Pince Nez spends a strange afternoon in a new reading room

As Pince was walking the forest began to blur, or maybe it was melting, transmogrifying... The branches had long been getting more tangled together, the top of each tree running into the next, soon the branches were in all kinds of knots pressing against each other, next the trunks were side by side so tight they had become a masterful puzzle, the grooves in the barks of different trees fitting so closely you could hardly distinguish. And then she felt swallowed by the woods. 


As her eyes adjusted she saw she was really in a hall, the bark blending into wall paper, the roots becoming parquet flooring. During her mortality Pince would probably have turned back at this point.




No.


Actually, that's not true at all but there's no real way of proving any which-way now that she was dead. And being dead, Pince most assuredly continued down this hallway. It turned sharply to the right and opened into a small room with a bank of windows flooding the room with sunlight. There was a wall with leather bound books and a velvety lime green chair that looked like the one her sister had told her their grandpa had always sat in. Her sister had imitated him one day, showing her how he'd sat and how he'd gesture as he'd talked which was as close as Pince would ever come to the real thing. Her sister had always been telling her about the chairs their grandparents had sat in. 


Pince chose a book and sat down but did not immediately start reading. She stared out the window wall for a long time, at the cherry tree outside. It made her think of baby blue cotton pijamas with an oriental collar and a Mickey Mouse toy castle.


When she finally opened the book she was surprised. 

TMA 298 

The Gleaners & I  

Marge Bjorke

was at the top of the first page. She thumbed through the book and saw that each page was that of a similar college writing assignment. She grabbed another leather volume and another and saw they contained all of her writing assignments from college. Many had underlines and comments from professors scribbled in the margins, some of the handwriting she could still recognize. Every once in a while she'd pause to read a paper and was generally horrified at the poor quality of her writing. Why did anyone ever let her pass? Her ideas weren't even that clever which wasn't entirely shocking as she had matured enough by the time she died to recognize that her thoughts weren't entirely revelatory. Though anyone would have to admit her argument that The Life of Pi and The Catcher in the Rye were telling the same story was rather intriguing. How had she never noticed before the titles rhymed? Perhaps she should start wiling away her hours by writing papers about books with titles that rhyme. It would certainly do to concentrate her efforts on bettering her literary talents. Hadn't she always heard how Thomas Jefferson would wake up early devoting hours a day to writing letters and important documents?


Maybe she should just devote hours a day to writing letters.