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Add continuity context and update proposals

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Joey Grasty
2026-08-23 17:32:18 -05:00
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\f0\fs24 The library was cool and smelled the way libraries always smelled \u8212? paper and time and the particular quiet that collected in places where people came to be alone together. Lizzie walked through the glass doors ahead of her mother and felt her shoulders drop about two inches.\par
\par
"Don't go far," Elikapeka said, which was what she always said, which was unnecessary, because Lizzie never went far in a library. She went deep.\par
\par
Emma had declined to come, predictably. Emma's relationship with books was polite but not passionate. She had stayed home with some intention involving the phone and the pool and whatever complicated social machinery was required to plan a birthday party a few weeks in advance. Lizzie had not been sorry to leave her.\par
\par
She moved through the new releases first, the way she always did, not because she expected to find anything but because you never knew. The spines passed under her fingers. A lot of things she'd already rejected. A lot of things she had no interest in. And then one cover stopped her hand.\par
\par
*Stardust.* Neil Gaiman.\par
\par
She pulled it out. A wall. A town on one side, something else \u8212? something wild and dark and other \u8212? on the other side. She turned it over and read the back and then read it again, and something in her chest did a small, certain thing, like a key turning.\par
\par
"Mom." She crossed the floor to where her mother was standing near the periodicals, leafing through nothing in particular with the calm unhurried quality she brought to every task. "Look at this one."\par
\par
Elikapeka took the book. She read the back cover with care, which Lizzie appreciated even as she found it agonizing. Then she fanned the pages \u8212? a quick, practiced inspection, reading a line here and there.\par
\par
"No," she said, and handed it back.\par
\par
Lizzie stood still for a moment. "Why not?"\par
\par
"I don't think it's for you yet."\par
\par
"I've read Lord of the Rings."\par
\par
"I know you have."\par
\par
"I've read Dragonflight. Multiple times."\par
\par
"I know that too." Her mother's voice was the same voice she had used with Emma at breakfast \u8212? the one that was not unkind but that was also not going to move. "This is different."\par
\par
"Different how?"\par
\par
"The content." Elikapeka set the magazine back on the rack and looked at her directly. "Not yet, Lizzie. Maybe in a year or two."\par
\par
"A year or two." Lizzie looked down at the cover. The wall. The other country beyond it. "I'm going to be in high school."\par
\par
"I know where you're going to be."\par
\par
"I read at a college level. Mrs. Patterson said so."\par
\par
"Mrs. Patterson is your English teacher and she's right," Elikapeka said pleasantly. "And I'm your mother. Put it back."\par
\par
Lizzie put it back. She did not slam it. She was not Emma.\par
\par
She went back into the stacks and stood for a moment in the fiction section, in the particular silence that came after a refusal, and let herself feel the frustration without acting on it. Then she moved toward the F's, because there was no point in standing around feeling sorry for herself when there were books within reach.\par
\par
Dragonflight was there \u8212? it was always there, because apparently no one else in Lighthouse Point needed it on any given Saturday, which said something about Lighthouse Point. She took it down and held it and felt some of the annoyance leave her, because she loved it, had always loved it, the dragons and the Thread and Lessa's furious stubborn intelligence. She picked up Dragonquest too, and The White Dragon, and held the stack with both arms.\par
\par
Then she stood in front of the T's for a while, looking at the Tolkien. She didn't need to check them out \u8212? she had the entire corpus at home, the one with the Alan Lee illustrations that she kept on her nightstand and treated with the seriousness of a sacred object \u8212? but she stood there anyway, looking at the spines.\par
\par
She went back to her mother with the McCaffrey books.\par
\par
Elikapeka looked at them. She turned Dragonflight over, read the back, and made a small sound that was not quite amusement. "You've read these."\par
\par
"I know."\par
\par
"All of them. More than once."\par
\par
"I know that too."\par
\par
Her mother looked at her over the books. "Wouldn't you rather find something new? Something you haven't read?"\par
