Work Text:
The collected edition stood on the highest shelf in the store, its crimson spine visible between two black omnibuses broad enough to make it appear slimmer than it was. Jenny found it within thirty seconds of coming through the door and then spent nearly five minutes pretending to examine everything beneath it.
Rain ticked against the front windows. The narrow shop smelled of paper, dust, wet coats, warm electrical wiring, and the pepperoni slice someone had abandoned beside the register. Boxes occupied the floor in unstable-looking rows, leaving aisles that were already too narrow for the men browsing them shoulder to shoulder. Jenny moved through those spaces without touching anyone. Her new navy skirt made a soft brushing sound against her knees. The sleeves of her cream blouse were still buttoned at the wrists, though it was after six and the office was fourteen blocks behind her. Her shoes were sensible black leather, newly polished that morning and now speckled with rain.
The laminated identification card clipped to her satchel had turned backward during the walk. Its blank white reverse faced the room, concealing the small photograph and the dark-blue lettering beneath it.
She looked again at the crimson spine.
The title had been embossed in gold.
Not printed in yellow ink that had faded toward mustard. Not crushed between staples. Not broken across the rounded edge of a paperback whose glue had begun to surrender. Gold, clean and deliberate, running from top to bottom beside the small figure of a sword.
Jenny lowered her eyes to a rack of individual issues and lifted one at random. She knew before touching it that she would not buy it. Its plastic sleeve had clouded with age, and a square white sticker on the upper corner gave the price as three dollars. The cover showed a woman in steel and red, one boot planted on a stone, sword raised against a sky the colour of bruised plums. Jenny studied it with honest attention anyway. She never handled books dismissively simply because they were not the one she had come for.
Behind the counter, the woman with the cropped grey hair looked up from an invoice. Her reading glasses hung from a red cord against her black T-shirt, and a pencil had been pushed sideways through the hair above her right ear. She watched Jenny return the issue precisely to the gap from which she had taken it and said, “You have been circling that shelf as though the book may come down by itself out of pity.”
Jenny turned toward her. “I was hoping patience might make me taller, Mara, but I think I have completed the experiment.”
Mara’s mouth moved at one corner. She came around the counter, wiping graphite from her fingers onto her jeans, and followed Jenny’s gaze upward. “The Sonja?”
“Yes, please. The collected one.”
“I know which one. You have checked whether it was still there every Friday for nearly two months.”
“I have checked other things as well.”
“You have been very fair to the other things.”
Mara reached for the rolling wooden step kept against the end of the aisle. Jenny moved aside and held the lower rail steady while Mara climbed. The book came free with a whisper of compressed jackets sliding against one another. It was larger in Mara’s hands than it had looked on the shelf, a proper hardbound volume with a painted dust jacket, thick cream paper, and enough weight that Mara instinctively offered it with both hands.
Jenny received it in the same fashion.
The weight entered her palms and settled there.
She did not smile immediately. Her face became still instead, her lips gently closed and her large eyes fixed upon the cover. Red Sonja stood on the rise of a hill with the wind driving her hair behind her. The artist had given the sky a pale, cold brightness and the country below her an immensity made of mountains, ruins, distant fires, and roads going farther than the page could show. Sonja’s sword rested across one shoulder. She was not attacking anything. She was simply looking.
Jenny’s right thumb moved cautiously along the fore-edge without touching the paper inside. She examined the upper corners, then the lower. She tilted the book toward the shop lights and looked for scuffing across the laminate. She checked the head of the spine, the heel, the fit of the jacket, the narrow channel beside the boards.
Mara remained beside her without hurry. “There is another copy in back,” she said. “Still in the publisher’s wrap, unless Derek opened it after I told him not to.”
Jenny looked up. “May I compare them?”
“That is why I mentioned it.”
“Thank you.”
