before Christopher Columbus,’ she imagined.
“Why do you think they wrote those stories?” she whispered the question into the side of Clarice’s stuffed, earless head. “Do you think they really thought that’s what God was like, or do you think they just needed a way to blow off steam?”
One time, Mrs. MacNeil had sent Neve out of the classroom, and she had to sit down and talk about anger with the school