That they might have been friends, if they’d grown up at the same time. She liked to pretend, back then, that she and Alice shared more in common than just a birthday. A happy coincidence she had locked away inside her heart when she’d first discovered it. Jane had the same birthday as Alice Liddell. The book was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. No, she couldn’t remember the first book she’d eaten, but she could remember the first book she’d eaten purposefully. Jane brought the book up to her nose and inhaled. Ruth squeezed by in the aisle and Jane showed it to her. The cover featured a woman in a sea of blue water, floating on her back, her hands outstretched over her head, one high heel on, one off.

Jane walked down the center aisle, letting her fingers brush across the spines of books until she found one by Raymond Chandler, a collection of short stories called Killer in the Rain. It was a tiny store, built in a one-car garage behind a big Victorian house. “Although we’ll run into each other soon enough in here.” “Let me know if you need anything,” she’d said when they walked in. The woman behind the counter was unpacking a box of paperbacks. Nothing as dramatic as this, sheets of water falling so thickly from the sky that Jane couldn’t see a foot outside the window. If it rained at all, it was a delicate sprinkle that lasted ten or fifteen minutes and ended with a rainbow. She wasn’t used to driving in the rain-neither of them was. “I don’t want to go any farther until this lets up a little.” They’d made it to Maine about thirty minutes ago but the rain had driven them off the highway and into this town with the strange name-Kennebunkport-and Ruth had pulled over and idled on the side of the road until Jane searched bookstore on her phone and found this one. Outside, the rain pelted down angrily, it sounded like muffled gunshots on the roof of the bookstore, but inside, inside, surrounded by books, surrounded by the smell of them, she felt calm and tranquil, momentarily at ease, like the past five weeks had never happened. Had the smell of books calmed her down then, as it did now? She must have been a baby, a toddler, ripping pages out of a picture book about a talking stuffed animal.

What it had tasted like, how it had felt-the scratch of it as it slid down her throat.

She couldn’t remember the first book she had eaten.

Horrid by katrina leno