by Gary Jonas
Table of Contents
Title Page
Word Magic
About the Authors
Copyright Info
WORD MAGIC
by Gary Jonas and Barb Hendee
Local legend had it that Reader’s Paradise, an aging bookstore on Emerson Street, had been infused over the years with magic, but Greg Jenkins didn’t believe it. Sure, the old man who sold him the bookstore--complete with an upstairs apartment--was a bit off kilter, but the guy was ancient; he was allowed to be eccentric. Greg still remembered the last time he talked to the old man when they signed the closing papers.
“Writers are Word Magicians,” the old man had said, smoking a meerschaum pipe in the shape of a lion’s head. He wore a faded tweed hat over still-thick silver hair, pulled back into a ponytail. “They work magic with words. They create worlds in their minds and share them with us. When you read a book or a story, you’re sharing in the magic. This is Word Magic, and you would do well to keep a steady supply of it in the building.”
Greg listened politely, caught up in the spell of the old man’s voice. He had his own ideas about how to survive running an independent bookstore in Denver. At first, he wanted to change the name from Reader’s Paradise to Ye Olde Fiction Shoppe, but decided to stick with tradition. The chains had knocked a lot of stores out of business with their discount pricing on the bestsellers, then the online retailers drove a stake through the hearts of most of the chains. Greg knew this was an opportune moment for an independent bookstore, and that he could rely on the trusted and recognized name of the store. He also wanted to focus on special events to draw in more customers.
The Grand Re-Opening of the store was a “kick-off” day with best-selling romance writer Susannah Hayworth on the agenda. In addition to being the only best-selling author Greg knew personally, she understood the game and played her “part” well. Draped in long, black silk dresses, she always wore her hair in a tight, sophisticated bun with large gold earrings dangling from her lobes.
It helped that she loved challenges. She accepted Greg’s invitation to write a story in the window of the bookstore based on whatever particulars the customers gave her. Greg had borrowed this idea from the late Harlan Ellison, who had been famous for doing the same thing.
The night before the opening, Greg couldn’t sleep. He tried getting comfortable on his left side, then rolled onto his stomach with his face in the pillow. This gave him a neck ache, so he rolled over onto his back, upsetting Nikko, the Siamese cat who owned the place with him. Lying in bed, staring through the darkness, he could feel the years of the place settling in on him. He had no wife or kids, just Nikko. And here he was, thirty-seven years old, living alone above an old bookstore.
In some ways that bothered him, but his spirit had never really healed after losing his last girlfriend, Shawna. The thing was . . . almost everyone liked him, but deep connections were difficult—nearly impossible—for him to establish or maintain. He didn’t know why. Shawna connected. But their relationship was one of those heights of heaven/depths of hell dramas, and the last time she walked out, he just never called her back.
Giving up on sleep, Greg got out of bed and maneuvered around the stacks of books piled like sentinels throughout his apartment—making it difficult to visually separate where his living quarters ended and the bookstore began. He walked down the spiral staircase into the store itself, which stood shrouded in shadows. He sat on the bottom step and peered through the darkness at the bookshelves. The place felt cozy and warm with plush chairs placed in little alcoves so people could sit down to read. There were two wooden ladders on rollers to reach the top shelves on the sides of the store and several folded step stools leaned against the back wall. As Greg looked around his store, he liked to believe that maybe there really was a bit of magic hanging in the air.
***
Susannah Hayworth fans packed the bookstore. Greg felt overjoyed by the crowd. Susannah arrived and took her place at an old manual Underwood typewriter that had been a fixture in the store for as long as anyone could remember.
“I haven’t used a typewriter in years,” Susannah said, her lips shaded in Este Lauder’s Cimarron Red. “I wonder if I still can. Where’s the on switch?”
The crowd laughed.
Greg smiled and leaned against Susannah’s table. “Hello everyone and thanks for coming. My name is Greg Jenkins, and I’m the new owner here. We have a special treat to re-open Reader’s Paradise. You’ve read her recent novels The Silk Caress and Love’s Beating Heart. Please welcome Susannah Hayworth!”
The crowd applauded.
“Thanks, Greg.” She rose and faced the people. “Today is something really different for me. Normally, I don’t write short stories. I seem to ‘think’ in novels, and I need lots of words. But today, I’m going to write a story, and I need your help. I need a main character.”
“Captain Kirk!”
“No, I was thinking more like a kind of person.”
“Use the new owner!”
Greg laughed. “No, she said a kind of person.”
Susannah grinned, and Greg knew he suddenly had a target on his forehead. “I like that idea,” she said. “Greg, you’re going to be the main character in my story.”
“Wonderful,” Greg said. “Remember, I know where you live.”
Susannah laughed, then spoke to the crowd. “I need a place.”
“New Zealand!”
“Jupiter!”
Susannah shook her head. “I can’t send Greg to Jupiter. Let’s keep it closer to home.”
A middle-aged woman knitting a sweater stopped clicking her needles and pointed out the window. “There’s a Starbucks across the street. Use that.”
