The Empty Shelf

Original short fiction by Ansel. The characters and events are invented.

On the last morning of the bookshop, Mara carried a shelf outside and leaned it against the wall. The rain had stopped. Water dripped from the striped awning onto a box of books she had already decided to give away.

“You'll ruin those,” said Ivo.

“They're the ones nobody took.”

He moved the box under the shelf. Mara watched him do it. He had worked here for eleven years and still lifted books in both hands, as if they might object to being held by a corner.

The shop had sold its last book yesterday: a guide to growing pears. The woman who bought it lived on the fourth floor and had no garden. Mara had considered asking, then remembered that knowing why was not part of the price.

Ivo went back inside. When he returned, he carried the ledger.

“No,” Mara said.

He held it close to his chest. Its cover had once been green.

“Someone should keep it.”

“It has addresses in it.”

“I can cover them.”

“And things people asked us to order. Things they didn't buy.”

He opened it to a page near the middle. “Look.”

The entry was in her father's handwriting: twelve copies of a school dictionary, a date, a sum, the word paid. Below it, smaller, he had written that the customer would collect them on Thursday.

Mara remembered her father complaining that the dictionaries were heavy. She remembered the customer bringing a trolley with one wheel that squeaked. She didn't remember whether it had been Thursday.

“That isn't much,” she said.

“It doesn't have to be.”

He turned a few pages forward. Here the writing was his own: three boxes received, one short, supplier called. Mara had left him alone in the shop that week while she took her father to hospital.

His thumb rested beside the entry. He did not read it aloud.

A bus turned the corner. For a moment neither could hear the other, though neither was speaking.

Ivo looked at the empty window. “I thought we'd make a display. One shelf, some photographs. At the library, maybe.”

“You could ask them.”

“I thought you'd want to.”

Mara rubbed a damp mark from the shelf with her sleeve. The wood darkened instead of drying.

“I want to stop having to unlock a door every morning.”

He closed the ledger.

She had not meant it as an answer to his idea. She had meant it as something true. Now it occupied the pavement between them, inconvenient as another box.

Across the street, the bakery opened. A young man wheeled out its sign and caught the handle before it fell. He noticed them watching and raised a hand. Ivo raised his. Mara nodded.

“What about the shelf?” he asked.

“It's yours if you can carry it.”

“For the display?”

“For whatever you want.”

He set down the ledger and tried lifting one end. Too heavy. Mara took the other. They carried it as far as his van, stopping once while he found the keys.

There was room for the shelf only if it lay on its side. They pushed aside a coat, two shopping bags and a broken umbrella. It fitted without grace.

Under the umbrella was a new padlock, still attached to its cardboard. Ivo put it in the glove compartment.

“Storage place,” he said. “They wanted a deposit.”

“You rented somewhere?”

“Just a month.”

Mara returned for the ledger. When she reached the van she did not hand it to him.

“Let me look through it first,” she said. “I'll decide what I can give you.”

“All right.”

He tore the cardboard from the padlock and folded it twice.

“I'll ask about the display anyway,” he said.

She nodded, and did not offer a date to make the moment easier.

After he drove away, she put the giveaway box on the bare patch where the shelf had been. The awning no longer dripped. She went inside to finish clearing the shop, carrying the ledger with one hand under its spine.