Long Life Maker

"Mademoiselle," the heroine said, exasperated. "Please pardon me if I'm confused, but what is the point of owning a stationery store if you refuse to sell anything?"

The woman behind the counter, a stout character with beady, wide set eyes and a frog's mouth suddenly whirled her head in her direction. The gold beads that hung from the stems of her coke-bottle glasses swung dramatically about her face.

"A stationery store?" She croaked, mouth opening wide to reveal two rows of square, white teeth, as the few thick bristle-like hairs peppered across her upper lip shot out like fangs. "Why, you little monster! Do you even know where you are? A stationery store? Unbelievable!"

The heroine may have only been a young woman of twenty-and-five, but she leaned in unafraid and yelled right back, "Yes, thank you, I do! I'm here, inside—?" She failed her arms in desperate irritation, "Oh I can't even remember right now because I’m so frustrated!"

She was very quickly losing her patience.

"All I want, all I need," she began again, "is to buy this simple notebook. So please, help me help you." Her hand came down militaristically, elbow to hip, as its guillotine's edge stopped mere inches above the notebook in question which sat innocently on the counter. The cover was bound in black and folded protectively over a stack of one-hundred or so pages of a rich strawberry. The label, which originally caught her eye through the window of the small store, read:

'Long Life Maker — The Western Red Cedar.'

She blew at her bangs with a long piqued breath and shifted her stance. "How much is this thing anyway?" She flipped open the front cover.

"Twenty-thousand dollars?!" She recoiled from the notebook.

The frog clerk spun round and round in her swiveling stool as she laughed with spiteful mirth. "Help me?" She repeated. "Help me?!" The shock was genuine. "This isn’t some pell-mell commercial hut selling ego and vanity, young lady!"

As quickly as she had begun, the clerk stopped her merry-go-round with sudden sobriety and fixed her gaze on the heroine with fiery anger.

“Do you know how many leaves there are on the average tree before it’s cut down?”

Reluctantly, the heroine shook her head.

“Twenty-thousand.”

“Do you know how many sheets of paper one such tree yields, on average?”

The heroine shook her head.

“Twenty-thousand.”

“And do you know how old in days this tree was before it was sentenced to death so that whiny, spoiled brats like yourself could get off on the shallow fantasies of crackbrained penmanship for—what? Five pages? Before abandoning the pursuit and running off to find some new prey to throw into the bottomless void of your inane, empty existence?”

The heroine, shaken, shook her head.

"Twenty-thousand."

The clerk took the notebook from the counter and held it above their heads in a show of reverence and degradation. "This 'simple' notebook, young lady, is fifty-four years old. That's one dollar, only, for every day of the life lived, that was cut short, for you." She thrust the book at her. In accusation, the heroine wondered, or guilt?

The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as the clerk’s words brought forth gnawing memories of her own long held resentments and deeply buried regrets. She pushed them aside with a flick of her braid and exhaled exasperatedly.

The clerk, also annoyed, placed the little cedar notebook back onto the counter and crossed her arms. Her anger slid with mock serenity into the fleshy greenish folds that rippled up and back towards the edges of her receding hairline.

The heroine blurted, "I'll give you ten dollars for it?"

The frogwoman bellowed then, her chest filling with air and puffing out so that her neck recoiled back into her body like an accordion. Both of her hands balled into fists and slammed onto the counter as her growing form overshadowed the heroine. Faces only inches apart, the clerk’s black eyes glowed like hot coals.

"WHY SHOULD I GIVE THIS BOOK TO YOU?"

Like a spell, the words flowed from her mouth to fill the tiny one-room shop with a thick, purple, billowing smoke. The floor began to shake and the walls began to creak. Like giant lungs gasping for breath, they contracted and expanded below the heroine's feet, and roots, branches, and leaves sprouted violently from the notebook. They spilled into the shop until, from its cover, came a deafening—CRACK!—before the heroine, the clerk, and the little cedar notebook exploded upwards into the sky.

Without thinking, the heroine hugged the thick trunk of the magical tree as it shot star-like into the midday blue and screwed her eyes shut in frantic disorientation.

"Tell me!" The clerk's voice rang out through the dangerously swaying branches of the godly red cedar. "What do you see before you?"

Grasping the trunk of the tree for dear life the heroine blinked her eyes open and did all she could not to scream. Her feet dangled hundreds—no! Thousands of feet off the ground where they flew over the grey city skyline! "Look!" She goaded, "Look at what you humans have done! Wasteful, destructive, selfish creatures!"

The sound of her voice came from all directions as the scales of the cedar's leaves nipped at the heroine’s arms and face. The tree continued to grow.

"This land was once covered in thick forests made of red cedars taller than this! Ancient, powerful beings who were the gods and guardians of this land!"

