ReadFin Literary Journal (Winter 2018)

A Tale from Heaven
(Novel Excerpt from
‘The Author of the Mended Child’)
Adam Casey
The sound of the bins been pulled back into the organic grocer
confirmed it was Thursday morning. He peeled back the thick,
dusty curtain (he would never dare knock the dust out of 18th
century Egyptian curtains; the Graeco-Roman motifs would
stare daggers at him while he slept), the morning workers
already filling up the cafés on both sides of the street. Despite
the early wake up calls of the inner North, Charlemagne was
happy to still have his shop front downstairs. He was lucky. He’d
watched many traders around him come and go, particularly
with the onset of gentrification digging its talons into his
neighbourhood. His strange little Op Shop appealed to many
of the passersby and had grown quite a name for itself over the
50+ years it had survived. He’d called it ‘A Tale from Heaven’, the
flicking whale flukes painted gold on black along with the text,
barely visible amidst the bright signage of the revolving shop
fronts around him. He would never dare paint over it; his good
friend, Daniel, whom he sorely missed, had painted the flukes at
a whim, misinterpreting Charlemagne’s shop name for the rear
anatomy of his passion in life, the Southern Right Whale. Only 3
months later, he had died at sea in a freak storm that swallowed
his little boat. When people asked of the signage, he would refer
to Daniel and his new home inside the whale, dimly lit with
his gas lantern, pouring over his text books, unaware that he’d
passed from the material world of air, earth and buildings. And
yes, I can see you catching on; Charlemagne certainly did have
a story attached to almost every aspect of his life. The way he
saw it, everybody did, but he just took note of them, catalogued
them in his expansive mind that, in equal measures, shut
out procedure, technicalities, and his enemy, the moribund
language, Latin (‘Latin is like cancer,’ Charlemagne would say. ‘It
has spread its way through this disaster of a language.’). ‘A Tale
from Heaven’ was a conglomeration of these stories, the physical
manifestation of the catalogue that spilled from his mind.
There was nothing more sumptuous, Charlemagne would opine,
than draping yourself in story. He would spend many a night
updating his pricing classification system (a procedure, yes, but
one that was necessary to disseminate his wares in fairness;
unfortunately Charlemagne lived in a world where people had
stopped caring for things that had not been assigned a value, so,
in this one instance, for the sake of the longevity of his shop, he
dipped his toe into the material concerns of the black world that
lay outside), attributing value to different components of story.
The prices were marked at the bottom of the story rolls, which
Charlemagne penned himself, via ink and quill. The customers
would delight in the more expensive garments; Charlemagne
would break the wax seal, the paper racing to unravel, hitting
the floor below, and rolling to their conclusion (and price tag) at
the feet of the customers. Charlemagne had the shop organized
via ‘itsy bitsy teeny weeny stories’, ‘teeny weeny stories’, ‘stories
of medium girth’, ‘stories of large girth’, and finally, ‘stories of
grandeur’, a section of the store that was cordoned off by the
same Egyptian curtain fabric he had hung in his room.
Some customers would make the mistake of peeling back the
curtains to this grand portion of the shop, but Charlemagne had
smartly installed sensor alarms that would fill the shop with a
sharp, incessant beeping sound. Oh, how Charlemagne hated
this sound, but use it he must; from a very young age, humans
are taught to react repulsively to these generic alarms—hands
quickly pulling away from the curtains, head swinging from
side to side in fear of being seen doing something wrong, eyes
bulging, hands rising into a gesture of surrender, as if awaiting
the cuffs to be slapped on their wrists. Charlemagne found he
didn’t even need to leave the counter. ‘By appointment only,’ he
would call out dryly.
The customers would either scurry away from the shop,
muttering an apology, red faced (Charlemagne was fine with
that; most people were not ready for stories of grandeur), or, he
would encounter the occasional plucky customer who would
inquire further.
‘Ah, I see…what’s behind there?’
‘Exactly what the sign says,’ Charlemagne replied, not lifting his
head from the dust covered pages he was carefully inspecting.
‘Stories of Grandeur…are there more clothes in there?’
‘I don’t sell “clothes”…’ Charlemagne spat out the final word
scornfully, ‘…there are tomes behind those curtains, just like the
rest.’
‘Tomes, you mean books?’
Charlemagne finally lifts his head, peering over his reading
glasses. ‘I mean what I say!’ he finally snaps.
‘Aren’t tomes big old books?’
Charlemagne’s gaze softened. The plucky customer had found
the crack between his protective layers; it was necessary
Charlemagne keep up his armour against the vacuity of banal
conversation. The world was rampant with it; or at least
Charlemagne thought it was, but his interactions with the
world were largely limited to the shop. There was a time when
Charlemagne wandered the outside world, but those days were
long gone, and now, Charlemagne had invited the world in, and
the tomes that surrounded him pushed and pulled him across
a greater landscape of temporal suspension, a world covered in
golden dust. That was the real world. But he could never escape
the world outside; it announced itself via the Nepalese cowbells
rattling in beautiful discordance as a customer opened the shop
door. Charlemagne ignored the new customer, as always, and
spoke in a measured tone, to the stupid, nosy, but well-meaning
and curious, plucky customer. ‘Tomes can be big old books, yes,
but stories are not exclusively attached to books.’
The plucky customer scrunched his nose while squinting,
and pushed his head back slightly, as if trying to allow an
imperceptible force to make its way through his eyeballs, and
seep into cognition.
Charlemagne cast his eyes on the plucky customer’s partner,
who was waiting in the corner, patiently sitting on the Kaare
Klint safari chair. She gazed out the window, that is, if the
window could be seen through, but Charlemagne had covered
it with butcher’s paper; another of his attempts at keeping the
outside world at bay, and as he watched more closely, noticed she
was moving ever so slightly to an unheard rhythm. The plucky
customer was asking more questions, but Charlemagne had the
adept skill of losing his hearing to inanity. He swayed by him in
dance, moving toward the girl, when he remembered his 78s.
Charlemagne’s collection of 78s was formidable. He kept them
in the attic above his room. He did go through a phase where
he sold them in the shop, but they were too popular, and he
would find himself in sorrow when the old wooden milk crate
was empty at the end of the day. Nothing drained him of
energy more than watching a tome leave the shop in the hands
of a hungry ghost. You see, despite Charlemagne being a shop
vendor, his focus wasn’t on sales, in fact, you could fairly say, he
was averse to selling too many items. There was the occasional
customer who transcended this sorrow. They were a special kind
of person, someone who was disinclined to shop at all (which
is what made them a rare occurrence in his shop), and this was
ReadFin Literary Journal 21