Mara went through the curtain behind the counter. Jenny carried the display copy to the reading ledge beneath the front window and placed it down with care. She unfastened her raincoat but did not remove it. Water still clung to the shoulders, and she would not risk shaking any of it onto the book. Instead, she stood over the volume and studied the cover as traffic rolled through the wet evening beyond the glass.
A bus passed, briefly filling the shop with reflected yellow light. People leaned into the weather under umbrellas. A messenger pedalled through the intersection with his jacket ballooning behind him. The world outside continued moving because it always did.
Jenny slid one finger beneath the front edge of the dust jacket and opened the book.
The binding gave a small, tight sound.
She stopped at once.
There was nothing wrong with it. It was merely new.
She tried again more gently, supporting the boards rather than pressing them flat. The illustrated endpapers showed a map rendered in brown, black, and faded red. Rivers curled through the valleys. Mountains rose in inked ridges. Kingdoms were named along borders that looked both ancient and temporary. Jenny leaned closer to read each one. She followed a road with the pad of her finger, stopping before she touched the printed line.
Beyond the map came the title page, the credits, a contents page arranged in columns, and then the first reproduced cover. Jenny knew that cover. She knew the upper half of the story behind it as well, although the copy she had once read began six pages late and lost another four before the end. She remembered the space between two surviving panels, the unexplained change from a forest to a ruined courtyard, Sonja bleeding from one temple without any surviving page to show the blow.
Here the pages were all present.
She turned past the familiar opening and found the missing scene almost immediately. A horse had fallen. Sonja had rolled beneath a broken cart. A mailed hand had caught her by the hair before she drove an elbow backward into the man’s ribs. Jenny’s attention travelled across the artwork slowly, taking in the order of movement, the mud on Sonja’s arm, the hard line of effort around her mouth. There had always been a cause. There had always been a passage between the pieces.
A boy squeezed past behind Jenny, his backpack brushing the wall. She drew the book closer to her without shutting it. He murmured an apology, and Jenny answered, “You are all right,” while keeping one hand lightly over the lower corner of the page.
Mara returned carrying a second volume. The publisher’s film remained intact except for a short split at the bottom seam where the plastic had tightened around one corner. She placed it beside the display copy and said, “Derek remains innocent.”
Jenny closed the first book and compared them. The wrapped copy had sharper corners. Its dust jacket had never been exposed to fingerprints or the fluorescent lights above the shelves. Yet the plastic hid the texture of the cover and made the colours appear colder. Jenny turned it over. A pale line ran beneath the film near the bottom of the rear board.
“Is that on the plastic?” she asked.
Mara bent close. “Could be. Could be a rub beneath it.”
“May we open it?”
“If you are buying one of them, yes.”
Jenny’s hand rested on the wrapped volume. “I am buying one.”
Mara glanced at her, not because she doubted her but because the words had arrived with such quiet certainty. “Then we may open it.”
She took a small utility knife from her pocket, extended scarcely a quarter inch of the blade, and slit the film along the open edge. Jenny watched every movement. Mara peeled the plastic away without dragging it across the cover and folded it inward before setting it aside.
The pale mark belonged to the jacket after all.
It was slight, barely longer than Jenny’s smallest fingernail, but it broke the dark colour at the back. The display copy had no comparable mark. Its upper right corner showed the faintest softening, perhaps from being handled, but its jacket was otherwise unmarred.
Mara tapped the display volume. “This one is better.”
“Yes.”
“You have excellent eyes.”
“I have bought a great many things that were already damaged.”
Mara’s face did not change into pity. Jenny liked her for that. She merely opened the display copy again, looked at the binding, and said, “This one has also been opened properly. No strain at the hinges. I did it myself when it arrived.”
“That matters.”
“It does to some people.”
“It matters to me.”
Mara nodded as though that settled not only the choice of book but some larger question she had never asked aloud. She carried the wrapped copy away and left Jenny with the first.
Jenny looked at the price printed on the rear flap.
Forty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents.
