\Demiurge: the creator of a world.
May 24, 2012
A skinny boy with glasses too big for his face barreled into the heavy glass doors of the bookstore so hard, he nearly hit his head on the metal frame. Completely undaunted, he put all his weight against the door, just managing to open it enough to squeeze through, and zipped off down the broad center aisle, heedless of the clerk at the long row of registers to 'mind the books!'.
He expertly wove between tables stacked with precarious pyramids of glossy-covered bestsellers sporting the faces of suited business people and their promises of success or fortune. He leapt onto the escalator and dived between people as he took the steps two at a time, then rushed past long rows of towering books labeled history, poetry, biography etc. He didn't even glance at the scanty corner devoted to 'teens', which was more filled with plastic vampire teeth and tee-shirts to match the played-out romances that flooded its shelves than actual books.
Only when he reached the blissful corner of the expansive store marked 'youth' and displaying proudly the most reliable books in the whole place to give the satisfaction of a happy ending and the belief that all things turn out as they ought to in the end, did he stop. And there it was, practically a shrine on the back wall surrounded by all the flashy merchandise (the inevitable leaches that latch on to any success).
Slowly, now that his quarry was in view, the boy walked across the polished tile floor and stood before the bookcase laden with the chronicles of the most fantastic world he had ever lost himself in. The familiar, buzzing excitement seemed to rattle his very bones as he reached for the prize at the top, knowing it was the last time he would do so. There was a strangely melancholy note in his thoughts as he cradled the heavy tome in his comparatively small hands. But it was soon driven out by ringing anticipation as he tore off through the store again, unable to wait another second to be back in a world of magic.
The clerk who had yelled at him upon his entrance rang him up. She surveyed the child's painfully eager face as he snatched the plastic bag containing his treasure off the counter and plowed back out the heavy door again. How many just like him had she seen? She shook her head, thinking of the mob that had filled this store five years before on that final release date, the people – old and young – who had come out at midnight garbed in all assortments of strange clothes and speaking what seemed practically a foreign tongue to her. All strangers, they were, but they welcomed each other like old friends, all part of something, all celebrating and mourning the same thing.
She had to hand it to that Rowling woman. She had set out to write a book, and made a whole world. Amazing how easily people were drawn to things that did not exist.
When she walked home that evening, the clerk was too absorbed in her own thoughts, pondering why it was people were so attracted to the impossible, that she barely noticed the thin, black-haired man who bumped into her. He muttered a polite apology, straightening his round glasses, and hurried off after the little red-haired girl skipping ahead of him. By the time she reached her cozy flat nestled in the middle of London, she had yet to come up with a satisfactory answer. \
A/N: I realize that this was fairly un-fanfictiony and an indulgence of my writing perhaps, but I honestly could think of no other angle to take with this word. I really wanted to write something about JKR herself, but it felt far too weird to even think about describing the fictional actions of a real person, so…. Oh, and perhaps I'm a bit hard on the teen sections of bookstores and it is likely that British bookstores don't have the same vampire obsession that American teen sections do, but this is the appalling state I have always found my local bookstores keeping their 'teen' section in. Much better luck in the youth….
Anyway, thanks for humoring me! I'll try to get more entertaining.