Hollow

 

     He’d been wooing her for quite some time, but she’d been doing her best to ignore and avoid him, which he found strange as he could sense that the feeling was mutual. He had sent her a hundred messages, and she didn’t reply even to one.

     So he was surprised when, out of the blue, he received a message from her, inviting him to her house. Inside her house, she led her into her room, which looked more of a library than a bedroom. There was a bed beside a wall, and there were tall bookshelves filled with books on the other three walls. Beside the bed was a nightstand, with a few books on top. A few more books littered the floor, a couple more were on the bed.

     She loved books, he was well aware of that; it was like she was born holding and reading a book. That was why he always gifted her with books; it was just that he hadn’t bought her a book she liked.

     She sat on the edge of bed and asked him to sit beside her, which he readily obeyed.

     She was quiet for a bit as they sat side by side on the bed, and then she said, “I love you. I've loved you for years.”

     It was something he had suspected, but it still staggered him a bit. She looked him straight in the eye, waiting for him to speak. He could tell her a thousand words right there and then, words that would describe his immense feelings for her, but he decided to do what he had been dreaming of doing—he kissed her. And he wanted to cry as he savored those sweet, shivering lips.

     He laid her down on the bed and, breathlessly, started to undress her, and as he kissed her from her belly down to the most delicate part of her body, he noticed something—there were words tattooed on her belly, and on her thighs.

     Dark-skinned

     Left-handed

     Still searching

     Clouded

     Those were some of the words; the others were quite unclear, as if the ink blotched while they were being tattooed on her skin.

     “They are not tattoos,” she said. “And those words were meaningless, just incidental.”

     She reached for one of the books, an old-looking one, on the nightstand and handed it to him.

     “Go to page twenty-six.”

     And he went to that page and saw that half of the almost-yellowed page was missing.

     “There was an illustration of a woman on that page, the heroine of that novel… some words from the novel rested on the illustration,” she narrated. “The original owner of that book fell in love with her, the heroine. He obsessed with her… until one day, he cut off her illustration and he went to a sorceress. He asked that she cast some spell to make the heroine come alive—and the sorceress acquiesced. And the heroine became human.” She paused and melancholy covered her angelic face. “At least on the outside, inside, there was nothing inside her, she was hollow, like a statue made of paper. The sorceress gave the heroine a thousand years to live.”

     “You’re that heroine,” he said, his head numb.

     “Yes,” she said. “And tomorrow is my one thousandth year of being human. And I wanted you to know that I love you and I wanted to experience being loved by you before I crumple and vanish.”

     She went near him and embraced him tightly, and as he held off a tear, he knew now why she smelled like freshly-printed pages of a new book.