A stolen hour is like a page torn from the ending of a book. These broken moments are wrapped in the acknowledgment of finality. Knowing that repair is impossible, the only recourse is disassembly. Disengagement. At least, Kim thought so.
She was supposed to be at work. The thrift shop would stand empty for hours without her. Perhaps there were people lined up outside, impatiently knocking on the glass of the door. Perhaps they were murmuring to each other in disbelief. After all, the sign said the place should be open. How unprofessional, they might think. How unfair.
Kim had left work early. She was supposed to have 6 more hours to go in her Wednesday shift. In her mind, the guilt of abandoning her post was deftly and suddenly rearranged. It seemed to Kim that actually, she was leaving work late. She should have quit that job a year ago. Surely there was something better for her to move on to.
The convenient reinterpretation of the facts wouldn't hold together, though. She had in fact applied to several jobs in the last year and had found that nobody wanted to hire her. As she scanned the shelves of the quaint little used bookstore, she wondered what was wrong with her. She was assaulted with the mental image of something green stuck in her crooked-toothed smile at a crucial interview. A discovery made too late had left a stain on her confidence. And her teeth weren't even crooked in a cute way, like Hannah's.
Hannah would be standing in front of the thrift shop before long. She was scheduled to work at three. Hannah's sanctimonious streak would compel her to show up at least ten minutes early. She would also, without a doubt, report Kim to the general manager. Kim walked down the aisle and ran her index finger along the spines of the books. Rough, smooth, rough, rough, smooth. She closed her eyes. Her familiar translucent blobs of color were there behind her eyelids, uncountable and energetic in their frenzied forever dance. They seemed to react to the tactile input of Kim's finger as she absorbed the various textures. A crumbling of torn paperback led into a trembling of glossy dust jacket and reached crescendo in the embossed title of a fancy hardcover.
Rough, smooth, smooth, wet. One of the books was soaked. No. Leaking. Gushing. Splattering on Kim's shoes, seeping in quickly. She opened her eyes. The book on the shelf was exceedingly normal. Her socks were dry. Her finger was pointing to the unassuming title, written in bold black print: How to Escape. Apparently, it was written by Glenn H. Grissom. Kim picked up the slim volume and marveled at its heft. The thing might have been full of rocks rather than pages.
At the far end of the little bookstore there was a ratty red armchair. It looked uncomfortable and contained a sleeping cat. Kim clutched the heavy book in one hand and gingerly shooed the feline away. This was acceptable, it seemed. After a light nudge, the cat made it clear that it had always had every intention of getting up to stretch and explore and didn't want to sit in the chair anymore anyway.
Kim looked up. The store was dark. The cat had returned. It was perched on the arm of the chair and licking Kim's finger. She looked down and realized why this was happening. The cat was enjoying a trickle of cold clear water that seemed to be dripping down Kim's forearm and splashing on the floor. She straightened in her seat and the cat again adopted an air of implausible nonchalance. It hopped from the back of the chair over to a shelf and trotted away.
The shield of sleep disintegrated rapidly. Kim felt the water lapping at her ankles. The book had been lopsidedly hanging off her lap. From between the pages, a creek was flowing. Kim blinked in disbelief. The creek was bubbling away between the darkly-shrouded shelves. Clearly, the bookstore was closed. Hours had passed, slipping into a blank void of memory. Kim immediately accepted that she had lost her job. Oh well. She stood up. The copy of How To Escape plopped into the water that had pooled around her feet. A fountain sprang up. The book was open, facing the ceiling. The waterspout that emerged from the binding’s crease was taller than Kim herself. Her eyes bugged.
She kicked the book closed and the water sprayed in a diminishing arc, splashing her from face to knees. She recoiled and felt blindly around for something to steady herself. She gripped a branch. Shocked, Kim turned to examine the thick young birch tree that the branch belonged to. It had grown through the soggy carpet and the hardwood beneath. The tree was blocking the self-help aisle. Kim blinked. She squinted past the birch and down into the sudden rocky ravine between the non-fiction shelves and the cash register. Her head felt sick and dizzy. She looked left and right. The back half of the bookstore seemed relatively intact. The uncomfortable chair was now burbling with clear spring water that leaked from its cushions. The creek on the carpet carried mysteriously muddy water past Kim’s ankles. The shelves themselves were still standing straight and each was still stolidly bearing their burden of books. When she looked into the shadows at the far end of the nearest aisle, though, she saw a faint suggestion of rustling leaves and thorny undergrowth.
Something growled back there. Before Kim could think to panic, a shape had squirmed out of the secret forest at the end of the Culinary section. It had at least 16 legs and it was covered in sickly green scales that made a sound of sharpening knives with each step the creature took. The face of the thing was narrow and rotting, like a zombified crocodile. The zombodile marched into Kim’s little clearing and stared at her. The thing shambled up onto its hindmost four or five legs and let loose a crackling roar. The giant insectile wings that spread out from the monster’s back were the last straw, it turned out.
