One good robbery would have to do. What he liked most about taking the books was that it meant he would never have to sneak past the headquarters again. All the questions and the stares made him too nervous. Even just one day without having to walk past that black brick building made this whole escapade worth it.
The days passed and they began to fall into a steady routine. His mother made all of the back and forth trips, while he organized them into categorized piles. Brixton forgot all about that headquarters building and who lurked behind the doors and windows of it.
Each trip became easier. By far that was the easy part. Finding a place to put them was the hard part. Things quickly shifted from an exciting rush to a tortuous day in and day out chore. Every imaginable muscle in his body begged for an end that was nowhere in sight. Blisters erupted like miniature volcanoes of puss all over his hands. When they sat down to rest, neither he nor his mother could sit up in their chairs. Their bodies fell limp and surrendered to the soft cushions of the tufted chairs every evening.
Sonu accumulated so many bruises that she reminded him of a cheetah or some other spotted animal roaming around in the wild.
It kind of felt like that, he thought. Mom does roam the empty streets; ready to pounce on anything that so much as moves a millimeter.
The temptation to celebrate overpowered both Brixton and his mother when she decided they had saved enough books. It was perfect timing too. They hardly had enough space to walk around or sit comfortably without fear the slightest movement would send a book falling into their laps.
In the one week they had, they managed to convert every bit of available space into bookshelves. The walls made of plaster were easy enough to carve into. Those shelves cascaded from floor to ceiling. They wrapped around corners and into doorways. Sonu chiseled at loose bricks in the walls to form smaller cubby holes. Some of the cubbies housed one book while others crammed three or four. It all depended on how many bricks fell out. She only worked on the already loose ones to make sure the structure of the house wouldn’t cave in and crush them. She figured if they were already loose, they weren’t doing much good anyway.
Hardly any visible wall space stood in some places. During that Robin Hood time, they acquired thousands of novels. They had so much that many of them became furniture. Sonu stacked the older, sturdier encyclopedias on the floor. She then found a large recycled piece of glass at the junkyard and placed it on top. They now had end tables by the sofa and the window seat.
The fireplace, packed with shelves and books, seemed slightly ironic to Brixton. That would be the last place he would put them. One spark from the wood burning fireplace and all their hard work would go into flames. The carved whales’ teeth made for excellent bookends for the ones that held the honored position on the mantel.
Good thing we never use the fireplace anyway.
“Too much attention with the smoke and all,” Sonu would say. Only on rare occasions did they use it. When the temperature dropped down to unbearable where coats and blankets wouldn’t suffice, she lit up the wood. On those particular days, nobody would be outside anyway so they hardly worried about anybody spotting the smoke.
Even the space in between the stairs provided the perfect cozy little unit for smaller paperbacks. They literally swam in a sea of hard bounds, textbooks, and volumes of adventure. Their open loft gradually made its way to feeling like a small shoebox that smelled like tarnished leather and mildew.
Although the smell was strong at first, they quickly got used to it and began to like it. It permeated through the kitchen and into his bedroom upstairs.
Oh, his room. Even that received a story-fest makeover. He was curious to know if Sonu stole the books to save them or to use them for her decorating purposes. Of course, they needed to be saved, but his mother did enjoy a good renovation. She rearranged all the books in delectable patterns. His room looked the best of all. They spent a day and a half on his alone.
Only certain squares were chipped away on the old painted plaster wall so when she put the dark books in their cubbies, the entire wall looked like a giant chessboard. Squares she didn’t chip out were already white from the image he could no longer tell what it was.
On the wall with the giant circular window, Sonu allowed admittance for a tree to extend its winding arms through it. The branches begged for freedom to burst through for years as it grew. She took great pleasure in finding the biggest hammer she could to bust out the glass when really she only needed to unclip the hinges and it would have popped out.
He knew he’d miss that window. It’s massive size stretched out to a 15-foot diameter making it an excellent tool for his mother to teach him geometry and geography.
When he was still in school, Sonu borrowed a marker from his teacher and drew out the map of the world on his window. She included the equator and all the degrees of longitude and latitude. He was the only one in his class to learn the different continents before the school shut down.
After the marker wore off, the window began to remind him of an oversized submarine ship. To pass the time without school, he found a deflated bicycle wheel and pretend that he was captain of the giant ship. He spent endless nights fighting slimy sea urchins and evil pirates in his rustic war sub. That was probably when he developed such a fascination with war and war machines in particular.
“I’ve wanted to do that for years,” Sonu said as she twirled the hammer in her hand. “What a great stress reliever.”
Brixton laughed at his mother. He found it funny that a person so small could feel such strength and power. Even if it was only glass.
“Yeh, except now we have a huge mess to clean up.”
“Oh Brix, live in the present for once. We needed this.”
“Says the woman who won’t cook or turn on any electrical device because it sucks in too much attention.”
They both laughed at that. He was only telling the truth. They hadn’t used heat since the schools shut down. The Fatalities’ main concerns were those who used the power, so he and his mother went without. Sonu figured if they only paid attention to those with it then they wouldn’t get any attention and that was a good thing to her. Brixton always guessed it was a good thing for him too. Up until now, he didn’t see that there would be a problem if they didn’t have all the things that the other children had. But he wouldn’t have minded getting checked-up on by the Fatalities. They never did anything wrong anyway; not entirely. Now, was a different story. They’d kill him and his mother on the spot if they found out about the books. For once he was thankful they didn’t have a reason for Fatals to come knocking on their door.
Usually, they did just fine during the cold winter months. They had plenty enough wool blankets. However this year, he planned to sleep elsewhere once the first frost came due to the fact that his mother felt the need to obliterate his window leaving a gaping hole in his room. He would have to take advantage of every ounce of fresh air for the next month or so. Soon it would be unbearable once the snow came through. The window would be missed, but the twisting branches creeping in didn’t bother him at all. They intertwined and fit into his room as if they belonged there all along.
Once the limbs loosened up after the jerking and twisting, it felt like the building was built around the tree instead of it being planted after the building was built.
How can trees live so long and we can’t even survive a day on our own? He would always ask himself.
With the month of October in full stride, the leaves glowed as if on fire. Bright red and orange illuminated his bedroom in the mornings. The crisp flames crackled until they let loose of their grip and fell to the ground. Brixton stomped around his room, crunching the fallen leaves. He pretended they were the enemy in some epic battle. He stood towering over them as if they were his victims.
Parts of the tree that grew closer together became more space for books. The ones further apart made steps for Brixton to climb. He climbed to the top and placed all of his sacred adventure books on the rafters and in between the pipes. Being