Under the Green Desk Lamp…
In addition to regular blog articles and my published novels, I’ve also written several Single Serving Stories over the years. Some have been published in anthologies like ‘Between the Shelves’, ‘Edmonton: Unbound’, and ‘All Mapped Out’. Others have been shared exclusively on this blog via the publication platform Smashwords.
Recent changes to the Smashwords platform has made it a less reliable option however, and therefore an exciting change has come to Brad OH Inc.
I will be re-sharing in full—un-edited and un-abridged—all Single Serving Stories previously published on Smashwords with Brad OH Inc. as the new, exclusive provider. All text will be provided in full, with no download necessary. If Smashwords don’t like that, they can message our complaints department.
This project will culminate in a couple of heretofore unpublished Single Serving Stories, so even the most dedicated of readers will have something to look forward to.
Today we share our eighth Single Serving Story, ‘Neve Uncovers the Ultimate Truth of All Things’. This story was part of the anthology ‘Between the Shelves’, which was created by our local writer’s group, with proceeds going to the local library branch. As part of this anthology, it is written as a celebration of libraries, and books in general.
‘Neve Uncovers the Ultimate Truth of All Things’ tells the tale of a little girl with some big concerns, left to ponder upon them in the familiar confines of her local library. Although her world is in an increasing state of turmoil, she finds comfort and meaning in the books around her.
Book shelves rose up like forbidden towers on old castles, meandering off in every direction. Neve, caressing the stringy and stained hair of her doll Clarice, bit her tiny lip. She could hear the lackadaisical clicking of the keyboard behind her as her father continued his arduous journey to find new employment. She knew it wasn’t going well. It never did.
Neve was always getting dragged along to the library for his half-hearted attempts to turn things around, and was expected to wait nearby as her dad perused the net in search of employment. Her family didn’t have Internet at their house. ‘That was for those rich…’ well, Neve really didn’t like to say bad words, and reasoned that thinking them probably counted just as much.
Still, waiting around like this was a tall task. Neve was only eight, after all.
“What do you think we should do, Clarice?” she whispered, hoping to avoid any dirty looks or shushes from the library’s other patrons. But her doll just stared back with her one button-eye, providing little by way of answer. Neve was too old to be talking to dolls anyway, she figured.
‘Yet not old enough to have other fun,’ she thought.
“Neve! Quit wandering around so much. Stay where I can see you,” her dad barked. His eyes never left the screen, which cast a deathly pallor over his already exhausted face.
“Yeah, yeah,” she mumbled to herself, imagining Clarice’s button-eye rolling back to mirror her own. Neve had never been a disobedient child, but the library was pretty familiar to her after so many months of this routine, and that meant the temptation to drift away was nearly overwhelming her eager young mind.
The small cluster of computers where her dad sat was stationed in the very centre of the library—an oasis of desks and screens enveloped by a world of wonder. About two person-lengths from the computers in all directions, the tall rows of bookshelves rolled away into distances Neve couldn’t even imagine. One way led to fantasy books, where Neve could find old tales about knights and dragons. Beside that was non-fiction, which had never really captured Neve. Then there were the young-adult, horror, and literature sections. Yuck, yikes, and yawn! But just to her right was the row for science fiction books. There, Neve knew, she could read about unimaginable alien worlds, and starships piloted by people totally foreign in their experiences, yet somehow unbearably familiar in their struggles.
Neve liked that section a lot. Once, she recalled, she’d flipped through a book with pictures of giant space stations, and terrible battles in the stars. There had even been a princess in distress—just like in so many of the fantasy stories Neve loved.
Pulling Clarice tightly to her chest, Neve eyed the countless pathways eagerly. She was a good reader for her age—even her teacher, Mrs. MacNeil, had said so on a sticker covered certificate which now hung on Neve’s bedroom wall. So her regular trips to the library had grown bolder bit by bit, and whenever her dad was sufficiently distracted, she would wander a little further down one row or another, reading anything she could get her hands on.
