The Books
On the wall storage unit in the front room, that her father had copied in exact detail from a Readers Digest Complete Do-it-yourself Manual, among the china souvenirs, were The Books. There was a book with maroon coloured imitation leather binding, titled '100 Great Lives', written in gold lettering on the spine, with a separate chapter for seven women. There was a fat dictionary with curved finger-tip sized steps precision cut and staggered diagonally along the front opening edge of the pages — for each two or three letters of the alphabet. There was a navy blue bound medical manual, with an implicit 'DO NOT OPEN' on its illicit dark blue cover. There were a set of beige leather bound encyclopaedia with gold embossed titles on the spines. The illustrations pictured other worlds — under the sea, the stars in the sky, mountains, rivers, lakes, volcanos, strange animals and birds, and stranger fishes. Some of the pages were folded maps. When opened out and released from the bounds of the book, they revealed the world and its countries in ice-cream colours like a sickly sweet surprise. The borders, black lines slightly bleeding into the paper. She traced, with her finger the names of the places from where her parents had journeyed, as if she could imbue herself with the secrets that were left there.