I could live and dine in a bookstore. For dinner, I’d eat from the recipe books, then for dessert, I’ll munch on the stars dropped in the astronomy coffee table books. They’ll taste all sugar-coated and sulfuric. I’ll have my fill of starry nights.

When I slept, I’ll lay on Impressionism and Broadway biographies.
For breakfast, I’ll sip on the tea-flavored Danube rivers from musty maps.

I’ll hide deep in the bookstore behind the velvet curtains. Customers could ding at the cash register. I could care less.

Toddlers could jingle, again and again, the front door’s bell. Their nannies could chat. Let the little ones trail their apricot jam-covered fingers over the spines of books about anatomy. I don’t care. I’ll be devouring those tomes soon.

Let the moths circle overhead and the book worms slink along the floorboards. Make yourself at home.

Let ferns grow in the History, Zoology, and Dinosaur aisles. Let mammals roam.
Sure, the owner might ask me to modernize. Add a screen or two.

So I’ll hang everyone’s phones like worry beads from the wooden beam ceiling or I’ll deck them on the Christmas tree with silver garlands and popcorn.

“Don’t worry,” I’ll tell the pony-tailed owner over the tin can phone. “I’ll dust the smart phones when they begin to blink on and off.”

Or maybe I won’t tell the owner anything at all, as I’m too busy walking the religion aisle with Mother Mary, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Joan of Arc and I will be sharing visions at lunch today near the roses in the Garden section.

She and I — and you are invited — will breathe life into fiction.

We’ll dream, wake, dine, let go of our need to know. We’ll find we are no longer able to change one word of some past or favorite story. Perhaps, we’ll find, in other books, near science fiction, romance, or true crime, that change is possible.

I’ll be meeting my great- great-grandmother in the Self-Help and World Language sections later to inquire about the inevitability of decay.

You can find any answer to any question in my little book shop. But beware as you enter, as you hear the bell tinkle as you creak open the front door, you might never return. You might become the book you read — you will fall into the pages of the book that you were not assigned. And you will dine on stars.

I began this poem/story two decades ago. I found the pages this morning, handwritten, in a dusty folder, as I was looking for other creative writing. While on summer holiday, I was planning to declutter my file drawers. And I’ve been updating some Storyworth and memoir-ish stories. The featured image above is AI-generated.

I just finished reading The Road from Belhaven, a novel by Margot Livesey. I devoured it in two days. In that novel, there are many mysterious yet believable twists.