\par
Lizzie looked at her. "I tried to."\par
\par
A pause.\par
\par
"Lizzie\u8212?"\par
\par
"I found one. You said no." She didn't say it with heat. She said it the way her mother said things she was certain about \u8212? as the shape of reality. "So these are what I'm checking out."\par
\par
Her mother was quiet for a moment. Then she checked them out.\par
\par
---\par
\par
The grocery store was the wrong place to be when you had books waiting.\par
\par
Lizzie understood, in the abstract, that grocery shopping was necessary, that families required food, that her mother's habit of slow and deliberate progress through the Publix served some purpose she would probably appreciate more when she was older. She understood all of this. She still found it almost unbearable.\par
\par
"Can I just\u8212?" she started.\par
\par
"Here." Her mother handed her the list. "You know what we need. Get the things on the right side. I'll do the left."\par
\par
This was the arrangement that worked. Lizzie took the list and went.\par
\par
She moved fast, the way she moved through everything when there was a book waiting \u8212? with a focused, slightly urgent efficiency that made other shoppers step aside. Cereal. Juice. The specific bread her father liked that was on the second shelf and not the first. Milk. She knew this store the way she knew the library \u8212? where everything lived, how to cut through the produce section to save forty seconds, which checkout lines moved and which ones didn't.\par
\par
She was back at the cart inside seven minutes.\par
\par
Her mother was standing in the cereal aisle, reading the side panel of something, which was not on the list.\par
\par
"Mom." Lizzie set her items in the cart.\par
\par
"Hmm."\par
\par
"I got everything on my half."\par
\par
"I see that." Her mother set the box down and considered the one next to it.\par
\par
"Are we almost done?"\par
\par
"We'll be done when we're done."\par
\par
Lizzie leaned on the cart and looked at the ceiling. "I just \u8212? I have books."\par
\par
"I'm aware you have books. You have books you've already read." Her mother moved down the aisle with no discernible increase in pace. "I would think a book you've read before would be somewhat less urgent."\par
\par
"It's not less urgent. It's\u8212?" Lizzie considered how to explain this. "It's like visiting someone. Someone you like. You still want to get there."\par
\par
Her mother glanced at her, and something in her expression shifted in a way that Lizzie recognized \u8212? the small, private thing that meant she was pleased, though she wouldn't say so directly.\par
\par
"That's a nice way to put it," Elikapeka said.\par
\par
"I want to go visit Lessa," Lizzie said. "She's been waiting."\par
\par
"Lessa has been waiting since 1968. She can wait another twenty minutes."\par
\par
"That's easy for you to say."\par
\par
"It is." Her mother lifted two cans of tomatoes from the shelf, read both labels, placed one in the cart. "You know, I used to read like you do. When I was your age."\par
\par
Lizzie looked at her. Her mother didn't say things like this very often \u8212? the when-I-was-your-age things that weren't pointed at a lesson, that were just offered, plainly.\par
\par
"What did you read?"\par
\par
"Everything I could." She moved toward the pasta. "My mother had to hide books from me to get me to do anything else."\par
\par
"That's what you do to me."\par
\par
"I know." There was no apology in it, but no defensiveness either. "It worked on me. I turned out fine."\par
\par
"I'm going to write them someday," Lizzie said. "Books. Not just read them."\par
\par
"I know you are."\par
\par
"Fantasy. Like Tolkien. Like McCaffrey." She pushed the cart forward to keep pace. "There aren't that many women writing it. But McCaffrey did. I can too."\par
\par
"You can," her mother said, in the same tone she used when she said things like the cousins are coming to the party and the bread is on the second shelf \u8212? simply, as the established nature of things.\par
\par
Lizzie was quiet for a moment. The store moved around them, Saturday-morning sounds, other carts and other conversations, the low music from speakers somewhere above.\par
\par
"Can we go after the pasta?" she asked.\par
\par
Elikapeka picked up the pasta, read the weight, placed it in the cart.\par
\par
"After the pasta," she said.\par
\par
Lizzie pushed the cart toward the checkout and tried not to go faster than her mother's pace, and mostly succeeded, and the whole time she was thinking about fire-lizards and dragons and a woman named Lessa who was small and fierce and refused to be told what she could not do.
}