She turned in tiny circles as she thought about the possibilities. The spinning made her dizzy, but Neve didn’t mind. “That way is where the romance books are,” she told Clarice—as if the doll didn’t already know. Over the last couple of months, Neve and Clarice had been nearly permanent fixtures in their local library branch. “I like those ones,” she purred quietly to her little stuffed friend, and felt a flush creeping into her cheeks.
Neve remembered one book in particular. She’d flipped through it on one of her first trips to the library, struggling with some of the words and wishing for pictures, but doing very well on the whole, according to Clarice. The book had been an old story about star-crossed lovers separated by cruel circumstances. No matter what they did, their paths just never seemed to bring them together.
Neve liked how they never gave up hope though. Clutching the rough cover in her little hands, she’d hoped her parents held onto that same hope.
“Books can be a big help to people, you know.”
Clarice only gaped at Neve’s prompt, but this didn’t stop her. Once, Mrs. MacNeil had said Neve was ‘headstrong’. One trip to the library later, Neve learned that meant she didn’t quit when things got tough. That had made her happy.
“Just remember the woman we met in the ‘Religion’ section?” she continued.
The memory from several weeks ago still remained with Neve, fighting tenaciously for space amongst confounding math problems, cruel playground rumours, and half-comprehended speculations from her dad about where they were going to live.
Neve had been standing at the threshold of the aisle, inching in slowly as she kept one vigilant eye on her dad. The covers seemed scary, with blood and fire and thorns. Neve had actually begun to wonder if she’d stumbled into the horror section again by accident, when she saw the short old lady holding a light purple book. She had tears running down her face, and Neve’s strong sense of sympathy had overpowered her aversion to scoldings.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, staring up at the frail blue-haired lady.
The woman was startled at first, but her expression naturally softened when she saw Clarice. “Oh, oh bless your heart. Nothing’s wrong my dear. I was just reading an old passage that my mother used to read to me. I never understood it back then,” she explained with a paper-thin smile before being interrupted by a gross coughing fit. She put a hand to her chest, and her old body shook. “It speaks to me now though,” she finished, and creaked slowly away, leaning upon her rocker.
With an emboldened spirit, Neve had picked up the book and flipped through it. There were a lot of lines about valleys, and fear, and other things Neve didn’t really understand. But she remembered how much it had meant to the lady.
Now, Neve could still hear the slow clicking of the keyboard, and a quick glance backward told her that her dad remained fixated on his own quest.
With one tentative step, then another, Neve inched her way into the fantasy section, where the book covers showed horses and dragons and all sorts of wonderful scenes. Picking up a pale green book with a white sword on it, Neve flipped the pages excitedly, her mind a maelstrom of big ideas and vague hopes.
Foreign words were scattered freely throughout the text, but many of them were pretty close to words she knew, and the clever girl was able to make some general sense from the lines she read as she flipped happily through the pages. There had been a king long ago, in a land that had a new name now. The king had a sword.
“Not just any sword,” she whispered to Clarice, whose little grey button eye seemed to wobble with excitement, “a magic sword, pulled from a stone! It’s what makes him king, but…” Neve paused, considering what a hard time the king seemed to be having.
She flipped a few pages, searching for the happy parts. She’d looked through the book a dozen times before—sometimes she felt like she’d done so with every book in the library. Inevitably though, she’d find something new with each venture into the forbidding stacks.
“The sword is why he’s king, but he can never figure out how to make the people happy. He gets advice from a wizard, and he listens to his people, but everyone wants something different.” Neve felt silly sometimes, whispering to a doll. But someone had to share in these adventures with her. She was pretty sure that was a rule.
“I think it’s hard to be good sometimes, Clarice. Sometimes there’s no way to make everyone happy, and—”
“Neve, get back here!” her dad’s voice ricocheted across the library, and people stared at Neve, many with long bony fingers pressed to their thin gray lips. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Sorry dad.” Neve hurried back to his side, her eyes glued to the faded blue carpet. “I was just reading about a—”
“That’s OK honey, just don’t wander too far.” He never looked away from the screen.
