The Dryad's Books
by Rachel Ayers
It is winter now, and the forest fills softly with snow. It is beautiful, but it is the dryad’s least favorite time of year. Everything is dying and she feels the ache in her Mother’s sap, the slowing of something that is already slow, the heartbeat of the forest almost imperceptible.
The dryad is given her wandertime, for a little while; perhaps as much as a year, perhaps only a season. She does not waste it, setting out through the paths of wind and ice, between the trees and the roots.
It is as a young woman that she walks into the town, ice crunching under her boots. The boots are scavenged along with everything else she is wearing: a thin dress, a ragged sweater leaking wool in snags and holes. The young woman is odd, though in a way that is difficult to articulate. Her molecules do not line up in a way that is quite human; the shape of her cells is a little off. She is still quite pretty. Her skin is dark and a bit rough around the edges; her hair is wild and moves with every breeze, fluttering and flashing and never settling.
The wind whips between the buildings, scattering debris and the last fallen leaves which crackle through the slushy streets. It is a small town, the only one she has ever known, and it does not take her long to reach the center. There is a single street of small businesses and vacancies, two Mexican restaurants, and a train depot at which trains rarely stop (only for special occasions).
Her Mother has told her to stay away from the town, but now Mother grows too cold and sleepy, and her warnings seem to belong to another time. The dryad is captivated by the quickness of the town: there is always automobile traffic, always people walking down the sidewalks, and they nod and smile at her, distracted by their errands and thoughts and worries. They don’t grab her or cut her as Mother warned; they walk past, forgetting her as soon as she is out of their sight.
There is a new store, bannered with the words GRAND OPENING across the front window. The door is painted with gold copperplate letters spelling out the words XAPTI BOOKS. The rest of the storefront is curtained with crimson velvet: to be revealed soon, according to the paper sign on the door, which further announces that the advertised grand opening will be on December 1st.
The dryad jumps momentarily out of her skin when the door crashes open with a clanging of bells and a billow of warm air; this is a slight separation of bark and soul, and would not be noticeable except to a very observant viewer.
The woman who pushed the door open has her arms loaded with boxes, and several bags with paper straps are hooked over one elbow. She does not see the dryad, who does not move quickly enough, and soon her armload is scattered over the sidewalk, half in the dryad’s lap and half on the ground.
“I’m sorry!” the woman says, getting to her knees first, and then to her feet, crouching as she gathers the boxes back into her arms. She is Nicole Brandt, and it has taken all her life savings and a considerable amount of debt to open the little bookshop she’s dreamed about for all of her adult life. She is nearly ready and extremely nervous for her Grand Opening.
They work together to restack the boxes, careful not to unbalance each other. “Can I help you carry them?” the dryad asks. She is curious about the new shop. She has always liked books as objects, though she does understand that is not their only purpose.
“That would be great,” Nicole says. “I really appreciate it. I’m just over here.” She gestures along the curb, toward the cars parked at an angle down the street, and leads the young woman to a grey car with a dented brown hood and cracks in the windows.
Nicole opens the trunk with a clickthud, and they load the boxes and bags into the already-half-full space. It is not certain that the trunk will close again until the moment when she actually closes it, bearing down with both hands and hopping to make the latch hold.
“Are you all right?” the woman asks once her things are tucked away. She looks the younger woman over, head to toe, trying to understand the strangeness of what she sees; it is nothing that she can define. “You didn’t get hurt falling down there, did you?”
The dryad shakes her head. She does not bruise easily.
“Would you like to come in and warm up?” Nicole asks as she steps back on the sidewalk, and the younger woman agrees. She wants to see what’s behind the curtain in the window.
It is the scent that hits the young woman first: a thick, fusty scent of ancient pages turned thousands of times by so many loving hands. Emotions surge through the room like spots of sunlight and shade on a forest floor—the excitement of discovery, the wistfulness of nostalgia, the sheer joy of story.
The dryad stops short in the entry, the shop owner trailing around her. The shop is all one room, but it is a tall room, two stories, with ladders going up each wall. It is crammed with books, which are the source of the delicious, emotional fragrance. The young woman takes a slow turn, trying to sniff out the delicate differences. The older woman watches her with some concern, though she cannot define for herself why she feels this way.