She had known the number before entering the store. She knew the sales tax as well. She had calculated the final amount twice at her desk that afternoon, once on a yellow legal pad and again in the margin of a discarded fax cover sheet. She had calculated it a third time on the train, not because she feared being wrong but because the act steadied her.
The money in her purse had already been divided.
Transit. Lunches. Coffee. Household. Savings.
The rest occupied a small white envelope whose flap she had tucked rather than sealed. There was no label on the outside. She had considered writing one and then decided that the envelope did not need to justify itself.
Jenny turned several more pages. Some of the colours varied slightly from issue to issue, the older inks reproduced with their imperfections intact. She was glad of that. A complete collection did not need to pretend that every piece had been made on the same day. The differences were part of its honesty.
A customer at the neighbouring ledge glanced over. He was perhaps thirty, with an army-green jacket and a stack of superhero comics braced under one elbow. “That is a beautiful edition,” he said. “I keep thinking about it, but I have nowhere to put another hardcover.”
Jenny looked from the book to his stack. “You appear to be finding room for several thinner negotiations.”
He laughed, though she had not meant to tease him sharply. “Those can go in boxes. A book like that wants a shelf.”
“Yes,” Jenny said, and her eyes returned to Sonja. “It does.”
The customer wandered toward the register. Jenny remained where she was.
A shelf.
She could already see the place.
The narrow bookcase in her room had a middle board that bowed slightly. She would not put the volume there. The upper shelf was straighter, although it held two dictionaries, a row of library-sale novels, three binders, and a chipped ceramic horse Alexis had once left behind. The binders could be moved to the desk. The dictionaries could remain. The horse would look rather fine beside a sword.
Jenny closed the volume, keeping one palm against the cover for a moment after it lay flat.
She had first seen the collection announced in the store catalogue the previous winter. The reproduction had been no larger than a postage stamp. She had cut it out, then regretted damaging the catalogue, although Mara had assured her the shop was finished with it. The clipping had lived beneath the transparent cover of her old day planner for months. When she opened the planner to record a delivery, an appointment, a train time, a name, or an address, the crimson shape appeared beneath her hand.
Now the actual book waited in front of her.
Mara was ringing up the man in the green jacket. Coins struck the drawer. The printer produced a receipt in quick mechanical bursts. Somewhere near the back of the shop, two men disagreed earnestly about whether a costume had been redesigned or merely recoloured. Their argument had all the intensity of diplomacy and none of its consequences.
Jenny opened her satchel.
The first thing inside was a blue folder from Donnelly & Blake Partners. She had brought home nothing confidential, only the printed employee handbook, a copy of the office telephone directory, and the forms regarding medical coverage that she wanted to read once more before filing them. The folder was crisp, its corners still square. Beneath it lay her black cloth purse, an apple wrapped in a paper napkin, a compact umbrella, two pens, a comb, and a small notebook.
She lifted out the purse and noticed that her identification card had turned backward. She unclipped it from the satchel strap.
The photograph had been taken against a pale grey wall. Her expression was composed, though the corners of her mouth had been on the verge of rising. Beneath the photograph appeared the firm’s name, followed by:
JENNY LEWIS
ADMINISTRATOR
MIDDLE EAST DIVISION
The card was not handwritten. It had not been borrowed, altered, improvised, or made convincing through confidence. The plastic was thick. The lettering would not rub away beneath a damp thumb. A magnetic strip crossed the reverse, granting her entry through the security doors each morning.
Jenny polished one drop of rain from the lower edge with her sleeve and clipped the card inside the satchel, where it could not turn around again.
Then she took out the envelope.
Mara returned to the reading ledge. “Do you want me to keep it at the register while you look around?”
Jenny shook her head. “I think I have finished looking around.”
“You usually stay another hour.”
“Usually I am deciding what I might want someday.”
“And today?”
Jenny placed her hand on the book. “Today I came for this.”
Mara lifted it carefully. Jenny carried the envelope.
At the counter, Mara inspected the book once more beneath the brighter light. She used a square of soft cloth to remove a faint fingerprint from the laminate, checked the price against the register, and asked, “Do you want an archival jacket over the dust cover?”
