'Neve Uncovers the Ultimate Truth of All Things'

overs the Ultimate Truth of All Things

  By Brad OH Inc.

  Copyright 2015 Brad OH Inc.

  Neve Uncovers the Ultimate Truth of All Things

  A Short Story by Brad OH Inc.

  Book shelves rose up like forbidden towers on old castles, meandering off in every direction. Neve, caressing the stringy and stained hair of her doll Clarice, bit her tiny lip. She could hear the lackadaisical clicking of the keyboard behind her as her father continued his arduous journey to find new employment. She knew it wasn’t going well. It never did.

  Neve was always getting dragged along to the library for his half-hearted attempts to turn things around, and was expected to wait nearby as her dad perused the net in search of employment. Her family didn’t have Internet at their house. ‘That was for those rich…’ well, Neve really didn’t like to say bad words, and reasoned that thinking them probably counted just as much.

  Still, waiting around like this was a tall task. Neve was only eight, after all.

  “What do you think we should do, Clarice?” she whispered, hoping to avoid any dirty looks or shushes from the library’s other patrons. But her doll just stared back with her one button-eye, providing little by way of answer. Neve was too old to be talking to dolls anyway, she figured.

  ‘Yet not old enough to have other fun,’ she thought.

  “Neve! Quit wandering around so much. Stay where I can see you,” her dad barked. His eyes never left the screen, which cast a deathly pallor over his already exhausted face.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she mumbled to herself, imagining Clarice’s button-eye rolling back to mirror her own. Neve had never been a disobedient child, but the library was pretty familiar to her after so many months of this routine, and that meant the temptation to drift away was nearly overwhelming her eager young mind.

  The small cluster of computers where her dad sat was stationed in the very centre of the library—an oasis of desks and screens enveloped by a world of wonder. About two person-lengths from the computers in all directions, the tall rows of bookshelves rolled away into distances Neve couldn’t even imagine. One way led to fantasy books, where Neve could find old tales about knights and dragons. Beside that was non-fiction, which had never really captured Neve. Then there were the young-adult, horror, and literature sections. Yuck, yikes, and yawn! But just to her right was the row for science fiction books. There, Neve knew, she could read about unimaginable alien worlds, and starships piloted by people totally foreign in their experiences, yet somehow unbearably familiar in their struggles.

  Neve liked that section a lot. Once, she recalled, she’d flipped through a book with pictures of giant space stations, and terrible battles in the stars. There had even been a princess in distress—just like in so many of the fantasy stories Neve loved.

  Pulling Clarice tightly to her chest, Neve eyed the countless pathways eagerly. She was a good reader for her age—even her teacher, Mrs. MacNeil, had said so on a sticker covered certificate which now hung on Neve’s bedroom wall. So her regular trips to the library had grown bolder bit by bit, and whenever her dad was sufficiently distracted, she would wander a little further down one row or another, reading anything she could get her hands on.

  She turned in tiny circles as she thought about the possibilities. The spinning made her dizzy, but Neve didn’t mind. “That way is where the romance books are,” she told Clarice—as if the doll didn’t already know. Over the last couple of months, Neve and Clarice had been nearly permanent fixtures in their local library branch. “I like those ones,” she purred quietly to her little stuffed friend, and felt a flush creeping into her cheeks.

  Neve remembered one book in particular. She’d flipped through it on one of her first trips to the library, struggling with some of the words and wishing for pictures, but doing very well on the whole, according to Clarice. The book had been an old story about star-crossed lovers separated by cruel circumstances. No matter what they did, their paths just never seemed to bring them together.

  Neve liked how they never gave up hope though. Clutching the rough cover in her little hands, she’d hoped her parents held onto that same hope.

  “Books can be a big help to people, you know.”

  Clarice only gaped at Neve’s prompt, but this didn’t stop her. Once, Mrs. MacNeil had said Neve was ‘headstrong’. One trip to the library later, Neve learned that meant she didn’t quit when things got tough. That had made her happy.

