“I’ve done labor before.”
Not well.
Books are hopefully easier on me.
“Good.” Her eyes study me an extra moment, then she sighs and relaxes her posture. “I understand that I probably showed unduly little enthusiasm for a moment which, for you, must be life changing.”
She pauses, crumples whatever movement was in her lips, and suddenly snaps to walking downstairs.
I don’t know if I was bitten by a joke, or if she bit away something I’ll never hear.
Mistress Vincenza drags a small cart, filled with books along its top platform. “This shouldn’t take more than an hour, even for you, but I’ll watch you, this first time.”
I nod passively.
“Example.” She picks up a book and points to the tag on its side. “This is NF dot seven dot five dot four hundred and sixty thousand and nine hundred and seventy-three dot ‘QEL.’ The shelves are organized from zero at the top left to nine at the bottom right.”
“Where do the letters go then? They’re not… numbers.”
“In order. A starts on the left. But not the first two numbers—those are the sections. NF is for non-fiction, which is what this shop is mainly…”
She drones on into a, though intermittently helpful, long rag about the exact books held by this parlour.
“There’s no more fiction section since people got confused about the presence of diaries in it. Now it’s separated into the ‘JOURNAL’ shelf, the ‘YOUNG FICTION’ shelf, the ‘POETRY’ shelf, and the ‘NON-BOOK’ shelf.”
Really… really drone on.
“Non-books?”
She grabs a bundle of flash cards set aside from the books. “These used to be included in the ‘NF’ section, but their cases deform under pressure. Now, can you begin with shelving that first book?”
“Yes, Mistress!” I timidly grab it from her hand and brave into the shelves. The sections seem so overwhelmingly many for a small parlour, but… uh…
“Stop. You went past the dot seven section.”
“Sorry!” I freeze and turn around, eyes glazing over.
She drills her eyes into me. I’m afraid to even get close and check the numbers without her getting angry at me for being so off.
Heart’s racing.
It’s so simple, and the longer I can’t figure out how to start, the more embarrassing it will be when I do.
She taps the spine of the book. “What’s the first number after the section?”
“...Seven?”
“Up here, it’s six.” Her finger drags across the books until hitting the end of the shelf and starting on the next. “And seven… starts here. Second number?”
I double check. “Five?”
“Then follow the spines until you hit five.”
She’s making a joke of me. Her skewering glances, weighty gazes. It’s obvious. It’s easy. It’s…
“There’s a dot four and a dot seven. No dot five?”
“So there isn’t,” she echoes.