“Do you live around here?” Nicole asks, and since it is a vague question, the young woman answers in the affirmative.
The dryad is disappointed by the space behind the window curtain. There is a large open area, almost a stage, on which to put a display, but it is empty. The store itself suggests that there should be more, should be something wonderful, magical, but the space is hollow, like a tree struck by lightning, its core lost.
The woman sighs. “I haven’t had time to do anything with the window. I was hoping to have something really impressive by the time we open, but there’s no way I’ll get it done now.”
“Could I help?” the younger woman asks, startling herself with her own boldness; pleased with herself, too. She is not supposed to spend time with humans.
The other woman’s look turns to something speculative, thoughtful, and she says, “I can’t pay very much, no more than minimum wage.”
The young woman does not know much about wages. She merely shrugs at this.
The shop owner nearly asks her to leave. There is something off about this young woman... but it is not threatening, no, and so, instead, she leads her into a back room filled with supplies: paper, colored pencils, crayons, glue, old books, little glittery puffs of fabric, ribbons, and more. “It’s all the craft supplies I’ve saved over the years,” Nicole tells her apologetically. “I didn’t have money to go buy a bunch of new display stuff, not while I was getting stocked up and getting things up and running and paying the deposit.”
“It’s fine. I can use this.”
The young woman traces her fingers over the sheets of paper. Pristine and white, brighter than new snow on a sunny day. Her fingers sink into the pulp, and she pulls her hand away. The older woman does not notice.
“My name is Nicole.” Nicole holds out her hand, and for a moment the dryad thinks that Nicole saw her hand sinking into the paper. Then she remembers that this is a human gesture, and they shake hands and do not meld at all.
“You might call me Windy,” the young woman says, though it is not really her name. It is a short version of her name, in this human language, and one that she will remember to recognize when she hears a human speak it.
“Whatever you can do tonight is fine,” Nicole says, though now she seems worried. She has let a stranger into her space and she does not know if it was a good idea. She physically gives herself a little shake. “Whatever you can do will be more than I’ve had time for.”
Windy loads the sheaf of brilliant white paper into her arms and carries it to the front of the store. She has already formed an image in her mind, a desire to create a particular object. She sits in the middle of the window and spreads the paper all around herself. Nicole watches the dryad pick up a single pristine sheet and fold it in half. The lines it forms are clean and cutting, and she creates another fold, and another, pleased at how easily the material molds to her imagining.
Windy is hardly aware of it when Nicole goes back to her own tasks. There are a dozen more things she needs to finish tonight, before the shop opens tomorrow. When Windy looks up from her work, Nicole is gone, and the dryad becomes absorbed in her own activity, losing any sense of time or place, watching and feeling as the paper grows into a thing with roots and leaves.
At some point, Nicole returns and exclaims over the paper forms growing organically beneath Windy’s fingers; Windy hardly hears her, merely nodding along with her comments until she leaves again.
A little smugly, the dryad considers that Mother would approve of what she’s done.
Nicole has left the lights on around the young woman, but the rest of the shop is dark, waiting until tomorrow to brighten again with hope of customers. Windy stretches her arms over her head, finger-shapes reaching forever for the sky. There is another light shining out from the door at the back of the shop, the work area where Nicole kept her supplies. The whistle of a teakettle breaks the silence.
When the boy speaks, Windy whirls to face him.
He’s watching Windy with heavily lidded brown eyes. His hair is extremely short and curls against his scalp. He is sprawled in a cozy chair, and he is small and full of springy energy.
“What did you say?” Windy does not know how long he’s been there. His name is Daniel, and he’s been watching Windy for almost an hour, amazed that he could walk nearly up to her and sit down without her notice.
“I said, that’s cool.” He gestures at the scene behind her, as though she might not know what she’s done.
“Yes, it is.”
Daniel does not know any other girls who would accept a compliment this way, and he cannot decide, in the moment, if he likes it or not. “Mom wanted you to do that?”
