AURORA - The Last Phoenix

The bell above the door of the bookshop gave its familiar, tired chime, and I didn't need to look up to know it was Mrs. Higgins, arriving exactly on time the way she had every Tuesday morning for as long as I could remember.

"Morning, sweetheart," Mrs. Higgins said, already making a beeline for the shelf of secondhand romance novels near the window. "Anything new come in?"

"A box from the Holloway estate sale," I said, not looking up from the ledger I was pretending to balance. "Mostly delicate china. But there might be a few books in there you haven’t read yet, if you’re feeling lucky."

"I’m always feeling lucky in this shop." Mrs. Higgins said it like a joke, but there was something almost reverent in the way she ran her fingers along the spines, like she believed it a little.

I smiled and let her make her way around the store. Mrs. Higgins has been coming to Vale’s Curiosities for as long as I could remember and I was sure she had memorized every book in the store by heart but she never breaks her Tuesday routine of popping into the store.

It was easy to love mornings like this; the smell of dust and old paper, sunlight slanting gold through the shop's front window, catching the brass fittings on the grandfather clock nobody had bought in four years.

 Vale's Curiosities wasn't much to look at from the street. A narrow shopfront squeezed between the bakery and the shuttered movie theater, a hand-painted sign that had needed touching up since before she was born. But inside, it was a world stitched together out of other people's forgotten things, and I had never once, in twenty-five years, wanted to be anywhere else.

I like to think that makes me simple. Uncomplicated. A girl who likes books and dust and the particular quiet of a town where nothing ever happened.

May Town had a population of two thousand and forty-three people, one stoplight, and exactly one mystery, and that mystery lived so close to me.

I didn't mean to look up. I never mean to. But some small, traitorous part of me always seemed to know the exact moment Cillian Ashthorne passed the front of the store, and this morning was no different.

 The door across the street opened, and there he was, dark gold hair catching the morning light, moving like he had somewhere urgent to be even though, as far as anyone in May Town could tell, he had exactly nowhere to be, ever.

He didn't work. He didn't seem to have family visiting. He kept to himself in a house he'd bought two years ago with cash, according to town gossip, and the only time anyone saw him was early morning or late evening, like he was allergic to the hours in between.

He looked up suddenly like he could feel me watching him and for the ten thousandth time, our eyes met across the street and I looked away as soon as our eyes met. For exactly one second, something hot and inexplicable curled low in my stomach, something that felt uncomfortably close to anger except it wasn't anger. I couldn’t call it that made me mad at myself.

"You’re doing that face again," Mrs. Higgins said, without looking up from a book she has managed from one of the shelves and I jumped a little in my seat.

"What face?’ I retorted quickly, too quickly in fact.

"The one you make at that boy. Like you want to set him on fire and also" She paused and I held my breath. "Never mind."

"There is no also…,"I said, too quickly, and turned back to my ledger with more focus than the numbers deserved and peach colored cheeks.

When I looked up again, Cillian had already looked away, jaw tight, walking like the sidewalk had personally offended him. I noticed he did that a lot, not like I was watching him or anything.

I had cataloged it the way she cataloged everything in the shop, carefully, without meaning to, filed away for no reason at all. He was, objectively, the best-looking thing to ever happen to May town’s sidewalks, and I resented that fact almost as much as I resented the way my pulse always ticked up half a beat when he was close, like my body knew something my mind refused to acknowledge.

We have exchanged maybe forty words in two years. Most of them were clipped greetings whenever he passes by when I’m outside. A few of them, on one particularly bad afternoon involving a delivery truck and a parking dispute, had not been polite.

I didn't know what it was about him. I'd tried, more than once, lying awake turning it over. Was it the way he never smiled, not once, not even when Mrs. Higgins baked cookies for the whole street and left a plate on his doorstep? Was it the way he watched the shop sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, like he was waiting for something to happen inside it?

Or maybe it is simpler than that. Some people just rub you wrong from the moment you meet them, no explanation required, the way lightning didn't ask permission before it split a tree.

I didn't know. I  only knew that some nights, when the dream came, the one I’ve  had since I was little. Fire licking up through a black forest, and somewhere in the smoke, a pair of eyes, gold-green and achingly familiar, watched me burn without looking away for once.

 I always wake with my heart hammering like it was about to rip out of my chest and my skin too warm, and some small, unwanted part of me thought of him.

