The unicorn promptly dove down and closed the vault to shut out the word flow.
But politeness demanded that Nikos endure. He began to dread that the entire evening would be like this—except of course for whatever Jen wrote. He could not imagine such a peculiar view of humanity from her, even in story form.
To distract himself, Nikos reached for Jen’s hand, and spelled out his question, keeping his eyes front. Her ready response said a lot about her own opinion of that text.
But the next two readers, both poets, reassured him. As Jen had promised earlier, this group was a mix of people. As you’d expect.
Then it was Jen’s turn at last! His unicorn emerged when Jen began to read.
At first he was entranced simply by the sound of her voice, though he could sense that she was a little nervous. Gradually he found himself drawn into the story. The fictional grand library reminded him of the ancient library he had once seen at Melk, a beautiful monastery above the Danube river. Only she had added magic to it.
She finished a page and laid it down, as he thought: Magic. What would she make of qi? He wanted so badly to tell her! But he had to wait. He looked forward to the pleasure of introducing her to the shifter world. Not all at once, of course. He didn’t want to overwhelm her, or frighten her off altogether.
She picked up a new page, and his attention snapped back to her story. As her magician character tartly remonstrated with a hapless young apprentice, he thought he saw glimpses of the little elder Godiva. The apprentice, so good-hearted, surprisingly brought Cleo to mind, and he wondered if he was reading his own life and people into Jen’s text—or had she written these pages recently?
He found himself sinking into her imaginary world. It was over before he was ready for it to end. He clapped harder and longer than anyone, stopping only when she sat down next to him, her cheeks pink. “I want to read the rest,” he whispered.
“There isn’t any more,” she whispered back. “Did you really like it?”
“I did!”
“Maybe I’ll finish this one,” she sighed. “I start them, and I love everything about them, but somehow I find myself running into a wall. I don’t know what keeps stopping me . . . later.” She stopped as another person began reading.
Nikos sat back and bent his attention on the new reader. Intellectually he was aware that the writer deserved her fair share of attention, but he found his mind wandering. His thoughts were all on Jen. Did her writing about magic mean she might be accepting of the hidden world of mythic shifters in particular, or was she merely writing in a genre that had proved to be popular, and she would be like most humans, denying anything that didn’t fit into the human worldview, and attributing it to tricks of the eyes, to tiredness,
to anything but the truth?
He found himself counting the pages until the reader finished. He clapped along with the rest of the group, but under cover of the noise, leaned over and asked Jen, “Is this later enough? I’d like to know what keeps stopping you from finishing your stories. If you want to talk about it.”
Jen sighed. “If I knew, I’d fix it. Just, at some point, I fall out of the world. And there I am, sitting in my chair, mentally throwing plot ideas at the screen. I know it might sound stupid,” she whispered quickly, “when I’m writing about magic and the like, but it’s like . . . it’s like it ceases to be real.”
Another reader rattled papers and cleared his throat, as the baker Linette slipped out of the room, carrying empty trays piled with dishes.
The new reader began to read anyway.
What is a stock market crash? the unicorn asked plaintively. No, I do not wish to know. And once again he sank below the surface.
Nikos found himself wishing he could follow his unicorn, as the reader embarked on a long catalogue of physical attributes of what he called a “Wall Street Warrior.” At first Nikos strove to comprehend, until he glanced at Jen, to catch the same out-of-focus expression she’d worn when Bill was reading.
It seemed they had similar tastes. Suppressing a grin, he was about to reach for her hand when the crash of broken glass sounded from the front room.
Jen dropped her purse on the chair next to Doris’s as she whispered, “Excuse me. I’m going to go see if Linette needs help.”
Doris whispered, “I can come . . .”
“You haven’t had your turn yet.” Then she turned to Nikos, just as he was about to offer to go with her. “I’ll be back in a moment,” she whispered. “If a lot of us go, it’ll disturb everyone.”
Jen slipped out, followed by a wispy young woman sitting close to the door.
Nikos sat back, and did his best to pay attention to a chapter about baseball.
A moment turned into a moments, then minutes. The reader sat down, and Nikos clapped along with the others, but his ear caught the faint tinkle of glass shards.
The baker elbowed her way back in, carrying a new load of refreshments.
Nikos waited until she was right behind him, and caught her eyes. “Linette, right? Is there anything I can help with?”
“Jen and Angelique have it covered,” Linette said. “They know where the cleaning stuff is kept. But thanks for the offer.” And, lifting her voice, “Godiva, I see you have pages right there on your lap. Why don’t you go next?”