Excerpt: Lucy and the Man

She had started working in the bookstore two days after school got out for the summer. It was her first job and, while he wasn't actually part of the hiring process (despite is seven years of faithful shelving) but he had a good idea what had made her stand out from the annual pile of high school applicants. Sticking out from the bubbly loops of purple pen and the awkward sharpie chicken scratches had been a single sheet of parchment paper filling top to bottom with tight, monk-perfect, lettering. Each paragraph headed by an over-sized illuminated letter.

It was a cute schick, he had to admit. A little over the top, but it did the trick. It didn't hurt that the content was a simple fairytale with elements borrowed from an apparently encyclopaedic knowledge of classic children's literature.

It was just the sort of thing to tickle Mrs Johnson. She had always been eccentric, but since the death of Mr Johnson – Mr J to the long time employees and customers, she'd crossed the line and was well on her way to Batty Widowhood. The particular flavor of benign insanity she had chosen – or been chosen by-- was an over-affection for young adult literature. In particular those of the disappear into another, usually magical vaguely historical, world, save it, and return-- a motif of which Narnia usually topped the list.

Mrs. Johnson's obsession had germinated in the aisles of her own bookstore but recent left the building all together and she could be found on Sunday afternoons tramping about in public parks in several pounds of tea-dyed muslin skirt, a billow-white pirate shirt cinched tight across her matronly busom by a iridescent bodice heavily festooned with small bells, ribbons, and other bit of historically-questionable flair.

He didn't really care one way or another about Mrs. Johnson and her Nerf-wielding knights, but he resented loosing almost two full shelves of space to a display of Easter-egg pastel healing and divinatory crystals. If she started burning sage at store opening, he had decided, it was time to enquirer about openings at the Barns and Nobles out by the highway.