20 Hand Raised In by Amanda Kennedy
A Tale from Heaven(Novel Excerpt from‘The Author of the Mended Child’)Adam CaseyThe sound of the bins been pulled back into the organic grocerconfirmed it was Thursday morning. He peeled back the thick,dusty curtain (he would never dare knock the dust out of 18thcentury Egyptian curtains; the Graeco-Roman motifs wouldstare daggers at him while he slept), the morning workersalready filling up the cafés on both sides of the street. Despitethe early wake up calls of the inner North, Charlemagne washappy to still have his shop front downstairs. He was lucky. He’dwatched many traders around him come and go, particularlywith the onset of gentrification digging its talons into hisneighbourhood. His strange little Op Shop appealed to manyof the passersby and had grown quite a name for itself over the50+ years it had survived. He’d called it ‘A Tale from Heaven’, theflicking whale flukes painted gold on black along with the text,barely visible amidst the bright signage of the revolving shopfronts around him. He would never dare paint over it; his goodfriend, Daniel, whom he sorely missed, had painted the flukes ata whim, misinterpreting Charlemagne’s shop name for the rearanatomy of his passion in life, the Southern Right Whale. Only 3months later, he had died at sea in a freak storm that swallowedhis little boat. When people asked of the signage, he would referto Daniel and his new home inside the whale, dimly lit withhis gas lantern, pouring over his text books, unaware that he’dpassed from the material world of air, earth and buildings. Andyes, I can see you catching on; Charlemagne certainly did havea story attached to almost every aspect of his life. The way hesaw it, everybody did, but he just took note of them, cataloguedthem in his expansive mind that, in equal measures, shutout procedure, technicalities, and his enemy, the moribundlanguage, Latin (‘Latin is like cancer,’ Charlemagne would say. ‘Ithas spread its way through this disaster of a language.’). ‘A Talefrom Heaven’ was a conglomeration of these stories, the physicalmanifestation 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 nightupdating his pricing classification system (a procedure, yes, butone that was necessary to disseminate his wares in fairness;unfortunately Charlemagne lived in a world where people hadstopped caring for things that had not been assigned a value, so,in this one instance, for the sake of the longevity of his shop, hedipped his toe into the material concerns of the black world thatlay outside), attributing value to different components of story.The prices were marked at the bottom of the story rolls, whichCharlemagne penned himself, via ink and quill. The customerswould delight in the more expensive garments; Charlemagnewould break the wax seal, the paper racing to unravel, hittingthe floor below, and rolling to their conclusion (and price tag) atthe feet of the customers. Charlemagne had the shop organizedvia ‘itsy bitsy teeny weeny stories’, ‘teeny weeny stories’, ‘storiesof medium girth’, ‘stories of large girth’, and finally, ‘stories ofgrandeur’, a section of the store that was cordoned off by thesame Egyptian curtain fabric he had hung in his room.Some customers would make the mistake of peeling back thecurtains to this grand portion of the shop, but Charlemagne hadsmartly installed sensor alarms that would fill the shop with asharp, incessant beeping sound. Oh, how Charlemagne hatedthis sound, but use it he must; from a very young age, humansare taught to react repulsively to these generic alarms—handsquickly pulling away from the curtains, head swinging fromside to side in fear of being seen doing something wrong, eyesbulging, hands rising into a gesture of surrender, as if awaitingthe cuffs to be slapped on their wrists. Charlemagne found hedidn’t even need to leave the counter. ‘By appointment only,’ hewould call out dryly.The customers would either scurry away from the shop,muttering an apology, red faced (Charlemagne was fine withthat; most people were not ready for stories of grandeur), or, hewould encounter the occasional plucky customer who wouldinquire further.‘Ah, I see…what’s behind there?’‘Exactly what the sign says,’ Charlemagne replied, not lifting hishead 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 wordscornfully, ‘…there are tomes behind those curtains, just like therest.’‘Tomes, you mean books?’Charlemagne finally lifts his head, peering over his readingglasses. ‘I mean what I say!’ he finally snaps.‘Aren’t tomes big old books?’Charlemagne’s gaze softened. The plucky customer had foundthe crack between his protective layers; it was necessaryCharlemagne keep up his armour against the vacuity of banalconversation. The world was rampant with it; or at leastCharlemagne thought it was, but his interactions with theworld were largely limited to the shop. There was a time whenCharlemagne wandered the outside world, but those days werelong gone, and now, Charlemagne had invited the world in, andthe tomes that surrounded him pushed and pulled him acrossa greater landscape of temporal suspension, a world covered ingolden dust. That was the real world. But he could never escapethe world outside; it announced itself via the Nepalese cowbellsrattling in beautiful discordance as a customer opened the shopdoor. Charlemagne ignored the new customer, as always, andspoke in a measured tone, to the stupid, nosy, but well-meaningand 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 animperceptible force to make its way through his eyeballs, andseep into cognition.Charlemagne cast his eyes on the plucky customer’s partner,who was waiting in the corner, patiently sitting on the KaareKlint safari chair. She gazed out the window, that is, if thewindow could be seen through, but Charlemagne had coveredit with butcher’s paper; another of his attempts at keeping theoutside world at bay, and as he watched more closely, noticed shewas moving ever so slightly to an unheard rhythm. The pluckycustomer was asking more questions, but Charlemagne had theadept skill of losing his hearing to inanity. He swayed by him indance, moving toward the girl, when he remembered his 78s.Charlemagne’s collection of 78s was formidable. He kept themin the attic above his room. He did go through a phase wherehe sold them in the shop, but they were too popular, and hewould find himself in sorrow when the old wooden milk cratewas empty at the end of the day. Nothing drained him ofenergy more than watching a tome leave the shop in the handsof a hungry ghost. You see, despite Charlemagne being a shopvendor, his focus wasn’t on sales, in fact, you could fairly say, hewas averse to selling too many items. There was the occasionalcustomer who transcended this sorrow. They were a special kindof person, someone who was disinclined to shop at all (whichis what made them a rare occurrence in his shop), and this wasReadFin Literary Journal 21