“Nicole is your Mother?” Windy looks toward the back room, uncertain about the human rules that should govern this situation.
He nods, with a wave back toward the room where Nicole has killed the whine of the kettle. “She didn’t tell me you were going to be here.”
“She didn’t know,” Windy says, and again he frowns.
“Do you work here now?” Again he moves his hands, swirling his fingers in a gesture that takes in the whole store.
“No,” she says, “I am finished now.”
They stare at each other, each trying to understand where their understanding is failing.
“Did you say you’re finished now?” Nicole approaches from the back room, juggling three mugs of tea. She passes one quickly to her son. “It’s hot,” she says.
Windy takes the proffered cup without concern for the heat; the warmth like steamy sunshine as she curls her hands around it.
“This is amazing,” Nicole says, holding the remaining mug carefully. She studies Windy’s work.
The young woman has created an intricate scene out of folded paper. It is the bookstore in miniature, with folded paper people browsing the folded paper shelves. It is entirely colorless; the ream of paper the young woman picked was the plainest of printer paper. The sides of the window display have been transformed into tall shelves, reaching to the heights of a skyscraper, by their scale. The human figures are only six or seven inches tall, and are all in various states of book browsing: searching through the shelves, thumbing through the pages, deeply engrossed in one of the chairs set around the space, or standing in line to purchase their selections. A figure who looks remarkably like Nicole stands behind an old-fashioned register; she appears to be passing an old man his change.
“How did you do this so quickly?” Nicole asks, kneeling to take a closer look. “The detail is incredible.”
“The material moved as I wished it to,” Windy says.
Nicole and Daniel both stare at her.
It is late, nearly midnight, and Windy feels the urge to move back toward her forest, toward her home and sleep. She sets her mug on the counter without drinking the tea.
“Thank you for letting me create,” she says to Nicole, who is unable to speak. “I need to go now.”
She slips out the door before Nicole can even articulate the thoughts in her head, before Nicole remembers that the young woman did not have a coat, and that the weather report she looked at on her phone a few minutes ago told her that it is now below freezing outside. But when Nicole runs after her, there’s no trace of the dryad anywhere, and after a few icy billowing breaths as she looks back and forth down the street, she goes back into her nearly-open shop.
She spends another hour with her son, both of them kneeling in front of the display, pointing out more details to each other. There is a bird cage in one corner, and the birds within it are tiny books flapping their pages. A grandmother reads to her granddaughter and the cover of the book is impossibly embossed with the words “Alice in Wonderland.” One paper man stands high on a ladder, flipping through the pages of the book, which actually flutter when Nicole breathes on them, bending close to see how he can possibly have paper glasses.
The display is the full height of the window space, almost a full story as the floor here is only raised a foot higher than the rest of the room.
“How did she do it?” Daniel asks. “Without any glue, or anything? I watched her, and I still can’t believe what she did. Even though I saw her do it.” Daniel is only eleven, still young enough that he doesn’t have to play it cool; Nicole realizes with a pang that this will not be the case for long.
Nicole shakes her head. She wants to tell him it was magic, but that is not an acceptable answer. It is only paper.
*
The opening of the Xapti Bookshop is a smashing success by any small business standard. Once word gets out about the strange and intricate display, people stop by just to see the fascinating paper bookshop in the window.
Nicole leaves it in place, closing the curtain over the window each night and revealing it again last thing before the shop opens each day. The snow falls and the days grow shorter, and the opening week rush and excitement drop off, but still the bookstore is visited by people from out of town, some even as far as Kingston, who claim they’ve come to see the shop window. (Though they usually buy a book or two while they visit, since they came all that way.)
She thinks often of Windy, and her son asks after the young woman as well. Nicole can’t find anyone named Windy in town, and of course she does not know the young woman’s last name. She sets aside an envelope with the girl’s payment for the work she’d done, and as the end of the year draws close, she puts the matter out of her mind and concentrates on marketing materials and setting up activities for the cold winter days that will trail through January and February.