“Yes, please.”
“It adds two dollars.”
“That is all right.”
“I thought it might be.”
Mara selected a clear protective cover from a flat box beneath the register. Jenny watched her measure it, crease the edges, and fit it without tape touching the book itself. The clear film gave the cover a deeper lustre. Gold light moved along the sword when Mara tilted it.
Jenny’s breath left her in a quiet, involuntary sound.
Mara looked over the top of her glasses. “Better?”
“Yes,” Jenny said. “Much.”
The register displayed the total.
Jenny opened the white envelope.
The notes inside were arranged by denomination, all facing the same direction. She counted them onto the counter one at a time, smoothing each with her fingertips before placing the next over it. The money did not seem different from other money. It was the same cotton paper, the same green-black ink, the same worn softness at the folds. One twenty bore a streak of blue pen beside the Treasury seal. A ten had been folded so often that it tried to close itself again.
Yet Jenny knew precisely where it had come from.
Hours entered on a payroll sheet. A title entered beside her name. Withholding calculated. Deductions printed. A cheque signed and recorded. Work completed beneath fluorescent lights, among ringing telephones, courier slips, translated memoranda, appointment books, cables, reports, and people who had begun saying good morning to her as though they expected to see her there tomorrow.
Mara counted the money without haste. “You gave me a dollar too much.”
“I did?”
“You included the extra single beneath the five.”
Jenny looked down. “So I did.”
Mara returned it.
Jenny accepted the note and tucked it into the envelope. The small mistake did not disturb her. She had enough to make a small mistake and correct it. Even that felt new.
The register drawer closed. Mara handed over the change first, then the receipt. Jenny read the receipt from top to bottom. The store name. The date. The book title, abbreviated to fit the narrow line. The protective cover. Tax. Cash tendered. Change returned.
She folded it once along the existing crease.
“Would you like it in the bag or inside the book?” Mara asked.
“The bag, please. I do not want the ink against the pages.”
Mara selected a new paper carrier rather than one of the reused plastic bags stacked by the register. She reinforced its bottom with a piece of clean cardboard and wrapped the book in two sheets of brown paper before lowering it inside.
“You are preparing it for sea travel,” Jenny said.
“You came through that door looking as though the weather had tried to drown you.”
“It was not successful.”
“It seldom is with regular customers.”
Jenny put the receipt into the inner compartment of her purse. “Thank you for keeping the copy on the shelf.”
“I did not keep it for you.”
“I know.”
“You would not have liked that.”
“I would have appreciated the kindness. I would also have worried someone else had come prepared to buy it.”
Mara folded the top of the brown paper inward. “Then I am glad I did nothing and received your gratitude for it.”
Jenny smiled, open and warm. “Sometimes leaving a thing alone is excellent work.”
Mara gave her the bag.
Jenny took it by the handles with one hand beneath the base. She felt the book’s weight again, transferred now through cardboard and paper. Her smile remained, but softened into something private.
“You are going to read it tonight,” Mara said.
“I am going to arrange the shelf first.”
“Of course you are.”
“And wash my hands.”
“Of course.”
“And make coffee.”
Mara’s eyes dropped toward the rain beyond the window. “Keep the coffee farther from the book than you kept yourself from that shelf.”
“I will exercise severe discipline.”
“I believe you.”
Jenny thanked her again and went to the door. The small brass bell rang when she opened it. Rain breathed cold against her face.
She paused beneath the awning to button her coat.
The bag would fit beneath it only if she left the lower buttons open, but the book was too wide to carry comfortably against her body. She opened her umbrella, tested the wind, and placed the bag beneath her left arm with her hand spread across its reinforced bottom. The top remained covered by the umbrella. Her right hand held the curved handle firmly.
She stepped onto the pavement.
