Quiet is difficult to find anymore. Traffic never seems to stop, at home or at the library. The space between noise is almost gone. I can not get deep enough in to the woods or high enough up a tree to hear just the animals and the wind in the leaves. And there are the beating of my heart and the thoughts in my head, the loudest of all. The library, itself, is not the sanctuary I thought it would be, but a playground of computers and cellular phones for the patrons, and a hotbed of petty resentments in the back rooms. Shelving, I can get away from none of it.
"Beamer, my friend!" Hunter approached me as I climbed to the top of a fiction shelf with a book by Phillipa Gregory. Over his shoulder I could see a book cart stalled in genre fiction.
"Hunter." I turned back to my work. I may yet be naive about many human things, but I have been designated enough strangers' friend to have become sensitive to its quite different meaning.
Hunter clapped me on the back, and for the briefest but most conscious moment, I both lost and found myself--lost a new self and found an old self: My arm, with the book, threw itself backward, and by the muffled boom and the lack of vibration in my arm, I knew that the book's contact with the side of Hunter's head was all but entire. Following my arm, I turned to see him stagger back a step. His ear and cheek were already pink, but the rest of his face was darkening, as well.
"Please," I said, "do not touch me like that." At the end of the aisle a peering head retreated. I recognized the trailing hair.
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