She is mildly disgruntled when the bell at the door chimes late one evening between Christmas and New Year. She’d hoped to close the shop a few minutes early and get home to her son, and the crock pot of potato chowder that is waiting for her dinner. All her irritation vanishes when she sees Windy.
The dryad looks even more a waif than she had last time. Her thin hair is pulled into a ragged ponytail which looks like it has been chopped unevenly by a careless hairdresser, or perhaps by Windy herself. She wears the same old boots and the same thin sweater over her faded dress. No coat, no hat, no scarf, no gloves.
“Oh!” Nicole says. “You’re back! Come in,” she says even though Windy is already inside, “come warm up, make yourself comfortable.” She ushers Windy to the cosiest seat with the fluffiest stuffing and then changes the sign on the door to say CLOSED and draws the curtain shut over the window. “Let me get you a blanket, you must be freezing.”
Windy is not freezing, and does not answer, and Nicole goes to the back room and finds the blanket that she throws over her own lap on Saturday mornings while she does the bookkeeping.
“Here you are,” she says, handing it to Windy, who puts it on her knees without unfolding it.
“How have you been? I didn’t know how to get in touch with you.”
“In touch,” the young woman says. “No, I don’t have anything like that.”
Nicole frowns, but shakes off the oddity of the phrasing.
“Well, I have money for you, from the last time you were here.”
Windy tilts her head, as though listening to something in the distance, or puzzled by the statement. “May I do it again?” the dryad asks. She has walked for a long time, and gathered many stories, and now she is stirred by a longing to create an image in the world of what she has formed in her mind.
“Do it... again?” Nicole looks at the display: it is still utterly lovely, intricate, and precise.
“I would like to try again,” Windy confirms.
“Do you want to make another one over here?” Nicole gestures to one of the bookshelves that isn’t completely full; there is a range of shelves on the end which are still empty.
“No,” the young woman says. She reaches a hand forward, and before Nicole can stop her, plucks the man on the ladder out of the display. “I want to make another one here.”
“Okay,” Nicole agrees hesitantly.
She finds that she cannot watch the destruction of the beautiful display, and so she goes back to her office and pretends to work on the accounts, though she quickly becomes distracted by a new tower defense game on her phone.
Windy, meanwhile, tears the old display apart with abandon. That was the old season; it is time for new. She fetches another ream of paper and begins folding and cutting again, building and layering the intricate tiny pieces of paper into another marvelous display.
She realizes, this time, that the boy is watching her, but she ignores him, caught up in her task.
When she brushes her wild hair back over her shoulder for the fourth time, impatient, she acknowledges his presence with a small nod, and he comes and kneels beside her, watching her work more closely.
Daniel thinks that he will be dismissed, sent away, if he distracts her while she works, so he is silent, hardly daring to breathe as the display takes shape. It is strange the way she works; as though she can see the whole thing in her head, as though it is all one piece—which it is, in truth, but he cannot imagine how she does it. She does not build the elements individually and piece them together, which is the only way he can conceive of doing it. It grows from the ground up in concentric circles, becoming itself and expanding outward in layers.
When he finally realizes what it is, it does not seem like it ever could have been anything else.
Eventually, he leans back against one of the nearby chairs.
Eventually, his eyes drift closed.
Eventually, his breathing becomes soft and steady, and he sleeps.
He has forgotten where he is when he awakens, and the view in front of him does not convince him that he is not still dreaming. He stares in quiet curiosity at the delicate paper snowflakes that fall from the massive tree in the center of the window. He does not understand how they drift there, so tiny and perfect, until he realizes that each one floats out from the tree trunk, suspended by the minutest of paper strands.
He leans closer and sees: each snowflake is a flower, or a tree, or a falling leaf.
And the leaves of the big tree at the center of the display are even more numerous, and he sees oak and aspen leaves, pine needles and sycamore leaves shimmering in the soft currents of air that flow through the room.
“How long was I asleep?” he asks.
Windy, standing on the far side of the window, near the door, merely shrugs. She looks sleepy, too, her attention on the dark street outside, rather than on anything here in the shop.
