NOVEL WEB Chapter 1
There was a small town named Alderberg just off the highway, hidden between pine trees and an absolute unit of a wannabe-mountain, where electricity was still considered an eccentricity by the older population and people respected bees more than they did the government. These kinds of towns are often described as sleepy, but this one was anything but. Much like its thriving bee-population, its inhabitants were always working. That’s not to say that everyone was always miserably sitting in offices like drones, nor were they all swarthy lumberjacks coming home sweaty and tired.
Most of the people in the town had simply found a passion and turned it into their profession. Its small city council supported the arts and the sciences as best it could, most of the town’s profits coming from its export of the highest-grade natural products on the eastern seaboard. No honey was as sweet, no apples were as juicy and no pigs as oinky as the ones that grew and oinked in Alderberg. Every single person pursued what they desired and it seemed to be that the soil -- and the city council’s social programs -- rewarded them for it.
Everyone except me. I had planned on becoming Alderberg’s first export product that didn’t oink while walking around. I hated being here for reasons that had taken me a very long time to figure out. My parents had been absolutely delightful to me growing up, supporting me in trying to find my passions, and then they’d had the absolute gall to get swept away in a mudslide and I had become a ward of the state. I wasn’t bitter at all. I’d been old enough to emancipate myself and I did. I’d never been in the mood to ingratiate myself with a new family at the age of sixteen. Like all sixteen-year-olds, I was capable of only making perfect decisions.
That was some years ago. They weren’t very good years. I’d held several jobs, all of which I’d hated. I’d tried joining the other manly men working menial labour. I was terrible at it, and despite their attempts at putting me at ease, I’d hated it. My body was uncoordinated to begin with, and that didn’t improve when my muscles were sore. The whole town felt like everyone had found their place, what they’d needed to find contentment. Even the town teenagers had outlets, encouraged to experiment with graffiti and the town’s skate park. That had never been me, though. I spent a lot of time trying to get really into music, but while I liked some songs, there had never been a genre that captured my attention enough for me to style my identity around it.
Until last week, I’d planned to find a menial job, work it for a few years, and then move somewhere exciting, like south Maine, to really set my expectations high. Last week, I’d found a way I’d be able to make time go faster, finally. It wasn’t quite happiness -- that destination was still a significant number of air miles out of reach -- but it was a sort of begrudging contentment. This great discovery of mine had been, of all things, the town library. I’d literally always ignored it. Other than some strange romantic comedies, libraries did not exactly occupy a shining spot in society’s spotlight.
But I’d found some things there. An escape. Some fantasies. Some fictions. Stories that seemed to be -- and felt like -- impossibilities, but stories worth pursuing nonetheless. They would be better than the feeling that there was something inherently wrong here, about my place in this town. It wasn’t that the town felt sinister. It wasn’t that I was scared of getting Children-of-the-Corn’d here, it was that I was terrified of the thought of growing old here without noticing or having spent a happy day before I’d be ceremoniously forgotten by the church graveyard.
Stories had kept me going for the past week. I’d go in early in the morning, pick up a book I’d started the day before, and sit in one of the reading corners until noon, then go out for lunch, do a job interview, and then come back until their doors closed. The one librarian, a woman that was all smiles and long, black hair, didn’t seem to mind my presence there. She seemed to be just as much in her place as I was, happily helping anyone who came in with all the reserved flair required from a librarian. Whenever she wasn’t busy putting books back or talking to customers, she sat at the librarian’s desk and read.
It occurred to me that to her, I might seem much the same, reading because reading made me comfortable, and that this meant that I was comfortable. Nothing could be further from the truth, and there was a small, stupid part of me that wanted to walk up to her sometimes just to tell her that, no, I wasn’t reading because I enjoyed it, but because it distracted me. I mean, I didn’t hate the reading, and I would probably not even mind doing a job like hers. I just couldn’t imagine myself in her position. When I’d tried once, it had made me so uncomfortable I’d almost crawled out of my skin. She’d noticed, looking up from her book at me, over the rim of her glasses. If her hair hadn’t framed her face so perfectly, I would’ve been annoyed at the little smile playing on her lips. Clearly, my discomfort at living here was amusing to her.
After a week of this, reading and trying to, if not escape, then at least drown myself in escapist fantasy, I went home again. I had a very small apartment on the other side of town, above the town’s fish-and-tackle shop. It was exactly as glamorous as living above a shop that smelled of fish sounds like. It was a little bit of a drive, and that was if you had a car. The thought of affording one was ludicrous, so I took the tram home. Alderberg had not invested in buses. Since the town never really grew, there was no need for changing bus-routes (though there was a bus coming in from a somehow-even-smaller town every month). The only public transport in town was the train, which came in every Saturday, and the tram system. There were a lot of trams and two of them still worked. The one currently on the tracks was tram twelve. It was old, although the ever-cheerful people in town would call it ‘rustic’, which made me want to cry.
