In those summers, my brother and I slept above the bookstore carved into the first floor of the old house. Our grandparents—who owned the store—slept in the bedroom down a long hallway from us.
Our bedroom had a fan instead of an air-conditioning unit. Before going to bed, sometimes my brother and I spoke close to the fan’s metal grate. The whirring blades chopped our speech. We’d say things like “They’re coming to get you.” The fan gave an eerie effect to such spooky sayings without us having to use a ghostly voice.
A lamp in the front of the store served as a night-light for the books. Most words slept soundly under the books’ covers. Words like tender, giggle, cerulean. Words used in lullabies and romantic poetry and children’s books about talking bunnies and good manners.
But other words couldn’t sleep. Restless words. Words like danger, havoc, jubilant, delirious, indecent. Words used in thriller novels and news articles about disasters.
These words wriggled off book pages and out from under the covers and lifted into the air. Lifted by the energy of the words themselves. Believe me, words like delirious can fly. The windows were closed on the first floor, so the restless words flew up the stairs into the bedrooms, and out the open windows.
In the night sky, breezes came off the Atlantic Ocean from two blocks away. But the breezes didn’t soothe the words. Rather, the wind tingled more mischief into them. Occasionally, a bat flitted nearby, and some words landed on the bat’s wings to move faster through the air.
The words sought open windows in the buildings of the coastal town of Rehoboth. Hotels were favorite targets. Due to the many inhabitants in the stacked stories of rooms. If house windows or the sliding glass doors of hotel rooms were open, the words slid indoors.
Some people were awake in the houses and hotels. Night owls. They drank booze, compared sunburns, talked about the fun they had on that hot summer day. Restless words like passion and enthrall slid into the ears of these people and invigorated them.
Other words preferred sleeping people. Entering their ears to influence their dreams. Causing them to imagine the danger of a sea monster trudging out of the ocean. The havoc from a tidal wave. The dancing of jubilant kids amid the flashing lights of Funland’s amusement-park rides and games. The shrieks of delirious seagulls as one swooped and indecently snapped off a person’s finger instead of stealing the French fries in his hand.
Such vivid fantasies delighted the restless words. While these words enjoyed being included in thrillers at the bookstore, the plots of the books didn’t change. To the words, the stories hummed monotonously, like our bedroom’s fan.
(Although, the words loved when a reader of their book reached the words on the page and widened their eyes in excitement or—even better—gasped. But these moments were infrequent.)
More frequent was flying at night to be part of people’s dreams. See what fantasies came about. The dreams were unpredictable pleasures. Havoc couldn’t predict what kind of havoc would occur in the stories of slumbering people.
Before sunrise, the words again took to the air, collected in a flock, and returned to the old house. Back through bedroom windows, down the stairs to the store, under covers, and snug in their spaces of paragraphs.
The other words, those that had been sleeping, awoke to the new day. These words stretched and yawned. And all the words hoped someone would pick up their book and read.
Dave Williams writes fiction (and sometimes poetry) in his spare time, when he isn’t working his main job as a graphic designer. He has self-published a novel, a few novellas, and collections of stories and poems. He lives in Maryland with his wife, two daughters (when they’re home from college), and two cats.
His books are available on Amazon.
Visit his blog Dave Williams writings and drawings
Indie Blu(e) Publishing 