Nicole has not returned from the office. She is engrossed in scrolling through the posts on a popular social media site; and though they only make her angry and full of despair, she cannot seem to stop. Daniel, however, wonders if she’s fallen asleep too, and thinks that this moment is perfect and lovely in the dark store, with the mysterious girl. He may become a bit of a romantic.
Windy, however, is anxious to return to her home, to her Mother, who will notice if she is not back by the time the sun is up. Worse, she may not be able to make it back if she lingers for too long. She can see the sky growing lighter, faintly, through the edge of the window that shows around Nicole’s heavy curtain. She has stayed too long, draining herself into a creation that she cannot take with her.
“Will you come back?” Daniel asks.
She does not know, and she shrugs, and leaves, letting a draft of cold air wash through the store.
Of course she will return, because these things happen in threes.
*
It is nearly spring when Windy returns to the little town. Mud and slush lay thick in the streets, and a cold rain spatters the sidewalks. She is not so thin as the last time she made this journey, her hair and cheeks hinting at a fullness that has yet to fully mature.
The sun is still in the sky when she reaches the bookshop, and she taps at the door before entering. There are several customers waiting in line at the cash register, although the shop is technically closed. Nicole has had a problem with the credit card machine and by the time she sorts it out, it is past time to close. The men and women chat cheerfully with each other; people who stop in to browse at a bookstore on their way home from work are rarely in a tremendous hurry, and none of them mind the delay this evening. Nicole is the only one who feels harried at all, but her nerves are soothed by everyone’s good will as she finally completes the transactions.
Daniel, who is waiting for his mother, answers Windy’s knock when it comes, unlocking the door for her and letting her in as he lets one of the straggling customers out.
He is grinning, delighted to see the fey stranger again.
When the last of the customers make their way outside, Nicole notices the young woman that her son has let into the shop. “Oh, you’re back!” she says. Daniel locks the door behind the last customer and the three of them stand in a casual circle.
“I would like to make another one,” Windy says, and then, remembering, says, “Hello.”
“How have you been?” Nicole asks her, though what she really wants to ask is “WHERE have you been?”
Windy merely shrugs. She could answer the unspoken question more easily: down the glade, where the forest thickens, and the branches overhead block out the sun; where the wind softens and the snow melts more quickly under the sheltering branches of Mother.
The answer would not illuminate the situation for Nicole, who, sensing this, drops the topic. “Of course you can do another display if you want to. I’d love it. I have a whole area back here by the children’s books that you can use,” because she is deeply attached to the display of tree and snow, even though she realizes that winter is nearly past.
“No,” Windy says. “I want to make another one here.” She cannot conceive of creating where sunlight will never do more than glance askew.
Nicole reluctantly agrees to let her have the space. The three of them disassemble the previous display together. Nicole lovingly sets the snowflakes aside; she thinks she will use them on her own Christmas tree when winter returns.
She sits in her office, listening to the rustle of paper as Windy digs through her craft supply; it is rather like listening to autumn leaves rustling their way down a street in the breeze.
She is startled when Windy speaks. “What are these?”
The young woman holds three old, damaged books. While Nicole watches, Windy thumbs through the yellowed pages of one of them.
“They’re just old books that someone donated. They’re too damaged to sell.”
Windy looks startled, unsettled by this concept. “You don’t want them for anything?”
Nicole shakes her head, and while she does feel some regret about it, she’s been in the business for too long to be truly bothered by it. “I was going to put them in the dumpster tomorrow, actually.”
“I can use them?” Windy asks. She still does not entirely understand what books are, but they have a strange and treasured quality about them.
“Anything you do with them will be the best possible use they could have, at this point,” Nicole says, waving her on.
This time Daniel is determined to stay awake. He stays near Windy as she begins her work. She is surrounded by new paper in half a dozen colors, as well as a tumbling-over pile of the old, beat up books that Mrs. Cole brought by the shop today. His mother had given the woman ten dollars for the box, even knowing that she couldn’t resell any of it, because she knows that Mrs. Cole’s social security checks don’t adequately cover the bills. Daniel idly flips through one of the books while Windy begins her folding.
