Vera wasn't there. Not in body. But her notes were—scattered across my table, because I was supposed to be writing her biography. Vera had been a librarian here in the 1940s. She had hidden a collection of forbidden poetry inside the bindings of old agricultural reports. She had been fired for it. She had never apologized.
Not a question. A promise.
And I was just a writer on a Saturday afternoon, realizing that the table we were all sharing—the waiting man, the building child, the ghost of a librarian, and me—was not a collection of strangers.
Because questions end. Promises don’t. Jarw would stop waiting eventually. Merida’s tower would fall and rise again. Vera was dead, but her handwriting was not.
That, I thought, is either the definition of hope or the definition of madness. Perhaps they are the same thing. And then there was Vera .
— End of post
I thought he was waiting for someone. But as the hour turned, I realized: Jarw was waiting for time itself to admit it had made a mistake. By the window, Merida was building a house of cards. She was seven, maybe eight. Her mother (presumably the woman who kept checking her phone by the biography section) had told her to “be still.” Merida had interpreted this as “be still except for your hands.”