The city had become silver. Rainwater ran along the curb carrying cigarette ends, ticket stubs, leaves, and a red drinking straw. Taxis moved through the intersection with their lights reflected beneath them. Storefront signs trembled in the puddles. Jenny walked more slowly than usual, not timidly but attentively, judging each awning, each gutter, each approaching umbrella.
At the corner, a man hurried backward out of a doorway while wrestling with his coat. Jenny stopped before he collided with her. He turned, startled, and apologized. She assured him that nothing had happened, then waited until he had gone before checking the paper bag. One dark raindrop had landed near the handle. It had not soaked through.
She crossed only when the signal changed.
Halfway to the subway, she passed the little dairy café where she sometimes bought coffee after late deliveries. Warm light filled the windows. The rain made the glass opaque around the edges, but she could see the woman behind the counter wiping cups and an elderly man reading a newspaper at the rear table.
Jenny hesitated.
Then she went inside.
The bell above that door was softer than the one in the comic shop. Heat gathered instantly beneath her raincoat. She folded the umbrella into the stand, wiped her shoes carefully on the mat, and carried the book to a two-person table against the wall.
She did not set the bag on the floor. She placed it on the empty chair and moved the chair close enough that her knee touched its wooden frame.
At the counter she ordered a small coffee. The woman reached automatically for a metal pitcher, but Jenny asked, “Is the milk still the kosher one in the blue carton?” The woman checked the refrigerator, held the carton up where Jenny could see its mark, and answered that it was. Jenny thanked her and watched the milk go into the cup.
She carried the coffee back to the table and set it at the farthest corner, beyond the reach of any careless sleeve. Then she removed her coat and sat.
The wrapped book remained in its bag.
Jenny could have taken it out. The table was clean. The café was nearly empty. No child was running between the chairs, no one sat near enough to spill anything, and the rain made leaving immediately unappealing.
Still, she waited.
She drank the first mouthful of coffee. It was hotter than she expected and slightly more bitter than she preferred, but the milk rounded it. She held the cup between her hands and looked at the bag on the chair.
Nothing required her to open it here.
Nothing required her to wait either.
The choice itself seemed to settle the room.
Jenny finished half the coffee before reaching across and lifting the book from its paper carrier. She left the brown wrapping intact. She simply placed the parcel on the table, square with the edge, and rested both hands beside it.
The paper held the shape of the boards beneath. The corners were exact. A small piece of clear tape secured the final fold, and Mara had turned one end under to make a tab that could be lifted without tearing anything.
Jenny slid her thumbnail beneath it.
She stopped.
The moment was so slight that anyone looking through the window would have seen only a young woman sitting alone over a package. Her blouse was ordinary, her wet hair tucked behind her ears, her coffee steaming beside her. No one applauded. No one knew the arithmetic written on the discarded fax sheet or the route she had walked from the office. No one knew how many times she had touched the catalogue clipping through the cover of her planner.
Jenny drew her hand back and drank another mouthful of coffee.
She would open it at home.
The decision gave her an unexpected pleasure. The book was hers whether she saw it now or in an hour. She did not have to consume the moment quickly for fear that it might be taken away. She could carry anticipation all the way to Brooklyn. Ownership did not vanish while unopened.
She rewrapped the parcel as carefully as though she had never touched the tape and returned it to the bag.
On the train, Jenny sat with the carrier upright on her lap.
The evening carriage was crowded, though not packed. Coats gave off damp heat. Newspapers opened and folded. A man slept with his chin against his chest while a woman beside him worked a pencil through a book of number puzzles. Two teenage girls shared a set of headphones connected to a small player between them, each listening through one earpiece. A child knelt backward on his seat and watched the tunnel through the black window.
Jenny placed one palm over the bag handles whenever the train lurched. The volume’s weight pressed warmly into her thighs.
At Canal Street, more passengers entered than left. An older woman took the space before Jenny, holding a grocery bag against her hip. Jenny rose immediately and offered the seat. The woman glanced at Jenny, then at the large parcel.
“You have got something heavy there,” she said. “You sit.”