“Hmmph.” Neve flopped down onto the floor beside the computer desk, her eyebrows bunched tightly together. There was a garbage can next to her, but a quick peek in revealed nothing but bunched up papers and a few cough drop wrappers. The floor was mostly clean.
Neve looked at the clock, trying to follow the second hand around its course, but that got boring after only a few rotations.
“This is taking forever,” she whined, and Clarice nodded her emphatic support. She picked lackadaisically at the flaking paint on the leg of the computer table, but didn’t like the way it scraped under her fingernails. “Hmmph.”
On the shelf closest to her, Neve could see a big hardcover book with pictures of stars and planets and comets and crazy glowing balls of purple light and lots of other things she didn’t understand.
It didn’t seem that far away. A quick glance up to her dad told Neve he was still fixated by…whatever it was he looked at.
She lay down on the floor. Keeping one toe pressed firmly against her dad’s workstation as instructed, she stretched out on her stomach, her tiny fingers reaching out for the big old book.
“Darn, not quite enough,” she grumbled.
Her eyes flashed about like fireflies, desperately trying to figure out a way to reach the book, which hovered just a few inches beyond her grasp. But there was no way to stretch any farther without running the risk of tearing her skeleton loose from her skin, and Neve certainly didn’t want to do that. Her back was already getting sore, and she relaxed her posture a bit. No one was going to help her; that much was certainly clear.
With sudden clairvoyance, Neve reached the only decision available to her, and quickly chucked poor Clarice at the book, knocking it down from the shelf with a loud ‘Whop!’
A gale of ‘Shushes’ flooded her ears as she was buried under a tsunami of dirty looks. “Neve, be quiet. Don’t you get that we’re in a library?” her dad snapped.
Neve scooped up the book—and Clarice—with her toes still grounded firmly against the desk, and shimmied giddily back. Success!
Sitting up with her back against the hard old desk leg, she nestled the heavy book in her lap, placed Clarice comfortably in view just above it, and opened it up.
Neve’s mouth hung open as she took in the incredible, double-page panoramas. Tremendous clusters of stars spread out before her; entire galaxies scattered over the blackness like spilled marbles, and foreign planets beyond count were pictured within.
She gasped. “It’s all so big!” Scrunching up closer to the desk leg, Neve held her breath as she flipped the pages. She remembered again the lady she’d spoken to in the religion section, and how moved she’d been by what she was reading. “There’s something for everyone here I guess. There’s certainly room for it,” she finished, flipping the pages eagerly.
With such a humongous universe out there, it seemed nearly impossible that there could be any certain answers to all the strange things people wondered; just an ever-expanding list of questions. Neve pulled Clarice closer as she read about how all the stars she could see in the night sky existed in only an itsy-bitsy little portion of their single galaxy.
“It sure makes you feel small, doesn’t it?”
“You still there, baby?” her dad asked from just above her. It sounded like a world away.
“I’m still here Daddy,” she answered quietly.
Neve had a lot of questions herself: Who would she play with at recess tomorrow? Why wasn’t she allowed to do anything by herself? What did her parents always used to fight about? Where was her mom anyways?
Looking at all the thousands of stars, and all the great empty spaces between them, Neve realized that she’d kind of given up on getting answers for them anyway. ‘But sometimes,’ she thought, ‘the stories here are even better. Answers don’t seem so important when you have a good story, after all.’
Gazing at the big bright pages in amazement, Neve remembered another story she’d read once. She hadn’t understood a lot of it, but she’d gotten bits and pieces. It was about an astronaut on a big spaceship, flying through the stars to discover…something.
She’d thought he must have been very lonely, drifting farther and farther from home all alone.