He has picked up an old book of Greek philosophy. It is not old enough to be particularly interesting; the paperback cover is cracked and warped, the pages are yellow and brittle. A university scholar gives a pompous introduction on the first few pages.
Windy does not have any compunction about tearing the old books apart, but she takes a moment to caress the covers, a moment of gratitude for the existence of a thing. She can feel the paper beneath her fingertips, feel it down to the pulpy substance, and the wood that it used to be. She is connected to it, and she is grateful that it has ended up here, with her, for her project.
Nicole falls asleep in her office.
Daniel sits on the floor, and then slumps on the floor, and then sleeps on the floor.
Windy cuts and folds, cuts and folds. The tips of her fingers bleed once in a while, nicked by the paper edges, but she ignores it and it stops soon enough. Her blood does not show on the yellowed paper.
Nicole is not certain if she is awake or dreaming when Windy touches her shoulder. “I am finished,” she says.
“What time is it?” Nicole asks, and perhaps she is awake, if she wants to know the time.
Windy shrugs. It is not a concept that she has a strong understanding of, though she feels the slowing of her sap, the end of her wandering. “Will you walk with me?” she asks. “I have to go home.”
“Of course,” she says chivalrously, because she would rather go home to her warm bed, with her dog curled up on her feet, than go walking anywhere. Still she gets her coat and finds an old jacket for Windy, who does not have her own. She puts a blanket over Daniel, sprawled on the floor; the boy does not wake.
Nicole hardly glances at the new display before they leave the shop. She is groggy, but the chilly air of early morning nudges her closer to awareness. The streetlights glow dim and yellow, penetrating the mist as glowing orbs rather than lighting the street.
Windy and Nicole walk together for several blocks without speaking. They are heading toward the edge of town, and it’s not until Nicole realizes that most of the housing and apartments are in the other direction that she stops and says, “Where do you live?” Her concern for this young woman thickens tangibly in her chest.
“This way,” Windy says, pointing toward the thickening woods that tangles around the road.
“I didn’t know anybody lived out here,” she said, and she is thinking, “within walking distance, anyway.”
Nicole tucks her hands deep into her coat pocket, and it is only the sense of the surreal that keeps her moving forward. Part of her is still convinced that she is dreaming, and she wants to know what will happen.
There is a breeze, which should make them colder, but they both smell spring on it, and both of them relax into the warming air. Nicole finds that the farther they get from town, the lighter her steps grow, and her shoulders fall back, more relaxed than they’ve been for as long as she can remember. Windy likes making the walk with company, though they do not speak much. They follow a little footpath of mud and moss beneath the branches of the trees. Windy can tell them apart by aroma: beech and pine and oak and ash. Nicole sees their dark shadowed forms stretching up over her head, and she walks more closely to Windy, their elbows brushing together from time to time.
Nicole bumps into the dryad when she stops. The darkness beneath the trees here is not like anything Nicole has ever experienced; it is so very black, and yet she knows exactly where Windy is, and could put out her hand to intentionally touch the bark of the trees around them. Somehow everything is illuminated without any light at all.
Instead of reaching for the trees, she reaches for Windy, and finds her hand hovering where she knows it will be.
“You can come a little farther,” she says. Her voice is scarcely more than a whisper; she should not have invited Nicole this far. To go on risks Mother’s anger.
Yet... she likes the humanness of this; of being with someone, of showing herself to another being who is watching and surprised and interested. It has a faster rhythm than the forest and the trees. She has wandered overhill and underhill, through faerie and the world, and she likes this best, with other people who have stories to tell.
Nicole follows, only occasionally stumbling over uneven ground. Morning sunlight slowly filters through the leaves, turning the air a gentle green. Everything is soft and alive and moving.
Mother is not pleased. It is not enough that I have given you time to wander, my heart? You must bring this one back with you?
“I wanted to... put two things together again,” Windy says. It is inadequate; it is not her native language. But Mother understands her beneath the words.
“What did you say?” Nicole asks.
You cannot live in both worlds, my heart.
“I know, Mother,” Windy says, and reaches for her Mother, her home.
“What did you call me?” Nicole asks, but Windy has broken away from her, and does not answer.
