Excerpt: The Fictognostics Want Their Bookshop Back

In the late afternoon, Daniel Reed closed the curtains and emptied the cash register – he’d made fifteen dollars, which wasn’t so bad considering most people couldn’t even find the place. He usually strived to eat dinner and be in bed by seven, in order to get enough sleep for the second round of customers, who typically popped in just past one in the morning.

Reed was determined, however – he had personal business to attend to. He would suffer Chinese for dinner and deal with an hour’s less sleep.

There was a fourth sign upon the shop window: CLOSED.

“There’s a new one coming,” said CLOSED, rather quietly and in a language most cannot understand, to his brothers.

“That was the chubby-looking boy?” said REED’S BOOKSHOP eagerly.

“Can’t be,” said PART-TIME STAFF WANTED APPLY WITHIN.

“What would you know?” TECHNICAL MANUALS AND EDUCATIONAL BOOKS SECOND HAND snarled.

“Haven’t been here long,” said CLOSED, feeling rather hurt.

“Certainly not long enough to be making comments like that.”

There was muttering and arguing amongst the four. The consensus was this: it was highly unlikely, yes, that the boy was the part-timer, but CLOSED wasn’t a liar or an idiot, and he knew what he heard. The boy wasn’t fictional, no, not in the Gnostic sense, but…

“Found the shop, I guess,” said PART-TIME STAFF WANTED APPLY WITHIN, defeated. “Definitely counts for something.”

There was a rustling from inside, and a creak as the door was opened from the inside. Reed stepped outside, still in his brown coat, and whispered grumpily to the signs.

“It’s nighttime, little facts, and time for your master to go to sleep. So be quiet. Quieter. What if a passerby heard you? What would they think then? Go to sleep, little facts! You may talk in the busy day!”

“Is it true that you’ve got a new assistant? I don’t think it can be true, because he was very real, and couldn’t be a very good assistant, boss, but CLOSED thinks that you have, and I told him he was an idiot, because -”

PART-TIME STAFF WANTED APPLY WITHIN stopped talking. Reed was watching him with the tiger’s eyes, a silent growl caught within his throat. TECHNICAL MANUALS AND EDUCATIONAL BOOKS SECOND HAND whimpered.

“Don’t need you anymore,” said Reed, tearing PART-TIME STAFF WANTED APPLY WITHIN from the window. PART-TIME squirmed invisibly, squealed silently. Reed crumpled the sign into a ball, ducked back into the shop. The other, more permanent signs could hear PART-TIME’s screams. There was a whirring sound. They knew what that meant. That meant the shredder.

CLOSED shuddered.

The screams stopped. Reed stepped back out.

“Sleep, my little facts,” he said, and the remaining signs went quiet.
They were all very scared of Master Reed.