“I have been sitting since Midtown,” Jenny replied. “And it will remain heavy whether I stand or not.”
The woman accepted with a grateful nod. Jenny moved to the pole beside the doors, holding the book against her chest with one arm beneath it. She did not mind the weight. It made every shift of the train distinct. The volume could not be forgotten or misplaced. Its existence announced itself through her muscles.
The child at the window looked at the sliver of crimson visible through the top of the bag.
“Is that a comic?” he asked.
His mother made a small apologetic motion, but Jenny answered him. “It is a collection of them.”
“Who is it?”
“Red Sonja.”
“Is she a superhero?”
Jenny considered this seriously. “She is a warrior.”
“Does she have powers?”
“She has worked very hard.”
The boy seemed satisfied by that answer. His mother smiled, and the train carried them beneath the river.
By the time Jenny reached Sheepshead Bay, the rain had weakened to a fine mist. Water shone on East 18th Street beneath the lamps. Windows glowed above brick entrances. Somewhere behind an apartment wall, a television audience applauded. The scent of wet pavement mingled with bread from a bakery preparing the next morning’s first trays.
Jenny walked the final blocks with the bag tucked beneath her coat.
The old elevator was waiting in the lobby with its door half open. She stepped inside and pressed the button with her elbow. The mechanism shuddered before beginning its ascent. Jenny kept one hand under the book and watched the floors pass through the narrow wired-glass panel.
At Apartment 2B, she unlocked the door, entered, and turned the lock behind her.
The apartment received her with radiator heat, dim hallway light, and the lingering smell of onions cooked earlier in the evening. Jenny removed her shoes on the mat. She hung her raincoat on its hook, opened her umbrella in the bathtub to dry, and carried the paper bag directly to her room.
She placed it in the centre of the desk.
Only then did she change her clothes.
The office skirt went onto a hanger. The blouse followed after she inspected the cuffs for rain marks. She pulled on a soft grey sweater and a long cotton skirt, washed her face, and tied back her hair. At the bathroom sink, she scrubbed her hands with plain soap, cleaning beneath each nail. She dried them on a fresh towel rather than the damp one hanging beside it.
The book had not moved.
Jenny stood before the narrow bookcase.
The upper shelf was as she remembered it. Two dictionaries leaned against the left side, one English and one Hebrew. Beside them were six novels bought from library sales, their jackets covered in crackling clear plastic and their discarded catalogue labels still fixed to the spines. The ceramic horse stood near the middle, one foreleg chipped away. Beyond it lay a horizontal stack of office manuals, an atlas, and three thin volumes of poetry.
Jenny removed everything.
She placed the books on her bed in order, dusted the shelf, and ran one finger along its underside to check for roughness. The wood was old but sound. She tested the brackets with both hands. Nothing shifted.
The binders from the middle shelf went beneath the desk. The atlas moved downward. The dictionaries returned to the upper left corner. Jenny stood the ceramic horse beside them, turning its unbroken side toward the room.
Then she crouched and reached beneath the bed.
A shoebox emerged, its lid held at one corner by yellowed tape. Jenny placed it on the blanket and opened it.
Inside lay the pieces.
Individual Red Sonja issues in soft plastic sleeves, none of the sleeves matching. One comic had no cover. Another began with page three. Several bore old prices written in pencil at the upper right: fifteen cents, twenty-five cents, one dollar. A former owner had written KAREN M. in blue ink across the title page of one. Another had acquired a circular coffee stain long before Jenny found it. The oldest fragment consisted of nine loose pages held together inside a folded grocery bag.
Jenny took them out one by one.
She arranged them across the bed according to story rather than condition. Complete issues first, then partial ones, then loose pages. She knew where each interruption came. She knew which story stopped with Sonja entering a cavern and resumed, in a different issue bought two years later, with the cavern collapsing behind her. She knew where a page had been torn precisely through a speech balloon, leaving half a warning and the edge of a face.
She had never treated those gaps as permission to stop loving the stories.
