chapter one
(aunt julia reads the book)
She rocked back and forth, the book
of PRINCESSES & PRINCES:
HOW THEY TRULY LIVE and THE SUBJECTS THEY LOVE
ON HER LAP.
FLIPPED PAGES. THE ARTWORK WAS DELIGHTFUL, but the words!
she swapped it for a
worn-out book about a duck named Waddles, but her niece propped herself up on the bed. “Auntie—”
“Nina, those stories are too long, and it’s already eight.” Sassy child.
“But some stories are really, really short. There’s lots of them in the book. That’s why it is so big.”
she was out of place
talking to her aunt like that, too enthusiastic, she would have said, so Nina changed tactics and pleaded with downcast eyes. “Please?”
Julia let out an exaggerated sigh and read two stories that didn’t exist, and Nina heard two tales she had never heard.
Later, as she got ready for bed, Julia went over the tale she had woven for Nina, shocked at herself.
the following day
she read through the book, not the whole thing — it would have been almost impossible to do so in one sitting, or even in two, or three, or … well, not with people and stories colliding and running like bubbles under a faucet. She made notes on the edge of some pages as reminders for that night when she would read it to Nina again.
it wasn’t until nina leafed through
The Book that night before bedtime, while she bustled around the room folding and putting away laundry, that Julia noticed strings of blue ink along the margins of some pages. Last night she wrote in black. So after Nina fell asleep, Julia gingerly
plucked the book from
under Nina’s arms. Her sister Ana may be home from the hospital tomorrow, and who knows when she will get a chance to read The Book again.
