Word Count: 625
I saw it up ahead in the road that ran by the river, a fluttering, half-alive thing that I guessed had been nicked by a car. A squirrel, a possum, a cat–but no, as I saw it up close I could see it was only a book.
I had read much about the death of the book. The delight of visuals, the graphics and colors and music and jumping words all more fulfilling to the new evolving brain geared more for instant gratification, stimulation, entertainment. Even pure text alone on a screen seems to be more appealing these days than when trapped on assigned paper pages organized within chapters by number and form, walled in by covers, front and back.
So it would seem that what lay in the road, straddling the double yellow line so that each car in whichever direction it was traveling would affect the book’s pages by the draft, was dying. I felt its pain. I wanted to stop, to rescue it from its ignominious plight. It could not in its current position be read as its joyful purpose meant that it should. It was more than a discarded or lost companion, perhaps fallen out of a bicyclist’s backpack, or thrown from a half-open schoolbus window as a mean prank. It was a symbol of history being changed again by technology.
I’d come home by a different route and so didn’t see it again on that trip, but all night the book remained on a shelf in my mind. I wondered what sort of information it held. Was it a textbook, a novel, an anthology of poems? Was it non-fiction, a memoir, a biography of someone’s sad life? Was it numbers and rules, a mathematical master, or a lyrical fantasy land of short stories? I wondered; I worried; I wanted to cry for all its persistence, for all that it said to someone, even one person, who had fingered its yellowing pages, put a wildflower to press in its bosom, opened its cover and read its first words. Like a child, the opening line, the first words that lead into trails leading away.
By the next morning I felt the weight of the Bible pressing on my heart. Or the eloquence of Shakespeare in the drama of lives and living. Of the wailing of masses given voice only in books. Of the dream that is attained in a lifetime, or the one that inspires new ones from its own; of this and all that man had achieved in his questing for comprehension of his world and his ultimate need to share, discuss, write down.
I dressed quickly, took my coffee in a covered plastic cup, and drove the short way down by the river, looking for my small friend, the book.
It was early and commuter traffic hadn’t quite started. I drove below the speed limit, searching the route. It was not where I thought I had seen it and my heart slowed to a death march as I thought it sadly gone, its spine broken, its last words gasped out onto the pavement.
Then I saw a flutter of pages off the road, like a dove taking off into the sky from its imagined airstrip. I pulled over just beyond it, shut the engine, got out and walked the few steps back where it had near melted into the tall unkempt grass.
I picked it up, felt its dampness from the night light spring rain and stroked its fine black linen-like skin. It held no embossed in gold title, no hint at the thoughts in its mind. I opened it up, gently flipped past the first few pages, and got lost in its opening line.