The missing parts had become spaces she crossed by instinct. Sonja arrived wounded, and Jenny accepted the wound. A companion vanished, and Jenny understood that something had happened beyond her possession. Battles began before the surviving paper and continued after it. The stories had remained alive even while incomplete.
Jenny touched the grocery-paper packet. Its pages were brittle at the edges. She did not unfold them tonight.
Instead, she found a larger archival sleeve among the supplies in her desk drawer. It had originally protected one of her father’s old articles before she transferred the article to a binder. Jenny placed the loose pages inside, added a sheet of acid-free backing paper, and sealed the flap without adhesive.
The damaged comics returned to the box in their new order.
She did not move them to make room for the collected edition. She made room for both.
At the desk, Jenny lifted Mara’s small tape tab and unwrapped the parcel.
The book emerged slowly from brown paper. Its colours looked richer beneath the lamplight than they had beneath the store’s fluorescent tubes. The clear archival jacket lay so smoothly over the original that its edges almost disappeared.
Jenny held the volume against the clean front of her sweater.
Her eyes closed for a moment.
She did not embrace it tightly. She did not press the boards or bend the spine. She simply allowed the weight to rest against her, broad and solid beneath her hands.
Then she laid it on the desk and opened the cover.
The endpaper map spread before her again.
Jenny took the receipt from her purse. She placed it inside a small transparent envelope, one normally used for photographs, and slipped that envelope between the rear endpaper and the final blank leaf. It could be removed without damage. The printed ink would never touch the book.
The pay statement remained folded in the blue Donnelly & Blake folder.
She brought that out as well.
The company name appeared at the top. Beneath it, in the official payroll field, was her legal name:
YONINAH LACHKOVICS
The earnings, hours, deductions, and net amount had been aligned in clean columns. Every figure reconciled. She had checked.
Jenny laid the statement beside the open volume. She did not put it inside. Payroll documents belonged with payroll documents. Books belonged with books. Meaning did not require disorder.
From the desk drawer, she took a sheet of heavy cream paper and cut a rectangle with a ruler and craft knife. Her first attempt was a fraction too wide. She did not force it. She set it aside for another use and cut a second.
On the card, in the neat hand used for office labels and appointment ledgers, she wrote:
Yoninah Lachkovics
Jenny Lewis
New York, 2005
She looked at the words.
There was room beneath them.
Jenny held the pen over the paper for several seconds, then added:
Bought on Friday.
She smiled.
The day mattered, although not because history would remember it. Friday had carried her from the office to the store, from the register to the train, from a catalogue clipping to the physical weight now resting before her. Friday was sufficient.
She waited until the ink dried and slipped the card behind the front endpaper. It sat there without glue, held lightly by the fold of the protective cover.
Jenny closed the book.
In the kitchen, she made another cup of coffee. She warmed the milk gently rather than adding it cold, then carried the cup to her room on a tray. The tray remained on the desk. The book went to the bed.
She sat with her back against the wall, legs folded beneath her, and rested the volume on a clean cushion across her lap. For the first several pages she supported both covers in her hands, unwilling to let the binding open too far. Gradually, the book found its natural angle.
The first story began.
She read every caption.
Even when she remembered the words, she read them. She studied every panel in order, refusing the temptation to hurry toward the missing pages. The colours held small irregularities. Red deepened from one spread to another. Flesh tones warmed and cooled. Black ink sometimes thickened around Sonja’s eyes until her expression became almost severe enough to escape the paper.
Jenny reached the ruined-cart scene.
The page before it showed the horse stumbling. The next showed Sonja thrown sideways, one hand losing the reins. The cart shattered beneath the force of another horse. The mailed attacker came through the wreckage and caught her by the hair.
There it was.
No unexplained blood. No missing transition. No need to invent what had happened in the dark between surviving pages.
Jenny leaned closer.
Sonja’s face in the final panel was not frightened. It was furious, calculating, alive to the small possibilities left within a position that appeared hopeless. One hand had already closed around a broken piece of the cart.