  “Just remember the woman we met in the ‘Religion’ section?” she continued.

  The memory from several weeks ago still remained with Neve, fighting tenaciously for space amongst confounding math problems, cruel playground rumours, and half-comprehended speculations from her dad about where they were going to live.

  Neve had been standing at the threshold of the aisle, inching in slowly as she kept one vigilant eye on her dad. The covers seemed scary, with blood and fire and thorns. Neve had actually begun to wonder if she’d stumbled into the horror section again by accident, when she saw the short old lady holding a light purple book. She had tears running down her face, and Neve’s strong sense of sympathy had overpowered her aversion to scoldings.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, staring up at the frail blue-haired lady.

  The woman was startled at first, but her expression naturally softened when she saw Clarice. “Oh, oh bless your heart. Nothing’s wrong my dear. I was just reading an old passage that my mother used to read to me. I never understood it back then,” she explained with a paper-thin smile before being interrupted by a gross coughing fit. She put a hand to her chest, and her old body shook. “It speaks to me now though,” she finished, and creaked slowly away, leaning upon her rocker.

  With an emboldened spirit, Neve had picked up the book and flipped through it. There were a lot of lines about valleys, and fear, and other things Neve didn’t really understand. But she remembered how much it had meant to the lady.

  Now, Neve could still hear the slow clicking of the keyboard, and a quick glance backward told her that her dad remained fixated on his own quest.

  With one tentative step, then another, Neve inched her way into the fantasy section, where the book covers showed horses and dragons and all sorts of wonderful scenes. Picking up a pale green book with a white sword on it, Neve flipped the pages excitedly, her mind a maelstrom of big ideas and vague hopes.

  Foreign words were scattered freely throughout the text, but many of them were pretty close to words she knew, and the clever girl was able to make some general sense from the lines she read as she flipped happily through the pages. There had been a king long ago, in a land that had a new name now. The king had a sword.

  “Not just any sword,” she whispered to Clarice, whose little grey button eye seemed to wobble with excitement, “a magic sword, pulled from a stone! It’s what makes him king, but…” Neve paused, considering what a hard time the king seemed to be having.

  She flipped a few pages, searching for the happy parts. She’d looked through the book a dozen times before—sometimes she felt like she’d done so with every book in the library. Inevitably though, she’d find something new with each venture into the forbidding stacks.

  “The sword is why he’s king, but he can never figure out how to make the people happy. He gets advice from a wizard, and he listens to his people, but everyone wants something different.” Neve felt silly sometimes, whispering to a doll. But someone had to share in these adventures with her. She was pretty sure that was a rule.

  “I think it’s hard to be good sometimes, Clarice. Sometimes there’s no way to make everyone happy, and—”r />
  “Neve, get back here!” her dad’s voice ricocheted across the library, and people stared at Neve, many with long bony fingers pressed to their thin gray lips. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Sorry dad.” Neve hurried back to his side, her eyes glued to the faded blue carpet. “I was just reading about a—”

  “That’s OK honey, just don’t wander too far.” He never looked away from the screen.

  “Hmmph.” Neve flopped down onto the floor beside the computer desk, her eyebrows bunched tightly together. There was a garbage can next to her, but a quick peek in revealed nothing but bunched up papers and a few cough drop wrappers. The floor was mostly clean.

  Neve looked at the clock, trying to follow the second hand around its course, but that got boring after only a few rotations.

  “This is taking forever,” she whined, and Clarice nodded her emphatic support. She picked lackadaisically at the flaking paint on the leg of the computer table, but didn’t like the way it scraped under her fingernails. “Hmmph.”

  On the shelf closest to her, Neve could see a big hardcover book with pictures of stars and planets and comets and crazy glowing balls of purple light and lots of other things she didn’t understand.

  It didn’t seem that far away. A quick glance up to her dad told Neve he was still