Kim finally cut and ran. The surviving carpet disappeared under a substrate of loose rock. Crumbling sandstone began to curve away under her feet. The floor was collapsing and momentum had its hand at Kim’s back. She flailed her arms uselessly and began to fall. She bobbed to the surface of a river and shook back her hair. The bank was close, so she dug in her fingers and scrambled up onto the sand. Kim looked up. The sheer walls of the canyon had grown to be a hundred feet high. Landslide debris was still falling casually into the water. At the rim of the canyon, framed by some soft glow in the darkness, the lumpy green terror turned and wandered back towards its forest, uninterested. The crashing sound of tumbling rocks quieted. The silence down here was abrupt and suffocating. Then: thunk!
The book, How to Escape by Glenn H. Grissom, had fallen at Kim’s feet. Its corner was buried several inches deep into the beach. She picked up the surprisingly dry and undamaged volume. Was this the thing that was causing all this trouble? She wondered it to herself and felt a biting sense of danger as she held the heavy little book in her hands. She opened it anyway. All of the pages were blank. That was odd. She had been certain that she was reading the thing before she fell asleep. She flipped frantically through and found nothing but bare ivory paper until she looked inside the back cover. There was a hand-drawn map there. Simple, as though it were a relic of a child’s make-believe pirate adventure. A red splotch near the center of the scribbled mess of lines was labeled “You Are Here.” The nearest landmark on the map was a ragged circle shape that bore the warning: “Do Not Enter.”
After a few minutes of bungled orientation, Kim found that the map really did seem to be an accurate sketch of her current location. The ragged circle, it turned out, represented the entrance to a cave. The mouth of the cave waited just around an outcrop on the beach. From somewhere in the depths of the subterranean tunnel, a warm light was radiating. Kim held the book closed in front of her. She read the title over and over. She took a deep breath and then a step inside. A deep forceful rumble heralded another landslide. Within a second, the cave entrance was blocked by boulders. Kim sighed. As if in response, a tiny meow echoed through the cavern at that moment. Kim followed the sound, running her fingers along the strangely glassy surface of the walls. Heat filled the smelly air she was walking into. Kim turned a corner and stopped in her tracks.
A staggering pit sank away below her. At the bottom, a lake of lava roiled. A thin ridge of rock spiraled up the sides of the rocky tube. A few feet away, trotting unconcernedly along that little ridge, was the bookstore’s cat. It meowed to itself while it ascended the treacherous path. The feline disappeared into a passageway situated on the opposite side of the pit. Kim followed. She stuck the book into the waistband of her yoga pants and shuffled along the ridge. Her heart dropped every time a pebble lost its purchase and cascaded silently to its doom. When she reached the passageway, her sweaty hands slipped pitifully across the smooth surface of the rocks. Her despair tripled and grew teeth. She stepped back shakily and removed the book from her pants. She tossed it into the passageway and gasped for breath, telling herself to just stay calm. She couldn’t do this, though. She knew it, deep inside. She would die here. It was all just too much.
She couldn’t even handle a job as a thrift store clerk. If she wasn’t even capable enough for a fairly chill retail environment, how was she supposed to survive this? A rearrangement of thoughts snapped loudly across her mind. She had wanted something new, she realized, and she had found it. A rope unfurled. It was thick, and looked old. The rope was hanging out of the passageway, now. It dangled far below Kim’s precarious perch. She reached out. Her fist closed around the itchy tan rope and she tugged at it. It held fast. She tugged harder. The rope was securely attached, somewhere inside that passageway. “Hello?” she called. Silence.
She didn’t need much time to think about it. She climbed the rope deftly and lay facedown on the stone floor of the passageway, marveling at the sight in front of her. The book was lying open and a prodigious length of rope was being sucked back into the space between the pages. Kim got to her hands and knees and crawled for what seemed like hours. The passageway sloped gently upward, which she thought was a good sign. She held the book in her teeth as she crawled. Her jaw ached with the weight of it. She kept trying to lift her head, and the book grew heavier with every inch, dragging her gaze back down to the floor. The top of her skull struck painfully against something hard. She spat out the book and looked up. It was a grate. Thin aluminum mesh pocked with warm dots of light. She pressed her face to the grate and saw through.
It was morning in the bookstore as Kim kicked out the A/C vent’s cover and dropped down onto a disturbingly normal carpeted floor. She was facing the cash register. A bored old man stood drumming his fingers on the countertop. A trickle of blood ran from each of her knees, where the spandex of her pants had torn. She was soaked in sweat. Her hands were caked with dirt and clutching a book.
“Umm.” Said Kim.
“Yes?” The old man regarded her with complacent loathing.
“How much?” She asked, holding out the book.
Sean B. Monett is a self-taught illustrator from Knoxville, TN. He is the author of the novel Your Brain Has Fleas and the comic A Snail's Path. His poetry has been featured in Plum Tree Tavern and Imaginary Gardens. He enjoys long walks in the void and spending time with his shadow-family. You can find him online @yourbrainhasfleas and @nonsensepoetrycomics.