He did have a robot he could talk to, but it didn’t really seem anxious to help him or make him feel better. It just wanted to do what needed to be done for the mission, and never cared what the poor astronaut needed for himself.
“Can’t I go get another book, Daddy?” Neve asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Neve. I’ve got to keep my eye on you, that’s a dad’s job after all,” he replied. The façade of his cheery tone was entirely transparent to the whip-smart young Neve.
Neve slouched down, closing the big book in her lap and looking at Clarice. “That astronaut did his job, even though he had that stupid old robot to deal with. I guess I have to too,” she declared. But Clarice didn’t answer, and Neve tossed her down onto the floor.
She was too old to talk to dolls anyway. Doll didn’t have brains like people. Clarice couldn’t answer all the questions Neve had. Clarice couldn’t talk or think or even ask questions for herself.
‘No’, Neve thought, ‘only people can do that.’
She remembered another story she’d looked at once, sitting down next to her dad in the big old library. It was a long story, and there was a whole shelf in the library to hold all the books it took to tell it. She didn’t get through very much, but flipping through the old yellow pages, taking in that happy, musty smell, she’d managed to catch enough.
It was a fantasy story, like so many others she’d read. It was about an amazing world full of beautiful elves and terrible goblins and all sorts of strange stuff like that. But the world was dying; all the magic was disappearing and all the good people were going away, leaving the world to darkness and decay.
It made her sad then, and it made her sad thinking about it now. She looked over at Clarice folded in half on the ground and sighed. “The people in that story didn’t believe things could go back either, not to the way they used to be,” she whispered down to her hopeless friend.
Neve blushed, but a quick glance up to her father revealed that he hadn’t been listening—still absorbed in the cool blue glow of the screen in front of him.
‘They’d still tried though,’ she remembered that much at least. The smallest and most helpless had stood up to undo all the hurt, and carried the burden even though they couldn’t possibly understand what it all really meant.
Neve liked that.
Sometimes as she read one book or another, she felt like it had been written just for her. It was weird, because that made her wonder how anyone else could possibly understand it, since they didn’t know all the things she knew. But they did understand. Everyone found something in those books, and that’s what made them so great.
“Only people can ask questions, and only people can imagine answers.” Neve sighed, and pulled Clarice back over to her side. ‘It must be easy,’ she thought, ‘to be a doll and only worry about doll things: How you sit on the bed, what dress to wear—those things are easy-as-pie.’ Other than her one missing button-eye, Clarice had the best life Neve could imagine. And the missing button-eye didn’t even seem to bother Clarice.
Clutching the doll tightly in one hand now, she imagined the tiny weight was unbearable, just like the magic ring in the book she’d read. She crawled slowly; dragging Clarice along the worn carpet, fearing that at any moment the watchful eye of her father would settle upon her and end their adventure before it even began.
But no scolding came, and Neve slipped silently away into the aisle marked ‘Classics’.
She’d been here before too, so she took no time at all locating her favourite book. There was a silly drawing of a naked yellow man on the cover, and Neve had to bite her little lip to suppress a giggle. She had to do that every time.
The man seemed to be drawn on a pot, but Neve could never figure out what that had to do with the stories—which were all about the ancient gods of Greece, and the strange games they played with people.
Sometimes, Neve wondered if that’s how Clarice felt—manipulated against her will by a giant girl she could barely comprehend. That made Neve feel awfully powerful, and every time the thought entered her mind, she vowed to ensure she treated Clarice with all the respect she wanted for herself.
The gods in these stories weren’t like that though. Not at all. They killed and tortured their people, and gave them impossible labours to do, and then punished them if they did any of it wrong.
It all seemed so unfair.
Neve peeked around the corner to make sure her dad hadn’t caught on to her absence. He’d be awfully mad if she didn’t sit still in the place where she was told. But he just gazed at his screen, oblivious and fully occupied with whatever worried adults.
