Fetch him 'The Book". Every Spring it's like this.
"It's not a book," I remind him, and I want no part of it. Still, I show him I'm doing my job, searching through the disordered stacks of the library. Is he on to me?
I've hidden it of course. Well not this time, because I asked Liz to hide it. I hid it before, but Abe searched my memory as I slept, crept out from the tank and placed the awful thing on my desk.
He doesn't like to touch it. Abe's fingers are too moist and he smears the ink.
"Sorry, dear. Can't find it. Maybe Red borrowed it," I said.
"Maybe he returned it," Abe called from the tank. Look for it on the desk."
And there it was. Once again, Abe was one step ahead.
"Ma'i laula!"
"Be nice, Wen. I'll make it up to you."
It didn't look like Abe had touched it - the pages were dry and unwrinkled. A joke on me from Red and his wife? If so ... "Wen plans revenge," I mumbled.
I sat down next to the tank, leaning my head back against the glass. Abe pressed his hand to the glass on the other side.
Of all the books in Abe's library, this one most fills me with dread. The indecipherable prose, the lurid pictures. The Zones. The memories.
"Open it up!" Abe says. "It's your memories that make it most special." I loathe 'The Book' most of all because of that. I wish I could forget.
The blisters.
My back, aching with pain from the hours spent bending over.
And the black dirt. The everlasting black dirt under my nails.
I open the Burpee seed catalog to the first page.