The Night Plummer & The Mockemortician Excerpt

Her reading place was originally a haven from Matra Dara's watchful eyes, always catching Agnas at what she was doing, or failing to do. Fire had not been her only anthropomorphic childhood friend; she would come to this spot to sip wine with the Ladies of the Wood. The Ladies were still there, but now Boulder was something to lean her back against, Birch offered a branch to hang her sack over, and Stump served as a table to set her now-real wineskin on. Crotchety Maple, lonely and sad, stood brooding but enjoying Agnas's presence even if she would never admit it. Birch's sisters gathered nearby, hands joined as they circled in a never-ending dance. A cluster of evergreens gossiped and giggled behind Agnas's back, occasionally swaying in the breeze and peering over her shoulder to see what she was up to. It was a good place to nap, to dream, and of course, to read.

She was a slow reader, which worked out well since Minz Luggo's library was small. She would have already exhausted it had she read any faster. In a place where few could read, and those who could did not, she was grateful to have anything to read at all. She was re-reading The Arborendium, a year-long survey of the trees surrounding the Temple Square, conducted by Minza Hulna of the Temple of Florance and two of her acolytes. There were still a few books left in Minz Luggo's library that she hadn't read, but sometimes she found comfort in discovering new things in a familiar book rather than facing the overwhelming vastness of the world of knowledge inside a new one.

Even though she read slowly and carefully, trying hard to comprehend everything she took in, she found there was much she missed. A sentence might send her deep into thought and she would either gloss over the next one, or it would sit neglected and bored, waiting for her attention while she stared off into nothing. She wondered at what it must be like to be a sentence, a collection of words arranged in a particular order to convey a specific bit of information. Most of its life was spent in dark stillness, crammed awkwardly against another set of words on the opposite page. Or perhaps it was more of a cozy situation, the words cuddling instead of smushing. Every now and then someone would pick up the book, and there must have been such anticipation as each page rehearsed its lines and waited impatiently for its turn to be read. What frustration it must have been for some lonely sentence in the middle or end to have her, of all people, as a reader. And what about those readers who sped through, barely noticing any particular sentence, or worse, skipping past to a more glamorous paragraph, leaving the rest feeling purposeless. What profound disappointment it must have been to have its moment of giddy expectation turn to bitter inattention in a flash of turning pages.

Her eye caught the words capnut tree and she stopped flipping. When she was a child, she had three capnut dolls that she would take everywhere with her, dragging them along on a rope. She couldn't remember having them at the Plummers' Grove and wondered where they went. She picked up a nearby capnut and rolled it back and forth between her hands until she was ready to read again.

Each tree in the book was named (categorically, not personally, though Agnas thought the latter would be a pleasant way to spend the year), with its height and circumference recorded. They noted any significant observations, such as holes, nests, leaf coloration, animal sightings, and other points of interest. The acolyte Frenn had a funny way of describing the shapes of trees: this one looks like Minza Hulna bending over to scold us for failing to properly weed the garden; this one is shaped like Minza Hulna snoring away in her bed; this pair looks like Minza Hulna reprimanding Dayzee for mis-measuring a sapling; this one looks like a three-eyed toad. Apparently Minza Hulna did not preview the manuscript before it was sent to the scribes.