All at once birds begin to sing, from every direction all around them, and when Nicole finishes turning in a wondering circle, Windy is gone.
Her ratty sweater and frayed dress hang from the branch of a nearby willow tree, as though she carefully took them off and hung them there to dry. Her worn boots rest at the willow’s trunk.
“Windy?” Nicole asks, but finds that she cannot raise her voice to call out. She is afraid suddenly, of the cold morning, of the waking woods.
*
Nicole finds Daniel still asleep on the floor of the shop, and envies the easy way he inhabits his young body. She lets him sleep a little longer.
She wishes she knew more about Windy, wishes she knew for certain that the girl has a home and a bed to sleep in. She understands more than she is willing to admit to herself.
She stops in front of the new display and stares.
It is her favorite thing ever, and she vows that she will not let Windy take this one down, no matter if she wants to make another display later.
It is the perfect melding of two worlds.
The scene shows a forest of ancient yellowed trees. Their leaves are the perfect crisp white pages of books, which hang from the branches by their colored covers. People move through the trees, stopping here and there to pluck and read the fruit of this strange forest. The trees are all as tall as Nicole’s shoulders, the people below them intricately detailed even though they are formed of nothing more than folded paper and suggestions.
Nicole finds that she had tears in her eyes, though she doesn’t know why.
Daniel wakes to find his mother studying the details of the display. They start pointing things out to each other.
“Look, there, the birds’ wings are made out of book pages....”
“Oh, did you see this little girl climbing the tree? She’s got a bird peeking out of her overall pocket....”
“There’s a little frog over on this side reading a book....”
The comments and exploration continues through the day, as they open the shop and their customers come in and discover the new art. Word spreads, and the week is spent in a busy tizzy as the crowd gathers from nearby towns to see the new display and buy books and coffee and chat about art and what everyone is reading and how are everyone’s kids and aging parents and “oh, Millie, what a surprise to run into you here! I haven’t seen you in, what, it must be months, now?”
Nicole does not know what she’s done to deserve such a gift, and she recognizes that it is a gift: this strange and beautiful thing at the front of her shop. Finally she decides that she’s done nothing to deserve it. It is a centerpiece for her warm and inviting space, and she breathes gratitude every time she sees it, and she learns to look for other, quieter gifts throughout the spring: flowers growing in the cracks of the sidewalk, birds perching for a moment on her windowsill, clouds whirling overhead, ever beckoning.
*
There is a shelf in the shop dedicated to some of the oddest books. Their covers are rough and ranging in shades of brown; their pages are leaf-thin and veined. They are usually quite slender, and the stories in them are all strange, and start or stop in places that leave the human mind feeling abrupted.
Daniel, at the cash register, will tell customers that they are the fruit of a willow tree near the edge of town, near the edge of the forest, in the liminal light between night and dawn. If it is true, no one else has ever found such a tree, but occasionally the stock of these books will be renewed.
Nicole does sell them, but not for money. She will trade them for a picture, or handmade jewelry, or a bit of origami folded expertly—or inexpertly, under the right circumstances. She keeps a glass case full of the objects she has acquired over the years, and they are as curious and random as the books she traded for them.
At the front of the store, her paper trees remain, a little ragged now, a little dusty, and all the paper has gone a little yellow now. It has held up remarkably well, though a little girl got hold of one of the trees once while her mother was paying for books, and that tree has been a little wonky ever since.
Sometimes Nicole goes to the edge of town, to the edge of the forest, in the liminal light between night and dawn. Sometimes she loses her way and returns home with nothing but the benefit of fresh air and exercise.
She knows the dryad is gone, knows it to her heart; also Nicole knows that she is not gone in any way that matters.
But sometimes she finds the willow—the wind blowing softly through its branches, the space beneath them warm no matter the time of year—and when she does, she tells it stories. All sorts of stories: fairy tales and fables, or the summary of the last movie she saw, or about the young fellow that Daniel is dating. And sometimes when she does this, she’ll look up in the branches and find, like a gift, another book growing there, waiting to be plucked, waiting to be read.