I Got Locked in a Bookstore Overnight
Twelve hours, no phone signal, and absolutely no regrets.
The lights went out at 9:14 p.m., and my first thought was not fear. My first thought was: finally, some peace and quiet in this city.
I should explain how a grown woman ends up sealed inside a secondhand bookstore like a very literate pharaoh. The store was called Pell's, a basement-level shop off Corcoran Street with a hand-painted sign and a smell I can only describe as vanilla, dust, and 1974. The poetry section lived in the very back, past biography, down two steps, in an alcove with a dented green armchair that had clearly outlived several owners and possibly a war.
That evening I had folded myself into the green chair with a water-stained collection by a poet I had never heard of, a local woman named Edith Marchetti who self-published three hundred copies of her book in 1988 and, as far as the internet knows, was never heard from again. I was on poem eleven, the one about her sister's wedding, when I stopped being a person in a store and became a person in a book, which is a different thing entirely and does not hear announcements.
Apparently there were announcements. Apparently there was a bell. Apparently the kid who worked Thursdays did his closing walk with headphones on, because he saw neither me, my enormous orange coat, nor my shoes, which I had removed, because that is who I am in a poetry alcove.
The lights died.
A door thudded somewhere above me. A lock turned with tremendous confidence.
I sat in the dark holding Edith Marchetti and did the math out loud: "Okay. Okay. This is fine. This is a story."
My phone had one job and it declined.
No signal. Basement, brick walls, a phone plan I chose because it was nine dollars cheaper. The battery sat at 31 percent, which I immediately decided to preserve for an emergency, by which I apparently meant taking one photo of the dark ceiling and checking, twice, whether bookstores have Wi-Fi after death.
I found the front door by shuffling like a penguin with my arms out. Locked... obviously, with a gate behind it. I knocked on the glass for a while at a street that had gone home. A man walked by with a dog. I waved. The dog waved back, in spirit... The man did not.
And then something in me simply... put its bags down.
Because here is the truth I said out loud to an empty bookstore, which felt like a confession precisely because no one could hear it: I could not remember the last time I had twelve hours in which absolutely nothing was expected of me.
No one knew where I was. No one could reach me.
Every obligation I had was on the other side of a locked gate, pacing.
On the counter by the register, next to a mug of pens, I found the store's emergency stash: a flashlight with a dying battery and, gloriously, a fat white candle in a saucer, the kind you buy for hurricanes and use for birthdays. There were matches in the drawer, under a takeout menu and a Polaroid of a cat.
I lit the candle and the whole shop changed. Shelves leaned in. Spines glowed gold at the edges. The dark stopped being an absence and became a room.
I want to be clear that I was extremely careful with the candle, because "woman burns down beloved bookstore, was barefoot" is not the obituary I am building toward.
What do you do with a bookstore all to yourself? You do the thing you have wanted to do in every bookstore since childhood. You wander with no list. I read the first page of nineteen different books by candlelight. I found a 1962 field guide to owls with someone's grocery list inside it: eggs, thread, ask about the boat. I have thought about that boat every day since.
Around midnight I went back for Edith. I read her whole book, cover to cover, cross-legged in the green chair with the candle on the step beside me. Poem eleven, it turns out, was not even her best one. Her best one was about her mother's hands and it took the top of my head off, and no one had ever told me... because no one had ever read it.
Three hundred copies. One survived into my lap.
The internet had never heard of her, and I sat there thinking about how many writers like that are shelved in basements everywhere, brilliant and unopened. It is the same reason I lose whole evenings to profiles of writers nobody had heard yet: the talent was never the rare part. The witnessing was.
Being locked in is only a punishment if you are locked in with the wrong things.
Somewhere around 2 a.m. I got hungry and ate the emergency granola bar from my coat pocket, which had been in there long enough to qualify as an archaeological find. I ate it in the essays section. It felt correct.
Then I did something I had not done in two years.
I took out the little notebook I carry to look like a writer and I actually wrote. By candlelight, in a dead woman's alcove, in my socks. I wrote about my grandmother's apartment, of all things, the radiator hiss, the dish of hard candies fused into one candy. I had been meaning to write about memory for years, and it turned out all I needed was for the world to be physically incapable of interrupting me.
I always thought I loved the city because of everything happening in it. That night I learned I loved it best from inside a sealed jar, listening to it hum through the floor.
I slept a few hours in the green chair under my orange coat, and I want to report that the chair was terrible and I regret nothing.
At 8:40 a.m., keys. Footsteps. Then a small round man in a cardigan, the owner, stood at the end of the aisle looking at me, the saucer, the burned-down candle, and the tower of books I had stacked beside the chair.
I braced for shouting... Possibly the police. Instead he sighed the sigh of a man confirming a suspicion.
"You're not the first," he said. "You're the fourth. The chair does it. I should burn that chair."
"Please don't," I said, with more feeling than I intended.
He made tea. He would not let me pay for the candle. He did let me pay for Edith Marchetti, four dollars, which remains the greatest financial injustice ever committed in my favor. When I told him her mother's-hands poem was a masterpiece, he put on his glasses and made me show him, and we stood at the register reading it together, and he said "huh" in the exact tone of a man rearranging a shelf in his mind.
Here is the part I did not expect. That poem I scribbled at 2 a.m. about the radiator and the fused candies? I typed it up the next week, and instead of filing it in the folder where my writing goes to be safe, I posted it on a community wall for poets, where strangers could actually see it. A woman I have never met commented that her grandmother had the same candy dish. Same fused lump. Different continent.
Three hundred copies, I keep thinking. Ask about the boat.
Pell's still has the green chair. The owner put a small brass plate on it that says PLEASE CHECK FOR READERS BEFORE LOCKING UP, which I consider the closest thing I will ever have to a monument.
And on my desk at home, next to the lamp I now sometimes leave off on purpose, sits a fat white candle in a saucer. Unlit, mostly. It is not for hurricanes.
It is for the night the city locked me in with everything I loved and I finally... finally stayed put.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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