Books

The news was on; the news was always on. Things were happening. Something bad was happening. Something terrible was always happening and it was urgent and late-breaking. The boy was panicked, but unsure about his words, so he hovered at the edge of the table, at the back of the chair, with his hand on the snack cupboard (or the kitchen countertop or the window sill), in the doorway (looking in). It was irritating, this hovering - always in the way, always milling about, always making people vaguely uneasy when times were uneasy enough. The boy had no one to play with and they knew this, but "things were rough all over" and you had to "suck it up". He drank two chocolate milks before 10am and no one even noticed. He hid in his room and a memory came to him, in a voice he had not heard for a long time. "I read," his grandmother had told him (in a low voice, like a secret), "because books always give me somewhere to be." And the boy stared at his bookshelf with new eyes, feeling the warmth of an invitation, like a friend had stepped out from a shadow in the garden and waved him over.