Lydia heard the distant flap of paper wings as the first book fell from its shelf. She glanced up from the register, head titled, and imagined that a sparrow had flown through an open window again and was circling the store's airy upper floors, trying to find its way out.
A few seconds later another book fell. This time it thudded more than flapped, and she was sure it wasn't a bird.
It was just past midnight, the bookstore was closing, and the final customers were checking out. Lydia was alone at the register, scanning a stack of paperback parenting books being bought by a teenage girl with pitted cheeks and peeling lips. The girl paid in cash and Lydia smiled at her but didn't say anything, didn't ask what the girl was doing alone at a bookstore this late on a Friday night, didn't ask when she was due. When the girl got her change, she met Lydia's eyes for a moment, then rushed out without any bookmarks.
Another book fell, definitely somewhere upstairs.
One of Lydia's comrades, a balding guy named Ernest who walked like a Muppet but always looked sad, was standing by the front door, guiding the night's final customers into Lower Downtown.
"Are you hearing that?" Lydia said from across the store, but her voice was too quiet and anyway Ernest was occupied. She watched him unlock the door he'd just locked to let in a clubbing couple who looked drunk.
"They need to pee," Ernest said, shrugging in Lydia's direction.
Outside, a few scruffy BookFrogs lingered on the flagstone sidewalk, zipping up backpacks and duffels, drinking from gallon jugs of water they'd refilled in the bathroom. One had a pulp crime paperback crammed in his back pocket. Another had a pencil on a string tied to his belt loop. They stood together but none of them spoke, and one by one they slumped separately into the city, off to sleep in a run-down basement in Capitol Hill, or on a bench in Union Stations, or in the sticky cold of Denver's alleys.
Lydia heard another faint flapping. Definitely a falling book, followed by a few more in rapid succession: flap-flap-flap. The store was otherwise quiet.
"Upstairs empty?" she said to Ernest.
"Just Joey," Ernest said, but his eyes were fixed on the corner of zines and pamphlets that flanked the bathrooms where the drunk couple had just disappeared. "Do you think they're screwing in there?"
"He knows we're closed?"
"Joey?" he said. "You never know what Joey knows. He asked after you earlier, by the way. It may have been the longest conversation we've ever had. "Seen Lydia?" I was touched."