Jenny turned the page.
The strike followed.
Her smile arrived slowly and remained through the entire sequence.
The radiator began knocking in the wall. A pipe groaned above the ceiling. Outside, tyres moved over wet streets in long sighs. Jenny read until the coffee cooled, then carried it to the kitchen and warmed it rather than waste what remained.
When she returned, the open book waited on the cushion.
She read the first issue and began the second. She stopped at every reproduced cover. She found stories she had never seen and others she knew in pieces. A page once encountered alone now belonged to a scene. A strange expression had a cause. A sword raised in apparent triumph proved, on the next page, to be an act of desperation. Someone Jenny had assumed dead returned after three panels rather than three years.
Nothing in the book hurried her.
Near midnight, she reached an illustration she recognized from the oldest loose pages. Sonja stood at the foot of a dark stair with a torch in one hand and her sword in the other. In Jenny’s fragment, the following page had been lost. She had carried the image for years without knowing whether Sonja ascended.
Here she did.
The next page showed the first step, then the second, then the narrowing stone passage above. Sonja climbed with the torch held low and the blade ahead of her. The stair turned once and opened beneath a carved arch. Beyond it waited a chamber full of sleeping figures, their armour stacked neatly beside them.
Jenny sat very still.
She had imagined monsters beyond that arch. She had imagined treasure, daylight, another fight, an empty room, and once, when she was very young, a library. The truth was quieter. Sleeping soldiers. A path that required care.
She read on.
After completing the third issue, Jenny closed the volume. There were hundreds of pages still before her. They did not need to be consumed in one night. The book would not be due at a library desk. No seller would ask for it back. No borrowed owner might decide she had kept it long enough.
She could stop.
Jenny carried the volume to the bookcase.
The collected edition fit between the dictionaries and the ceramic horse with less than an inch to spare. Its crimson spine faced the room, the gold title catching the light from the lamp. Jenny slid the shoebox of old issues onto the same shelf horizontally, beneath the poetry books, and adjusted the arrangement until neither the box nor the hardcover pressed against anything else.
She stood back.
The shelf did not look grand. Its paint had chipped along the front edge. One bracket was a different colour from the other. The books beside the collection were used, discarded, annotated by strangers, and repaired with tape. The ceramic horse still lacked a leg.
The crimson spine belonged among them.
Jenny turned off the overhead light and left only the desk lamp burning. She gathered the brown paper and folded it along Mara’s creases. It went into the bottom drawer for future wrapping. The paper carrier was smoothed and placed beside the desk. The extra dollar returned to the household envelope. The change was divided between transit and coffee.
The pay statement went back into the blue folder.
Her employee card rested on top of it.
Jenny ran her thumb over the magnetic strip before closing the folder. Tomorrow was Saturday. On Monday, the card would open the office doors again. Telephones would ring. Appointments would shift. Someone would misfile a cable. Someone else would ask where a visitor from Beirut had been placed on the afternoon schedule, and Jenny would know. Papers would pass through her hands and continue onward. The work would move, and she would move with it.
The book would remain here.
That knowledge settled over her more gently than relief.
Jenny changed for bed and returned once more to the bookcase. She touched the spine with two fingers, lightly enough that the clear cover made no sound.
“Good night,” she said, and although the words made her smile, she did not feel foolish.
She turned off the desk lamp.
The room entered darkness except for the wet streetlight filtering between the curtains. Its pale reflection moved across the protective jacket and caught briefly upon the gold title. Jenny lay beneath the blankets with one hand tucked under her cheek. The apartment creaked around her. Water passed through the pipes. A door closed somewhere down the hall.
The shelf held.
In the morning, she woke earlier than she needed to.
For several seconds she remained beneath the blankets, looking toward the window and listening to the hush left behind by the rain. Then she turned her head.
The collected edition stood precisely where she had placed it.
Jenny rose, washed her hands, and took it down.