Susannah nodded. “I like that.”
“I’m not a coffee drinker,” Greg said.
“You will be for the story,” Susannah said. “All right then, since my field is romance and Greg is single, we’ll need to create a woman for him. I need a few specifics from the audience. Hair?”
They shouted out colors and lengths, and one man called out, “Bald is beautiful!”
“Perhaps,” Susannah said, blinking, “but let’s give Greg a woman with hair.”
As people shouted out descriptions, Greg shook his head. “Great,” he said. “I’ll be immortalized in a story having a romance with a Barbie doll.”
“Now Greg, I doubt you could take more than three weeks with a Barbie doll.” She looked around at the bookstore for a moment. “But I think I can pull someone out of my head who will fit with you.” And with that, she sat down to type.
As she wrote, people occasionally interrupted her to ask a question. Susannah didn’t seem to mind. She answered questions and went back to typing. Greg wanted to watch her work, but he had to keep going to the register to ring up sales. Like Robert E. Howard back in the 1930’s, Susannah was a talker. As she typed, she verbally acted out bits of dialogue or called out scraps of description. The scene was quite entertaining.
Some people browsed through books or played with the cat, but many stayed to listen to her work out the details. She kept looking over at Greg, which made him a little nervous.
As she finished each page, a customer took it and taped it to the wall. Greg started to go over to give it a read, but Susannah called out to him, “You can’t read it until it’s done, Greg.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s about you, and you can’t cheat.”
“Oh, I see, but everyone else can read it?”
Susannah smiled. “That’s right.”
People gathered to read the story as it came out of the typewriter. Greg rang up more sales and talked to customers, but he really wanted to know what she was writing. People kept reading the pages, laughing
, nodding and glancing over at Greg.
“I feel like I know you,” one woman told him as she placed a paperback on the counter.
“You probably do,” Greg said.
“What kind of car do you drive?”
“A 2016 Camaro.”
The woman nodded. “Yep, it’s pretentious all right.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
After a couple of hours, Susannah stood up and stretched.
“Time for a break?” Greg asked.
“No need. It’s done.”
“That didn’t take long.”
“Call everyone over and bring me the pages. I’ll do a reading, then we can do a Q and A and sign some books.”
The woman who had taped the pages to the wall gathered them up and brought them to Susannah.
“First,” Susannah said, “I’m going to give you a glimpse into the creative process. In order to write the story, I had to create a character. A woman I could actually see with Greg here. Her name is Elizabeth. She’s 28. Yes, that’s a bit younger than him, but that’s what I see.” She smiled.
Greg wanted to sit down. Everyone was looking at him.
“Shall I go on?”
“Go ahead,” Greg said.
“She’s an artist who works at Starbucks to pay the rent on her studio apartment, which also serves as her art studio. You two go out a lot because she doesn’t like all the books stacked up at your place,” Susannah gestured at the books that flowed off the shelves into stacks on tables.
People chuckled and Greg suspected that many of them had run out of bookshelf space long ago, too.
“And there’s nowhere to sit at her place because of all the canvas and easels.
“She’s on the small side, and she has short, spunky black hair and big eyes. She keeps her hair short because you’ve made such a point about liking long hair better.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Greg said.
Susannah ignored him. “You actually think her hair looks great short because she has a perfect nose, but since you made such a fuss about the long hair thing, you refuse to tell her that you like it.
“She thinks Nietzsche and Freud are full of shit and never, ever, overlooks an opportunity to share this opinion. For the most part, you find this idiosyncrasy charming, but it occasionally embarrasses you at functions like the annual antiquarian Christmas party.”
The audience nodded, charmed as Susannah spoke out words that brought a character to life.
“She reads a lot of Jung and believes in the power of the collective unconscious. She likes movies. She thinks your car is pretentious, but she knows how much you like it, so she never says anything. She thinks you’re quirky, but she’s crazy about you anyway.”
Greg stared at Susannah, the humor of this exercise forgotten. He tried to breathe, but the effort of sucking in air hurt his chest. He suddenly forced a smile.
“And what kind of hurdles will I have to jump to win her?” he asked.
“You like her already, don’t you?”
“Like her? Hell, if she walked in here right now, I’d marry her.”
Everyone laughed and a few people looked across the street at the Starbucks. But she didn’t walk out of the coffee shop into Greg’s life.
“So let me read you a story about how Greg here meets and loses and finally wins the love of Elizabeth.”
As she read, Greg found his gaze wandering over to the Starbucks. For some reason, coffee sounded good. He ignored that feeling and tried to focus on the story Susannah was reading. But all he wanted was for Elizabeth to walk through the door into his life.
The Q and A went well, and Greg sold a lot of books.
That evening, Greg took Susannah and her husband to dinner. Her husband didn’t like to attend readings. “She doesn’t come to my work, so why should I bother her at hers?”