I got on the tram. It was already quite full, but there were some seats free near the back. The old thing was fare-free, because of course it was. Everything in this town was perfect, just not for me. I sat on the back bench and rubbed my face, hoping that maybe my head would come off if I just rubbed my eyes hard enough. I felt someone sit down next to me as the tram took off with a jolt. I opened my eyes and looked up. It was the librarian. She had her purse on her lap and she sat up with the straightest back I’d ever seen someone have. Why was everyone here perfect too? I almost sighed with annoyance. I thought I saw her glance at me out of the corner of her eye, but I couldn’t tell for sure, with the evening sun shining in my eyes.
“Hey,” she said, softly. That didn’t track. People didn’t talk to me. Sure, people on the street did those ‘howahyah’s’ around here all the time, but this wasn’t that kind of greeting. Her tone was almost conspiratorial, like she was going to try to sell me drugs. Oh god, she was going to try to sell me drugs. She even chuckled like she was laughing at a private joke.
“I’m not going to sell you drugs,” she said. It was almost like she’d read my mind. The tram bingled and bangled on the tracks, the old bell trying and failing not to ring at every bump in the road. Nobody else on the tram had heard anything. I looked at her with absolute confusion, frowning.
“What?”
“I was going to tell you that you’re allowed to check out books, you know.” Oh. That was a whole lot less exciting than being sold drugs on the tram: being sold… the right to own a book for a short amount of time. “You don’t have to pay. It’s a library.” She’d done it again, where she’d responded to my thoughts.
“O-kay,” I said and looked ahead again. I hadn’t been looking for a book-dealer anyway. Heh. Book-dealer. She giggled again. I frowned again. Stop that.
“No,” she whispered and again I thought I saw her glimpsing at me from the corner of her eye. She was smiling conspiratorially.
“What…” I was deeply confused. What was happening? Was this town going to turn out to be full of terrible secrets? Was this going to be a Children-of-the-Corn-type situation after all? Was I too late to get out? Thoughts spun through my head, one over the other, none of them very good. I was trying not to panic. The tram bell rang loudly, and now both my ears and my brain hurt.
She got up, and the whole world went sort of… grey. All the colour had washed out. That wasn’t good. Everything had stopped moving. Except me. And her. She turned to me, her hair spinning a little further than her, interrupting her dramatic spin. As she swept some hair out of her face, she bent forward. Her face was very close to mine and I felt her breath on my face. Her lips must’ve been so close to mine, I could feel the heat radiating off of them and my heart caught in my throat. This was all a lot to take in. She looked me in the eyes, piercing me with hers, deep, dark and black.
I was squirming in my seat and I didn’t know whether to kiss her or try to escape out of the back window. She laughed again, softly, and her hot breath brushed my lips. I’d made the mistake of inhaling and something tasted sweet. My head swam. What didn’t help was her gently putting her hand on my cheek, and retrieving something from her pocket.
She held up a business card. Okay.
“Call me when you’re ready, dear. You’ll figure this out.”
And then she pressed her impossibly softly lips to mine and I could’ve sworn my brain exploded out the back of my head. It had started softly, but her lips were insistent, pushing into mine. My instincts took over and I’d intended to lean into it, pushing back, but found that doing so was impossible. I was utterly and completely weak in her hand as she tilted my head back and her tongue flicked out to taste my lips. And then she pulled away and I almost begged her for more. She giggled again.
“Try it out for a day. See if that helps.” She turned to the street. “This is my stop. You’ll be okay.” And with that she got off the tram and the world regained its colour. My breath was another matter, however. It took the remaining half hour of tram ride before I was able to breathe normally again. I was certain there was a blush on my face still, and I’d been sitting with my legs crossed, for the sake of public decency. When the bell rang again I barely heard it, only just in time jumping off and running across the street, up the stairs and to my room.
I slammed the door closed behind me, threw my backpack at the wall and myself at the mattress, and screamed into my pillow out of sheer confusion and more than a little frustration. What the fuck had happened? I put my hands in my pockets, looking for the card, and fished it out. Despite my rough handling of it, it was still in perfect condition. It was an elegant off-white and had only a phone number and a name on it.
The middle of the card simply read: “Madeline Lullaby. Call me.”