She stared with wide-eyes into the abyss below her and screamed, "I—I didn't know!"

"How many millions have died for you to live?"

She screamed again, "I didn't know!"

"How many more lives will fall at your feet so that you can continue down this path of greed?"

"I said, I didn't know!” She pleaded, “I'm only one girl!"

From the heart of the trunk and through its bark came a devastated animation of the clerk’s face. She cried, "And I was only one tree!"

The heroine blinked.

She was back in the shop and seated square on the counter in a disheveled heap.

The sturdy green walls, which there were mercifully four of, were back in their proper places dressed sparingly with wooden shelves carrying paper and pens. The ceiling too, which she now noticed was decorated in wrought copper and glass panels, was also thankfully overhead. The floor, she exhaled at last with great relief as she glanced down, was once again a mosaic of polished ivory tile. Besides the heroine’s disordered state, it seemed, the only difference in the scene from before they had soared up into the air were her arms. To her great surprise, they were wrapped around the elderly clerk as the woman sobbed giant salty tears of grief and loss.

"For fifty-four years I lived on this street corner. Before it was even a street! Fifty-four years, wasted. And for what? To be broken! Reduced and mangled into a hideously tacky notebook and sold for pennies!"

The heroine slowly removed her arms. Only moments ago the clerk had brought her to such terrifying heights! And now? Within the tiny space between them, the heroine bowed, diving into the depths of the woman’s heartbreak to meet her.

"You might not believe me, but I understand what it feels like to be betrayed. I know what it feels like to be used and abandoned, and despite your judgments of me, I do understand that it takes time and hard work to grow into the kind of life I want for myself."

Her shoulders relaxed, every muscle in her body releasing themselves in surrender as the ball of anxiety that was steadily growing inside of the heroine suddenly unraveled.

“I'm broke." She admitted in shame. "If I had the kind of money that could pay you properly for each day of the notebook's, your, life—the life that led to our meeting here today, then I would. But I can't. I can barely even pay for my livelihood, and to be honest, shouldn't be spending even ten dollars right now..."

“Then why are you here? What do you really want?” The clerk asked.

"I’m here because,” she swallowed, “I know that despite all my fears and insecurities, I need to keep trying. Even when I fail, again and again, I have to learn to be better. I have to learn to forgive." Her head sunk lower. "When I saw the notebook in the window, I thought... I thought, maybe, I can do this. Maybe if I just started somewhere, I could inspire myself."

"To do what, exactly?"

The heroine raised her head and met the clerk's watery eyes. "To live again."

The clerk deflated then, and shrank back to her previously stout shape behind the counter. Her face sagged with exhaustion, and for the first time looked human in the eyes of the heroine.

"Fine, fine, fine,“ she said, ”I'll give it to you.”

“But I didn’t mean—!” The heroine resisted but the clerk held up a staying hand, “I am not finished speaking!”

She started again, “I will give you the notebook… on the sole condition that you use every single one of my pages, front, and back." The clerk raised the little cedar notebook then, and smiled.

The heroine shook as she reached for it. Just as her fingertips stroked the book's edges she was stopped by an open hand splayed over the cover, “The ten?”

“Oh! Right, of course, pardon me.” She handed her the money.

"This," the clerk tapped the cover one last time, "Is no ordinary vessel. Respect the life that was given so that you, in turn, could live."

~ * ~

The heroine walked home. She did not know what had come over her. Such nerve! Such courage! Such adventure! She blushed despite herself and skipped with giddy anticipation along the somehow sunnier sidewalk. If only she could muster up that same determination and confidence in other aspects of her life, she mused. Maybe, just maybe, she could continue to receive all that she needed and finally, begin to gain all that she wanted.

"What do I want?"

A group of children whooped and laughed in a playground not far off in the distance.

"What do I want?"

She ran across the street towards them and sat down at a bench.

“What do I want?”

She removed the notebook from her bag.

Crossing her ankles, the heroine took the book in both hands and gingerly opened it before her face. Red, lined, blank pages stared back at her. She breathed in the sweet and spicy scent of pine and sighed.

“Okay.” She said aloud, “I’ll play along. What do I want? Well, I want...” The heroine giggled to herself and in a moment of spontaneity, raised the notebook to her lips and kissed it.

Twenty-thousand dollars!

Twenty-thousand days!

Twenty-thousand new, wondrous possibilities ready and waiting in the palms of her hands the moment she would take that first brave leap into her new beginning and say, "...I want to continue doing my best."

Maybe the clerk was right. Maybe it was vanity and ego that drew her to the little cedar notebook in the window of her shop earlier that magical day. Or maybe, just maybe, it was something more.