They talked about minor things before and during the meal, but afterward, Greg leaned forward. “So, tell me something. I listened to you describe this woman, and I swear to God she seemed real to me. As if I could walk across the street to Starbucks and she’d be working behind the counter.”
“She doesn’t exist, Greg. Well, not in reality.”
He waved her off. “I know that, but what I’m saying is that she seemed so alive. How did you create such a real person?”
Susannah smiled. “Magic,” she said. “It’s what I do.”
“The old man who owned the store before me called writers Word Magicians. He said writing was Word Magic.”
“I like that,” Susannah said.
“Me, too. What if someone really could work magic with words and actually create a living, breathing person who lives beyond the confines of the story, right here in our world?”
“Writers do that all the time,” Susannah said. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, didn’t he? And at one point, he killed him off, but Holmes would not stay dead. Now Holmes has a huge influence on people. At least as much as most presidents, wouldn’t you say?”
“More than most.”
“Sure. Think about these characters: Scrooge, Tarzan, Ishmael, Holden Caulfield, Scarlett O’Hara, Harry Potter, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. What do they have in common?”
“They’re fictional characters,” Susannah’s husband said.
“More than that,” Greg said. “They seem more real than your next door neighbor.”
“They spring to life in the pages of books, and they live on, inside the consciousness and memories of readers. And that, my friend, is Word Magic.”
***
Greg felt different when he awoke the next morning, strangely calm and content. Nikko meowed at him, weaving around his legs as he tried to walk out of the bedroom, so he went straight to the kitchen to feed her. He opened the refrigerator, looked at the cartons of milk and orange juice. Neither appealed to him.
He wanted a cup of coffee.
He wanted Elizabeth.
He grabbed a shower, brushed his teeth and headed across the street to Starbucks.
When he walked through the door, he looked around for Elizabeth. She wasn’t there.
Of course she wasn’t there. She was a fictional character. Someone Susannah had created for a story. While Greg truly had not expected to see her there, he felt a bit disappointed.
Elizabeth may not have existed in reality, but somehow, she had found a way to open Greg’s heart. For the first time in years, he wasn’t thinking about Shawna. That was a step in the right direction.
“May I help you?” the slender young woman behind the counter said. Her name badge read Donna. Her hair was blonde. She had a tattoo of an iguana coiled around her ear. It was small, but Greg noticed it. He didn’t care much for tattoos, but it looked good on her.
He smiled at her. Ordered a coffee. “Do you like to read?” he asked.
“What,” she said, “books?” She shook her head. “No way! I hated reading in high school. Why would I want to read now that I don’t have to?”
“Oh, it’s just that I own the bookstore across the street. Reader’s Paradise.”
“I thought old Jake owned it.”
“He retired and sold the shop to me.”
“That’s nice. That’ll be $4.57.”
Greg didn’t know what to say, so he handed her a five. He felt like an idiot, and he knew Donna thought he was some weird loser as she handed him his change. “Oh well, thanks for the coffee.”
“You bet.”
Greg left the shop and crossed the street to the bookstore. He closed the door behind him and tasted the coffee. He sat in the window seat, looked down at the typewriter, then across the way to Starbucks again.
A young woman with short dark hair entered the coffee shop. Something inside him told him to get up out of the chair and across the street. That’s not Elizabeth. She’s not real, he told himself. But then he thought about the legend of the bookstore being infused with magic. He thought about Word Magicians and Word Magic.
<
br /> He slipped a sheet of paper into the typewriter and punched at the keys in his hunt and peck manner. He looked at the words on the paper:
Greg walked across the street to Starbucks and met Elizabeth.
He pushed himself to his feet. He didn’t care if her name was Elizabeth. He didn’t care if she were an artist. He only hoped she would be single and available.
He crossed the street to find out if his words held magic of their own.
Barb Hendee is the national bestselling author of The Mist-Torn Witches and The Dark Glass series. She is the co-author of the Noble Dead Saga. She holds a master’s degree in composition/rhetoric from the University of Idaho and currently teaches writing for Umpqua Community College. She lives in a quirky two-level townhouse just south of Portland, Oregon. See more at her website: www.barbhendee.org
List of books by Barb Hendee
The Noble Dead Saga
(written with J.C. Hendee)
Phase One
Dhampir
Thief of Lives
Sister of the Dead
Traitor to the Blood
Rebel Fay
Child of a Dead God
Phase Two
In Shade and Shadow
Through Stone and Sea
Of Truth and Beasts
Phase Three
Between Their Worlds
The Dog in the Dark
A Wind in the Night
First and Last Sorcerer
The Night Voice
Vampire Memories Series
Blood Memories
Hunting Memories
Memories of Envy
In Memories We Fear
Ghosts of Memories
The Mist-Torn Witches Series
The Mist-Torn Witches
Witches in Red
Witches with the Enemy
To Kill a Kettle Witch
The Dark Glass Series
Through a Dark Glass
A Choice of Crowns
A Girl of White Winter
A Choice of Secrets
Other novels
