Bystander If you are standing in the elbow of the staircase on a particular day you will see a tall, white-haired man placing thick books in special arrangements on a table below. A furry ball of a Pomeranian scampers on the floorboards above and a young man tells a younger girl how to take its collar off. A cashier with yellow highlighted hair that falls against the collar of her shirt like feathers greets a woman with dreadlocks that dangle to her chin. Around you stacks of books sit silent against one another in small crooked towers. Outside sirens wail in and out of range; there are always sirens wailing on a nearby street. Inside the cashier is asking the woman one more time if she didn’t have another book with her? in a chipper, early-morning voice, the voice of a preschool teacher. But I saw you come down with another book, she says, phrasing that like a question too. You can picture the hairs on the nape of her neck rising like the white flag on a cockatoo’s head. Are you sure, because I saw you with two books, she persists, and you can’t hear the other woman but your palms are getting a little sweaty. No, interjects the man placing books on the table, She decided not to get that one. You feel your heartbeat. You hear the pause. You still cannot hear the customer but she was spoken for by the man, and now the cashier, still in that chirping, questioning voice, asks her if she is a student. The woman says yes, and the cashier must change the total because she had assumed the woman wasn’t. You hear the sound of your steps as you descend the bottom of the staircase. You place the books on the counter and the cashier smiles at you, and a little girl gambols up the staircase and the cashier raises her eyebrows and mumbles in a friendly way, I wonder where she’s going. You wait for her to ask you about other books you may or may not have had in your hands, you wait and wait, turning your pale palms over and over.
Guinevere Lee is currently a student in the nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University, and lives with her cat, Bibim Bop, in New York City. She received a Masters in Indian Studies from the University of Oxford and a B.A. in humanities from Soka University of America. When not writing, she pushes books around on booktrucks in the Columbia libraries to annoy students (and make money), plays Rachmaninov on the piano, ballroom dances with her girlfriend, makes bomb vegan pizzas, practices Buddhism, and obsessively lifts weights. This is her first foray into the frightening world of publishing.
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