the bookie joint

  Eric stumbles over a pile of books as he makes his way to the back to do a restock. Shit. His shift is just beginning and he’s already dreading the massive amounts of  reading material that will be brought in to sell, usually by seniors cleaning out their basements and libraries. He picks up a box on the floor and and starts arranging them by category. Science Fiction. Biography. New Age. Poetry. He’s been working at the Bookie Joint for seven years now. He was planning on quitting after he finished his masters, but the owner promoted him to manager and his schedule is easy enough. As he cleans off the dust on the ancient  pieces of random literature, merely books that would inevitably sit on the shelves for years while hipsters would browse through the philosophy section trying to look cool, he thinks of Angie. She never picked up anything to try to look cool. She picked it up because she was doing research for her life. 

  He wonders what could have happened between them if he had only thanked her for the cd. They could even be married by now, maybe with a kid. He pictures her delicate frame pregnant, the two of them reading together in bed, cuddling in the morning and thinking to himself this is love. He would bury his face in her silky chestnut hair and it would smell like a lavender field he used to pass on the way to his aunt’s house in Delaware. They would talk about how lucky they were, how they could have missed each other but no, she came into that bookstore and he professed his adoration and now look at how happy they were. IF. 

  That day she came in Eric was a mess. His landlord had decided to skyrocket his rent that month, so he was pouring over Craigslist ads for another studio in his area, for about the same price he had been paying for the past five years- to no avail. He barely looked up from his laptop when she walked through the door. He heard her clear her throat. “Do you have any Ginsberg?” He looked up at her, the platinum blonde hair, eyes like a sparking ocean. Her voice was raspy, sexy, confident. He took her to the back and they searched for good ol’ Ginsberg, the way people should search for scintillating literature: together. They talked for hours that day, about music, philosophies, life, family. Before she left she told him she would make him a mix cd and bring it by. And she did, a week later, after he had gotten the news of impregnating a girl on a one-night stand. How could he reach out to her now? His life was ruined. 

  So here he is, almost three years later, with a two year old and a wife he never wanted to have. Sure, Lucy’s a good mother. She cooks on occasion and sometimes they have sex. But he feels divorce is looming on the horizon. They got married for the kid, for Adam. Eric continues to sift through the pile of books in front of him. And even now, whenever he comes across anything written by Allen Ginsberg, he sets it aside for Angie. She could stop by one day, one grey afternoon, and they could run away together and be like those lucky people. Maybe one day...