When Celine was young, she’d call her books little gifts. Her folks weren’t around much back then, and she was left to care for herself in that bruised bungalow by the railroad tracks. The one with the garden that had been occupied by warring colonies of imperialist weeds. The one with the chipped paint, the boarded-up back door, and the pyramid of discarded tires stacked out front. Being all alone, those little gifts felt like all she had.
When she was eleven, Celine played Olympic skater at the top of the staircase. She took center ice. She could almost smell the hot popcorn and the arena's frozen surface while she twirled to the frenzied adoration of imaginary fans cheering her name. She spun and spun until she spun too many times, lost her balance, and fell down all seventeen steps.
Celine’s disfigured leg put an end to her imaginary skating career and her social life. Merciless tribes of maniacal tweens stalked her at school, teasing her with invectives they barely understood. They knew her soft spots. That her parents weren’t around, that she lived on the wrong side of town, that she was poor. Once they saw her limping through the cafeteria, they smelled fresh blood.
They called her trash. They called her broken. They called her Frankenstein while aping her tilted gait. Each new tyrannical barb broke something inside her. Until one day, Celine found shelter from the mob in the safety of the empty library stacks. Cracking open Wally the Whale’s Enchanted Tales, she plunged her face into the book and read a story about a girl who could control her dreams. She read another about a popular gameshow with terrifying stakes. She read another about a boy who fought off a pack of bloodthirsty dragons. Celine found her way out.
Everyday after school, she’d rush up to her room, drape herself in heavy blankets, and find all the friends she’d ever need within the bindings of the little gifts she borrowed from the library. Pooh Bear and Roo, Dorothy and Toto, Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. They all welcomed her warmly into their worlds. Soon, the bungalow was so full of books that it started to smell like a library, that delicious blend of dust jackets and dreams.
Celine got older and exchanged Neverland and Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory for crushes on Mr. Darcy, Theodore Laurence, and Alexi Vronsky. She’d fantasize about dashing bachelors in white tuxedos parading her around the parquet floors of grand Victorian ballrooms sparkling with constellations of candlelight. While waltzing to string quartets, she’d perch her neck by their handsome shoulders and breathe in colognes of honey butter balm and lavender oils. Each intimate moment ignited a delicate heat that smoldered every time she turned another page. All she ever wanted was for her life to feel like one of those stories, but the spark never took to flame until years later when she first met Xander Fairchild.
Celine found him at The Florentine Club up in Harlem. It was a dimly lit boutique bar that featured overpriced cocktails and a Julliard student who played standards from the 40s on a baby grand piano. Xander was at the bar sipping a Guinness, a lit cigarette between his ink-stained fingers. His forehead was resting on his large hands. His long brown hair was draped over his face like the velvet curtains of an old theatre. He appeared to be lost in a pensive thought.
Xander had that whole brooding cologne model thing working for him. But he also looked like the type of man who tried hard to appear as if he wasn’t trying hard. That didn’t really bother Celine because his arms seemed as strong as the oaks that littered the Hundred Acre Wood. She was so excited at the possible sighting of a real-life, honest-to-God tortured artist that she straightened out her lilac chiffon dress, mustered up some courage, and limped her way toward him through a mass of suited-up business types with empty martinis and full wallets.
Celine hesitantly sat beside him, pretended to text a friend, and secretly breathed him in. He smelled smokey and warm, like a fireplace in the winter. Xander turned. His eyes fell upon her. Those eyes were as clear and blue as Neverland’s Mermaid Lagoon. She nearly gasped. Nobody had ever looked at her like that before. He looked at her. Not near her. Not around her. Not over her shoulder to check the score of a ballgame or to check out another woman who walked with a more delicate stride. He looked at her.
“Can I buy you a drink?” she asked.
He nodded.
When they’d finished their drinks, he bought one for her. By their third, Xander admitted he was a writer. He confessed with a quiet pride that he’d published a novel. It came out like a rehearsed apology.
“But I have a thousand more,” he admitted. He said he had fragments of stories scribbled on crumpled-up bar napkins and in the margins of half-finished crossword puzzles. He said they were stories with tragic turns and characters that long for money, revenge, and, most of all, true love. He spoke longingly about the lost art of letter writing, asking for her info so he could write her one. Throughout this enchanted encounter, Celine felt a familiar flutter of heat flaring up inside her.
