The ear­ly after­noon was decid­ed­ly heavy, so I turned up the vol­ume when I stepped out­side. There was pow­der in the air, pow­der every­where, and soon I was snow­blind.

As I stepped on the bus, I looked at my watch and real­ized that I was leav­ing almost two hours ear­ly for class. How had I made such a mis­take?

I decid­ed to use the best of my time and do some brows­ing. I saw what appeared to be Nadine in the mall, and would have approached her if:

1. I was absolute­ly sure it was her
2. a sud­den case of shy­ness had­n’t tak­en over me

I took off to Zone to see if there was any­thing new, and alas, an open-air chime box was avail­able. I was tempt­ed to buy it, if the song was­n’t some Christmas car­ol. Afterwards, I set off for Folio, but to my dis­ap­point­ment, dis­cov­ered that it’s been replaced with a soon-to-be fur­ni­ture store.

I decid­ed to peruse the book­stores in the area, and the first one I went to had noth­ing of inter­est. Even at Chapters I did­n’t find any new trans­la­tions of A Hero of Our Time, or the audio nov­el of Lolita read by the sul­try voice of Jeremy Irons. The third book­store I went to, a sur­pris­ing­ly mod­ern store with eclec­tic fin­ish­ings, had a very selec­tive col­lec­tion of books. Every wall or pil­lar had shelves set up with books of a dif­fer­ent genre, and the entire place was quite a change from the bus­tle of the street right out­side. At one cor­ner, there was a mechan­i­cal fire­place with four very dis­tinct flames warm­ing up the air. The fire would have seemed much more real­is­tic if not for the odd churn­ing sound com­ing from the chim­ney. A couch was set up in front of the fire­place for peo­ple to read, but only a beau­ti­ful, navy blue, long-haired cat was sleep­ing on it, bel­ly up, one paw lazi­ly stretched out towards the fire.

Put in a dif­fer­ent mood by the seren­i­ty of the store, I set off for class, and prompt­ly changed my playlist.