Lady Bret wanted to slide across the floor to the shelves of books
and inch her way into their pages, like an actual bookworm ...

 Three Women

She calls herself Lady Bret.

At the bookstore café with Therese:  ". . . Chad . . . autism . . ."

The woman behind the counter is called a barista, but all she does is make coffee. If there was a different name for mother: matrista? Or a different job description. One or the other.

". . . schedule a meeting to talk about his IEP. . ."

In graduate school Lady Bret thought she would dedicate her life to books, like a nun to God. The office of Professor Edna Plum, her thesis advisor, had a worn wooden desk, a chalkboard from when the office had been the front third of a classroom, and a large window with no curtains or blinds, just a coating of dust and some purpled bird droppings. Professor Plum loved the light, the warmth, she said, as Lady Bret squinted at Plum’s silhouette. But the books did not love the light. Leaves love light. They bud and twist until they are opened completely, like a lover on a bed, and the light fills them with deep shades of green, gold, red. It is only when the earth turns away from the sun that leaves crinkle, fade and fall. But books. Each time she visited Professor Plum the books were more pale, like ghosts in progress. Professor Plum tucked her pumps under her heavy metal chair, which creaked as she leaned forward, and pointed to something Lady Bret had written, to something circled with a thick green marker. One of the book titles was gone. The spine had been lettered in a standard calligraphic print that said, Studies in Victorian Poetry. Or Romantic Poetry. Ekphrastic Poetry? Ecstatic?

Therese explains about her autistic son’s Individual Education Plan.

"They should call it a CYA," Lady Bret says, "a Cover Your Ass plan."

Therese laughs exactly as much as a woman with an autistic son can laugh about such things.

Professor Plum’s titles continued to disappear. Lady Bret began to dread thesis meetings. Plum did not seem to notice the vanishing titles. Did she smell the years of cigarette smoke that filled the room like dust in sunlight? Professor Plum chewed nicotine gum. A banana, past its prime, was curved on the desk like Grim Reaper’s scythe; a small insect circled it. There was a run in Plum’s nude stocking. Bret took a breath: John Donne was gone.

Sometimes when Therese’s son rocks and rocks his body through a high-pitched cartoon in Therese’s TV room, Lady Bret wants to sit beside him and join his rhythm until her own nerves settle.

But here in the bookstore café, her back is to the main store, to the books, and she can ignore their proximity. She should have gotten decaf. Already she can feel the extra pulses, the unsteady flow in her veins.

"You are so strong," she tells Therese, even though strong is hardly the right word, it’s something much bigger and more complicated, or smaller and less complicated. What is it?

Therese begins to cry.

"What is it?" Lady Bret clasps Therese’s forearm, which is pale like the books, and begins to cry.

The barista comes over to clear their uneaten desserts. She sits down at the table and cries.

In Plum’s office Lady Bret wanted to slide across the floor to the shelves of books and inch her way into their pages, like an actual bookworm, eating away the words and pages until she created a space she could fit her whole body in. Plum said you need to develop this section and read so-and-so’s article on that section if you want to—. But Lady Bret didn’t want to. She wanted and wanted.

She began to receive emails not from Plum but from someone in charge of head counts and enrollment dollars. She did not reply. She received announcements on a listserv until one day her university account was closed, like so many things.

Lady Bret wants to tell Therese and the barista about Professor Plum and the books that faded into nothing. You swim through life.

The barista wants to say something about the meaning of light. She has been working on an equation but can’t get it or her checking account or her relationships or her lattes or her equilibrium or her self or her stereo speakers or her tennis stroke or her stack of magazines in the bathroom or her guilt or her work schedule or her sense of beauty or her sad little sister or her desire for a dog or her loss of confidence or her torn knee ligaments or her hope for the suture or her equation about light and its particles, their lack, the darkness. To balance.

Therese excuses herself and heads to the bathroom. She sits on the toilet with her jeans still on and holds her head in the spread fingers of her hands. Her hair tangles in her princess cut ring and when she pulls her hand, several strands tear out. She gets on her knees before the toilet, lifts the seat, and prepares to vomit. The sight of water fills her with such thirst that she cups her hands into the toilet water and drinks.

Kelcey Parker is the author of the story collection For Sale By Owner (Kore Press 2011). Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Bellingham Review, Indiana Review, Redivider, Sycamore Review, Santa Monica Review, Western Humanities Review, Third Coast, and twice in Image, where she was featured as Artist of the Month in November 2009. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati and currently directs the creative writing program at Indiana University South Bend. Web page: http://kelceyparker.com