Along the back wall, everything slows down.

You are here with your cart, as you have been

many times before, and you will be again. But now

is all there really is. No past or future, only the books,

and the cart, and you, right now, at work in sci-fi.

The front of the store is a different universe —

up there you smile whether you want to or not. 

Play the role ordained for you. Clone of a clone of a clone.

Parallel universes often overlap with ours, and so it is in the store. 

Maybe you hear the sound of the register, distant. Maybe

the voices of customers, muffled like you are underwater,

like neighbors in a place with thin walls.

But the walls here are paper-thick

and you are building them, book by brick.

Filling each empty space, you hear the pleasant sound

of things sliding into place.

Every used bookstore is the same used bookstore.

Always the same bruised paperbacks, pages soft and lightly browned

and fragrant. Always the same thin white scars running up their spines.

Always that faint, disorienting sense of slipping between worlds.

Time is a liquid; it takes the shape of its space.

Begin with the A’s. Unless

today you begin at the end,

which you do sometimes. But today,

the A’s. Aldiss. Anderson. Anthony. Asimov.

Slowly you work your way from the apex to the floor. And again,

and again, 

and again.

There is an order here, there is a pattern

you can see and feel, there is a warp and a weft, and today you are the shuttle.

Hundreds of bricks, thousands of threads.

Paperback covers polished smooth

and slick. Nothing else feels like that;

nothing you have ever touched

touches you like that. They are cool and alive

and they know you, and you know them.

All these worlds are yours. For now.