And every time I ask myself one question – why him?

I  never told anyone about the dream. Not my parents, not Nova- my bestie, not the therapist I had seen for exactly three sessions in college before deciding some things were better carried alone.

The craziest part of it was that it didn’t feel like a nightmare, not exactly. I  never felt afraid in it. I  felt like I was home, right where I was supposed to be. Which was somehow worse, because waking up from it always felt like I was losing something I  never actually had.

I  was still thinking about it, an hour later, dusting the same shelf for the third time, when my mother's voice carried down from the back room.

"Aurora? Can you come sort through the Holloway boxes? My knees are done for the day." She shouted in her motherly tone that I love so much and I was pretty sure I couldn’t do without.

"Coming." I shouted back at her and made my way to the backroom.

I  set down the rag and let the dream go the way I  always did, folding it up small and putting it somewhere I  didn't have to look at it, and went to find out what secrets a dead woman's attic had to offer a Tuesday morning that badly needed one.

Of course, I  didn't make it to the back room without an interruption. The bell chimed again before I’d crossed the shop floor, and this time it was a voice I was well accustomed to that greeted me..

"Please tell me you have coffee, because I will actually cry." Nova said before I could say a word.

Nova Reyes has been my best friend we were nine years old and had bonded over a shared, ferocious hatred of the substitute teacher who'd made us read aloud in front of the class. She worked mornings at the bakery next door, which meant she smelled permanently of cinnamon and came through Vale's Curiosities' side door at least twice a shift, usually complaining.

"There’s a pot in the back, if Mom hasn’t finished it”.I said. "You look like you fought the ovens and lost." I teased her and she glared at me.

"I fought the ovens and won, actually, but at great personal cost." Nova hopped up onto the counter with the ease of someone who’d been doing it since she was a teenager, ignoring my attempt to swat her off the counter.

 "Mrs. Higgins just told me you were making your murder face at Cillian Ashthorne again. From across the street. At eight in the morning.", she said and I groaned in frustration.

"It’s not a murder face." I tried to reason with her but she just smiled like a cat who got cream.

"It’s a little bit a murder face, I’ve seen it quite a number of times myself" Nova grinned, unrepentant. "Honestly, at this point I think you two should just get it over with."

"Get what over with?" I asked, knowing fully well what she was about to say next.

"The kissing. Or the killing. Genuinely could go either way with you two, which is, frankly, half the appeal of living on this street."

"You’re disgusting," I said, without heat, because this was an old argument, and there was no version of it where Nova didn’t win. "I barely know him."

"You’ve barely known him for two years. That’s a whole personality trait at this point." Nova stole a butterscotch candy from the jar by the register, unwrapping  it with theatrical slowness. "I’m just saying. A man doesn’t water plants he doesn’t eat, on a porch he never sits on, at exactly the time you walk to work, for two straight years, unless he’s got a reason."

"Or he just likes gardening." I said with a shrug of my shoulder, hoping to convince myself with that statement too.

"Nobody likes gardening that specifically." Nova hopped down, already backing toward the door, because her break was clearly shorter than her opinions. "Anyway. I have to go before Mr. Delgado notices I’m gone. Don’t work too hard and try not to fall in love with your nemesis before lunch." She waved and exited the room where she entered  from.

"No promises," I called after her and the bell chimed once more on her way out.

 The shop went quiet again, and I  almost managed to forget, for a few more minutes, the strange electric hum that had followed me all morning like weather she couldn’t outrun.

The back room of Vale's Curiosities was less a room than a controlled avalanche. Boxes were  stacked to the ceiling in towers that defied several laws of physics, each one labeled in grandfather's careful handwriting with a date and a source, a system that made perfect sense to exactly one person on earth, and he'd been dead eleven years now, so the family had simply learned to decode it by trial and affection.

The Holloway boxes sat by the window, four of them, water-stained cardboard that smelled like someone else's grandmother. I  pulled the first one toward me and started working through the layers of newspaper padding. In it were a set of chipped teacups, a mantel clock missing its hands, a small ceramic fox that made her smile despite herself.

"Anything good?" Mom called from the front, where the bell had chimed twice more in the last ten minutes, the particular rhythm of a slow Tuesday.

"That depends on your definition of good. There’s a clock in here that o