A Bookpothecary

Character Cures and Plot Poultices: A Bookpothecary. The proprietor watches as Anna doesn’t even read the sign above the door before she pushes her way inside, eyes translucent with an unshed ocean of tears. Her face reveals months of pain, a boil of a boyfriend recently lanced and finally spilling out its pus, risking future infection. She is slightly out of breath, huffing oxygen in a way that borders on hyperventilating, which is appropriate for the defiant flight that has brought her here. Luckily, the smell that she is even now inhaling as she tries to put herself back together is part of the magic that will encourage that to happen.

The proprietor observes as Anna calms herself and begins to act like she is any other customer browsing a bookstore (though the proprietor knows better than to believe any customers are as fungible as the money they may or may not have or spend). They know that even now Anna is steeping in the particular scent of old books–lignin, decades of sun, the atmosphere of the lives the pages lived alongside. It is priming her, like how vitamin c helps with iron absorption, or how food soothes the more stomach-churning aspects of painkillers.

When she has settled in to her scan of the shelves the proprietor asks, “Is there anything I can help you find?”

Anna is behind a shelf, so the proprietor can’t see her, but can hear the tsunami threatening her ocean when she answers. “Nothing classic. But I’d be open to something old and bad, but still good.”

“Any particular genre?” The proprietor knows enough to talk around the pain without offering comfort– sometimes human disasters (unlike natural ones) were unhelpfully invited to intensify through acknowledgement of their unfolding.

“No.” Anna’s answer is firm. “I’d like to get back to reading everything.”

The proprietor raises an internal eyebrow at that. It’s an interesting data point, a curious development. “Get back to?” they push.

Anna’s roaming voice is steadier now, further soothed above and beyond the atmosphere by the undemandingness of book-talk.

“You know, just sometimes you feel like there’s something you ought to be reading…”

The proprietor mirrors Anna’s opacity with a noncommittal “Mmm.”

Anna continues browsing, and the proprietor allows her to simmer.

Eventually, the ask comes. “Do you have any recommendations?”

The proprietor doesn’t always wait for customers to ask. Sometimes they get a general sense of what’s gone wrong—they carry around their ailments like an aura, or sometimes there are more specific clues: a girl complaining loudly of a simpler heartbreak than the kind Anna seems to be experiencing to a browsing companion, a boy with a bruised eye, an old woman who finds everything but the shelves confusing. Sometimes in those cases they’ve found its best not to say anything (like with Anna and her tsunami) and just slip in whatever volume would treat best as a “free sample.” Occasionally customers buy what they’d have recommended anyways. Consent is best of course, but the customer can always decide later whether or not they’ll actually crack the pages, swallow their black-and-white pills. They’re glad this one’s asked for help in so many words though.

“It depends. What are you looking for? What do you like? Sometimes a soothing balm has to sting, but usually there isn’t any reason to deny someone a little honey in the service of helping the medicine go down.”

“I’m looking to believe in love again.” Anna sighs, then after a long thoughtful pause, adds, “and…”

“And?”

“And in myself, in my own value.”

“That’s a very brave thing to say.” The proprietor nods sagely, then begins to rummage around. Then they raise something with gold lettering, lovingly hand-bound and dyed in a marbled venetian style.

Anna takes and examines the cover before turning it over, looking for some description. Finding none, she cracks the pages and begins to read.

 An eternity passes in the shop, time enough for healing and understanding to blossom as Anna’s eyes glaze over and she practically absorbs the pages. It isn’t a traditional cure, but cure has always been a fraught thing, and the proprietor would like to take a chance on this girl. It might be too fast. It might be a fruitless dream. But it also might be exactly what they both need—the proprietor: an apprentice; Anna: a purpose, a reason to love pages again when the boy she has run from has clearly tried so hard to make them jagged and threatening mountains for her.

“Can a book really be a cure?” Anna eventually asks, when she turns the final page.

“Would you have stepped into my shop if you didn’t believe it might be?”

“But… can it? Can all of these really be therapeutic?” she opens her arms, even as they sag with the weight of all that they gesture to, as she recognizes the value in trying to lift the weight of meaning nonetheless.

“The line between cure and poison is in the dosage.”

“That sounds like a line from a book.”

The proprietor smiles, then concedes. “Does Advil “cure” a headache? What is symptom and what is ailment? Sometimes community and understanding are enough. Something that soothes can still be of value.”

“And what if I just wanted to walk away with more than what I needed?”

“What’s the harm in a little pleasure in that case? Why oughtn’t one try and explore a little, for fun?”

“Is that how you know all the books and what to give to folks?

“Yes and no. To explain my methods would involve the telling of a hard story.”

“I would like to hear it, to learn to tell it too,” Anna offers shyly, still uncertain, but open to turning a new page. On her face is a tentative smile: one of like-finding-like, a joy in seeing  another treading a never-before-dreamed-of path. But after all, this bookshop is a place full of doors, glad for the opening.