She flipped through the book cautiously. She didn’t want to stumble on some awful drawing again—once she’d seen one of a bird eating a man’s guts, and that had put her off her thanksgiving dinner, which also made her dad angry. All the stories in this section were terribly gruesome. In fact, Neve had avoided the section for a long time after discovering what it contained, but eventually she grew curious, and finally began to visit it again.
At first, she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to read something so awful. When she was younger, Neve only liked happy stories about beautiful princesses and magical times.
But at some point or another, those things began to feel a bit silly.
They were nice to imagine, and Neve still liked it when her dreams were happy, but she couldn’t deny that sometimes she liked those darker stories. She wondered about the people who wrote them. Mrs. MacNeil had talked about the ancient Greeks once, and although Neve didn’t know much, she knew they were from a time long, long ago. ‘Probably even before Christopher Columbus,’ she imagined.
“Why do you think they wrote those stories?” she whispered the question into the side of Clarice’s stuffed, earless head. “Do you think they really thought that’s what God was like, or do you think they just needed a way to blow off steam?”
One time, Mrs. MacNeil had sent Neve out of the classroom, and she had to sit down and talk about anger with the school counsellor. Neve was scared at first, but it turned out OK. She got to hold a big fluffy toy frog, which was nice, and they mostly just talked about things which made Neve mad—which somehow made her feel better about them.
In the end, the counsellor had told her to count to ten, and to drink some water, and to walk away. Neve didn’t know how to do all those things together without making a big mess and getting in even more trouble though, so she didn’t really bother. But she remembered that the counsellor had also told her how important it was to talk about it. She said you could talk to toys, or people you trust, or even write it down.
“That’s probably what they were doing,” Neve told Clarice, “just trying to write down all the things that scared them back then. That’s really good to do, because once you write it down, it’s not as scary anymore.”
Neve thought about the diary she’d started once, back when everything first started to change. She’d written big stories about her dad and her mom and their old house, but it was really hard work, and she’d ultimately given up.
“Oh,” said Neve, flipping through the thin pages with Clarice nestled snuggly in her lap, “this is one of my favourites.” She turned the book upward to show Clarice the full-page picture of the stone man and his lion skin and his big muscles. Then she blushed, shook her head at Clarice, and pulled the book back up with a huff.
“This guy was the son of Zeus—the king of the gods. But Zeus’s wife Hera didn’t like him, and they always fought. He was tormented by Hera, who only showed up when she wanted to make things hard for him and drive him crazy.
“But he never gave up. Sometimes he used his strength, and sometimes he used his brains, but he never gave up. I think that’s pretty important.
“I wonder who wrote this story,” said Neve, searching through the covers and end-pages for some kind of ‘about the author’ section.
“Neve!” The yell sent a chill up her spine.
The jig was up!
“Neve, get back here!” her dad called again. “You know better than to wander off. It’s time to go. C’mon!”
Sinking down against the rigid bookshelf, Neve frowned. ‘Time to go home,’ she thought. That meant a lot of things: It meant that bedtime was near for one thing, and dreams were always sort of a gamble. It also meant a whole day of school; wandering the halls alone and hoping someone would talk to her. She hated that!
Hopefully though, her dad would need to do more work tomorrow, because that would mean she’d get to come back here. She looked forward to being at the library. At any moment, some story could take her to a world she’d never heard of but always needed.
It amazed her how familiar they always felt.
“Neve! Let’s go. Now!”
“Well Clarice, it’s time to go,” she said, replacing the book on the shelf and gently taking her doll up by the hand. “I still think it’s unfair sometimes that people are the only ones who have to wonder why. It hurts to have so many questions. But I’ve gotta admit—I’m glad we have imaginations. At least that way, when we don’t know all the real answers, we can think up something that makes sense, right Clarice?”
“That’s right,” said Clarice, her voice as smooth and comforting as a mother’s touch. “I think we’re going to be just fine, Neve.”
-Brad OH Inc.
Brad OH Inc. 