Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(13)
A staircase up stretched along the righthand wall, books stacked on each step, so only a narrow path was left between them, and she wanted to run up those stairs, see what other treasures might be waiting for a quick, clever little girl to find. She had stopped crying, although she didn’t realize it yet, and her tears were drying on her cheeks.
“Hello, young miss, and can I help you? I would ask if I might help you, but I know I’m allowed, this is my shop and you’re clearly a patron, come through the Door just now,” and the way the new voice said the word “door” was funny, placing too much importance and emphasis on it. More than it deserved. “I am absolutely allowed to help you, and so the question becomes whether I can help you, for perhaps you didn’t mean to come here. Perhaps you’re only passing through and not seeking for something you’ve lost or answering my advertisement! Perhaps there is nothing I can do for you at all.”
Half of what the voice said made no sense, and the other half was too fast and hence confusing. Antsy frowned, turning toward the source of the voice.
Then she paused, even more confused, frown growing deeper and voice dying in her throat as she studied the sight in front of her. There was no one there, as she had assumed there would be; instead, an enormous bird with mostly black and white feathers, save for a blue patch at the bottom of its wings, was perching atop one of the nearest shelves. She blinked as she realized the bird was wearing a tiny pair of wire-framed glasses. It was the biggest bird she’d ever seen, bigger even than the macaw at the pet store near their old house, and they were the tiniest glasses, and that would have been funny, if it hadn’t been so confusing.
Then the bird opened its beak and said, a little impatiently, “Well? Can I help you?”
Antsy squeaked, feeling her eyes get so wide that it hurt her face, and took two big steps backward. Not clever: that was enough to collide with the nearest shelf and send folding paper fans and tiny balsawood boxes cascading down over her. They didn’t hurt, but the noise they made was immense, and somehow, that was one thing too many on top of everything else that had already happened. Antsy began to cry again, not quietly at all this time; no, she sobbed, huge braying sobs that shook her whole body and knocked more things off the shelf.
The bird looked alarmed. “Please, please, miss, stop your crying! I don’t trade in the tears of children, the people who want to buy those type of things are never the sort of patrons I’m looking to attract, they bring the whole tenor of the place down, so you’re simply wasting them! Please, I’ll help you if I can and if you’ll let me, but I need you to stop crying!”
Antsy—who had run away from home and stumbled into a place where birds wore glasses and asked questions, and who had the vague feeling that on top of everything else she’d lost tonight, she had managed to lose her way—kept crying as she sank to the floor, sticking her legs straight out in front of her and slumping there like a broken doll. Her sobs gradually dwindled in power and intensity, until they were no longer shaking the shelf, and it didn’t seem like there was anything else to fall on her by that point. She stayed slumped on the ground.
The bird spread its wings and hopped down from its perch, going into an easy glide that ended when its feet hit the ground and it began walking, in that jerky, head-bobbing way birds had, toward her. Antsy froze, watching it come. She had the vague feeling that she should yell or try to bat it away somehow, but she couldn’t quite find the strength to move.
She had dropped her backpack when she sat down, if her graceless descent could really be called “sitting down.” It was odd, and a little awkward, that the action of sitting and the process of sitting were described by the same word; it felt like there should be a difference. And she didn’t know why that seemed so important when a bird was talking to her. Nothing should have been important except for the bird.
Her tears stopped, chased away by her confusion over her own priorities, and she watched the bird approach, sniffling a little. Crying was like anything else; it didn’t matter whether it started all at once, it never stopped that way. Even when the tears were gone and dried and over, there was always snot.
There was probably a lesson in that, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it, because the bird was close enough now to peck at her backpack, tugging at the zipper until it slid open and the bird could stick its head inside. It pulled it back out a moment later, fixing Antsy with one small, bright eye.
“You have quite a lot of food in here for someone who’s just come shopping or to answer an advertisement,” said the bird. “I’m not good at knowing how old humans are—you’re all so unnecessarily big that it doesn’t seem to matter much—but I think you’re a fairly new one. Is that right?”
Antsy, who was still not sure she wanted to have an actual conversation with a bird, sniffed and nodded, staying exactly where she was.
The bird ruffled its feathers, seeming pleased to have deduced correctly. “Then I would guess, given your reaction to everything around you, that you haven’t come to answer my advertisement at all, or even seen it. I would say that you were running away from your nest, and you got lost, and that’s how you ended up here.”
Antsy blinked, puzzling her way through all that. And then she nodded. “I ran away from home,” she said. “My father … my father, he died, and my mother married a new, bad man, and he said if I tried to tell on him, he’d tell her I was lying, and I know she’d believe him, because she’s believed him before when he told lies, and I couldn’t stay there anymore. I couldn’t stay or he was … he was going to…” The shape of what he’d been intending was huge and incomprehensible, veiled behind all the experiences she hadn’t had yet, all the things she hadn’t learned. She only knew that it was terrible and unspeakable, and something she should never have needed to fear in her own home. Something so impossibly wrong that even seeing it clearly might have broken her.