The Bookseller (2010)
He was created out of the rain. This is what everyone was told. They found him beside the road. He woke up when the raindrops fell on his face, and found a crowd around him. He could not talk. He was twenty. Maybe twenty-one. Someone sighed. Everyone stood in the rain.
The bookseller looked after him. He had a wife and three kids. He had red hands and black hair. He did not love his wife. The stranger slowly learnt to speak and write. Everyone was pleased. They called him Joe. There wasn't any particular reason.
Joe asked the bookseller about his past. This made the older man feel slightly sad. He patted Joe on the shoulder. He told him he would write it down. That was okay. Joe played with the kids. The bookseller could hear the rain on the roof. That was loneliness.
She looked like a stranger in the dark. She used to be someone he knew. The bed was cold when he got into it. He stayed awake for a while, thinking. His wife was snoring, and turned on her side. The bookseller looked at her face. He thought to himself. It was a long time before he fell asleep.
Joe held the piece of paper in his hands. It told him where he was born and where he had grown up. He read it twice. He looked at the bookseller. The bookseller told him there was more. There was noise coming from a television somewhere. They stood there for a while. That was okay. The bookseller's wife shouted something.
Joe turned up the volume of the television to hear it over the shouting. A door was slammed. The bookseller came in and sat down beside him. His face was red. He looked at Joe and looked at the television. Dinner was cold.
He stood over her as she slept. It was late. His eyes hurt. He strained them to see his wife's face. He clenched his fists. There was blood pumping underneath his skin. The sound of it was in his head. It was still raining. He went to bed.
The bookseller didn't open up his shop. He sat in bed all day and wrote. As he finished each page he called Joe in and gave it to him. There were things in his life he regretted. It was a grey day. The house was silent. His wife was at the doctor's.
When it got dark he stopped writing. He held the final sheet of paper in his hands and looked over it. He looked beyond the paper, at the window where he could see the reflection of his own face.
Joe read his own history. He read that he had been having an affair with the bookseller's wife. That she was pregnant with his baby and that her husband had beaten him nearly to death when he had found out. He read of his own intentions to kill the bookseller in his bed that very night.
There was no more rain. Summer was coming.