Like Brilliant (fiction)

Part 1: Like Brilliant

There have been two things in my life that have changed me in a profound way.

I read a book that changed me. People say that sometimes when they don’t mean it but it’s true. And it bothered me a lenky bit about a few things.

I found the book in a used bookstore not far from my home. My brother Smoke had taken me there, special because Smoke rarely takes me anywhere and I adore going places with him. The bookstore is called McGuillis’s Secondhand, an I love it there. It’s very dusty and old inside the shop, although the building it’s in isn’t old at all, it’s as new as all the other buildings in Emerald City. And although that means that the oldness and authenticness I like about it are all aesthetics, I still enjoy going there. There are books piled on tables and in the shelves, all old books with cloth or even occasionally leather covers, and cushy dilapidated chairs obviously made that way. But it’s comfortable and like warm; a scene from a book.

Actually, I made a mistake. It wasn’t really the book that changed me, it was that day, and the book. I should really try to explain things correctly before I go in on writing them.

Smoke is only one year older than I am, golden boy until he hit puberty and started doing strange things; things like dressing off, getting in trouble, and eventually disappearing. When we were younger, my mother doted on him, nothing was too good for her little Arthur. She didn’t really ever treat me the same way; she treated me like different, colder and more distant.

Now that Smoke isn’t her lovely little boy anymore, she’s still cold to me, but cross with him. When Smoke turned fourteen, things really changed. That was when he started pulling the disappearing act. From this, Smoke earned his nickname, because that’s what he is: smoke. He disappears into thin air, without a trace, and he does it all the time.

And that brings me back to that bookshop. Smoke had taken me there, driving me over to the like sidewalk of the building in his car. The people who owned the shop had left the exterior as blank and slick as the other city sidewalks, gleaming dark greenish sparkle silver. This only made the warm faux ancient interior seem cozier. Emerald city buildings are notoriously over modern, simplified in the extreme. McGuillis’s is on a low floor, perhaps the fourteenth or fifteenth. Smoke drove us up, sent the car home and brought me inside.

“ I’ve got to go, Kat. Wait for me.” And then he turned in the direction of the restrooms.

I thought nothing of it at the time. It was late in the afternoon, an I began browsing in the shelves. I found this book, The Biography of Isabel Blackwrit by Cassia Ellison. I sat down in one of the carefully orchestrated comfy chairs. I was immersed so much in the story that it was soon dark before I looked up and realized that I had been there for about five hours, and I hadn’t seen Smoke, or Arthur called then, since we had arrived. I wasn’t too worried at first, I put down the book in the chair and looked around the shop for him first. Then I went out on the sidewalk and walked to the boys bathroom. I checked around the MegaMusic store next door. And finally, I walked back into the book shop.

“ Excuse me,” I asked the clerk, “ Have you seen a boy in here, a lenky bit older than me?”

She looked at me lazily, flipping her pink tinted hair out of her eyes, “What’d he look like?”

“ Like, taller and with blond hair. He was wearing a black shirt and pants.”

“ Haven’t seen anyone like that,” She smacked her gum insolently an looked down at an open laptop on the store’s faux wood counter.

I took the underground home, where I told my mother. She went minorly ballistic, and called my father, the police, the bishop, and anyone else who would pick up the phone.

A few hours later, Smoke waltzed through the door, not a lenky bit saddened by what had passed. And this being only the first time.