When the bar closed, they went back to his place.
The sex wasn’t just good. She’d later tell her book club that sleeping with Xander was like practicing transcendental meditation. No more double shifts at work. No more overdue electric bills. No more absent parents. No more limp. Xander temporarily silenced the muddled cacophony of her despair. All that remained was Xander’s warmth, his smell, his skin, his touch.
She rose before dawn, rolling to snuggle up on what she thought was the paragon of her desire. But Xander’s pillow was wet with drool. His guttural snores sent vibrations along the thin mattress. Last night’s romance of the tortured artist looked a little different in the light of day. Celine quickly grabbed her clothes, escaping his apartment before he woke. She grabbed a coffee from her favorite kiosk in Promenade Park and rushed to the bookstore in search of Xander’s novel, The Indecency of Nightmare Reflections. Was that really the title, she wondered, grabbing it off the shelf.
Xander called her that night, but she didn’t pick up. She was busy reading. The first line went like this:
“It had been a thousand years since the last human stepped foot in Arcadia.”
Ick. And it wasn’t just that first line. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, every word made her wince. Even the glossy headshot of a shirtless Xander in the fetal position on the back jacket made her physically recoil. Who published this drivel, she wondered. Despite the pretentious prose, she still finished it in one sitting, bingeing it in the same way she’d gorge herself on bad Rotten Tomatoes reviews.
The next day, he texted. Celine ghosted him. She couldn’t bring herself to reply. Xander’s book was rough. What could she possibly say to a person who possessed such an unearned confidence? She certainly couldn’t let him see her naked again.
About a month later, she received a letter from Xander. The postage was from Mumbai. She didn’t open it. More letters came from all over the world. More letters went unopened.
Deep in the recesses of her mind, she imagined Xander clean-shaven and barefoot in a pair of ripped jeans on a park bench, waiting for someone like Celine to stumble upon him. She imagined him staging selfies of himself typing away on an antique typewriter in a sun-kissed room. His second novel, Contradictions in Still Waters, came out a year later. It was a flop, and Celine was secretly pleased. So much so that she felt compelled to pull out the stack of unopened letters from her bedside dresser. She opened one:
Celine,
I wrote a page of prose yesterday that made me weep. It was about you. The lyricism in the paragraphs was so beautiful that I felt the urge to throw my typewriter off the balcony and never write another sentence again.
Please write,
Xander
Page of prose? Lyricism in the paragraphs? She couldn’t even. But like a great trainwreck, she had to open another:
Celine,
I’ve revisited Chekhov. What’s the point in even trying? Every word only torments me further.
Please write,
Xander
Chekhov? Of course he went with a Russian modernist. Then another:
Celine,
I went to the library yesterday and considered picking something up. I couldn’t do it. The agony of the chase torments me so. I’ve stopped reading. Everything. Novels, poems, newspapers, travel logs, emails, texts, all of it.
Don’t write. I won’t read it.
Xander
That night, Celine accidentally let Xander slip into her dreams. She dreamed he was walking through the volumes of that library, wherever it might be. She dreamed of Miss Havisham, Milkman Dead, Guy Montag and Edmond Dantes, of Prince Hamlet and Meg March and Elizabeth Bennet and Anna Karenina, and Captain John Yossarian all screaming out, begging Xander Fairchild in one united chorus to just stop it already.
Xander failed to relent. He launched himself into a pedantic monologue. He argued with these beloved characters about the role of the artist. When they couldn’t stand him any longer, she dreamed that they doused themselves in kerosene and burned the library to the ground.
About the author:
Jeremy Stelzner’s stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, including the 2024 Coolest American Stories, Across the Margin Magazine, The Jewish Literary Journal, The After Happy Hour Journal of Literature and Art, and Prime Number Magazine, where his story The Thin Line was awarded runner-up for the 2024 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. He teaches high school literature and journalism in Maryland. You can find his work at www.jastelzner.com or reach him by email at jeremystelzner71@gmail.com
