She hadn’t read them all, not hardly. She’d touched them, though; moved them; stacked them. She’d read the spines. She’d felt the paper. Each had a smell of its own, something suggesting the content of the unread words within. She sometimes considered sitting in the high-backed, green chair at the corner of the room, a room as set aside as any library in a television house might be, and opening one of them under the yellow light of the floor lamp. She’d consider it, but only long enough for the same thoughts to come. In the chair, she was small. Among the words, the deeds they described and their complexity, she was smaller, still. So she built things with them, instead. The books—whole in themselves, their stories aside—made fine bricks and planks and tiles for a world of things scaled to her needs and fancies. They’d formed the substance of fort walls, tables, and grandfather clocks, and, today, they’d compose the shell of her finest work, yet: a seaworthy boat of bind and page and wax.
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