The Golden Ticket
The Tale of August Beecher, part 1.
Her life was a melody of ink-stained blankets and lists made, unmade. She never intended for her life to be as cyclical as it had become—the early alarm, even before the sun, the jaunt down her cul-de-sac, her white terrier sniffing every blade of grass, the monotonous drive to work where she often struggled to keep her eyes open, the warm greeting from Shelly at the front desk, the indecipherable comfort that came from being surrounded by books, the subtle nod from Craig on his lunch break, the air pregnant with expectation, the winding of her nervous system with every bell the open door rung, the eventual collapse of a shelf or two, the eventual collapse of her energy as the sun drifted below the horizon, the red brake lights stinging her eyes, traffic, always traffic, the tender reunion with Chester the terrier, the feeding, the caring, the cleaning of her body and his so as to make it to the next morning, and, finally, the page of the day turned and closed, the next without ink.
She didn’t intend for it to be like this.
But, like so many things in life, it seemed to happen of its own accord. She, no say.
When you’re traveling through each day in the same way as the last and preparing the same for the next, you don’t really notice that your days turn into every day and your weeks into every weeks and your years into every years.
She felt the time passing—the subtle grey growing at her temples, the crow’s feet scrunched next to her eyes, the aches of ascending a staircase—but didn’t equate it to anything more than annoying inconveniences of a moment’s pause. She colored the roots of her hair, she lotioned and powdered the crow’s feet, she avoided steep staircases and soon enough these habits melted into the cycle of her days, time passing unnoticed.
This was until she received an invitation in the mail.
The letter was addressed to one Miss August Beecher at 4 Clifford Avenue in Pelham, New York, 10803. The envelope did not have a return address, just one slightly off-center stamp with a picture of Roy Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl in tiny reproduction. Since her name was printed clearly and correctly and since she rather appreciated Lichtenstein’s cartoon-y exhibition of female suffering, August opened the letter.
It wasn’t, at the time, rare to August to receive mysterious mail. She often received letters, most of which were solicitations or donation requests from organizations whose websites she had only visited once during which she vehemently denied any right of “cookies”. She couldn’t fathom how these well-meaning companies, or so they claimed, had found her private mailing address after less than 15 seconds on their homepage, and she promptly shredded every piece of mail she deemed suspect. There was something about this letter though, with the handwritten address and the weightless insides that gave her pause. She looked for clues in the postmark and the strange barcode at the bottom of the envelope—though only found New York City and a date marked 5 days ago—before deciding it intriguing enough to rip open the flap and deposit the contents on her kitchen counter.
Inside was a ticket.
One ticket for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child playing at the Lyric Theatre on W 43rd Street at 8PM on Friday night.
August looked back in the envelope. She shook it upside down before she realized that all that was in the envelope—all that was mailed to her from a mysterious benefactor who not only knew her private address but knew of her deep and all-encompassing love for the Harry Potter series—was the ticket. No invitation, no reciprocal contract, nothing beside the one ticket which held seat 4H for Miss August Beecher.
This puzzled her.
She could not conceive of this gift—could she call it a gift?—any more than she could conceive of what had to follow it: the seizing of this ticket or the disposal of it. It seemed as if this envelope had snatched her out of her cyclical, predictable life and left her with an urgent, pivotal decision: stay, or go.
I guess it went something like this.
Everyday, either before work, during, or after, August would open her book. She’d open her book to the last page read and continue reading. When her time was up, she’d place one bookmark or another inside and cast the book aside. Every time she did this—every time she saw the book slightly more read than the last—she had real difficulty leaving it behind. It wasn’t because the story was difficult to leave behind, though often it was, it was instead because of the creases she’d left.
Most of the time she read paperbacks. And most of the time the top cover of the book, even if she was just starting a book and had only read one line, would stick up and out. August could be as careful as a mouse lifting each page, turning to the next, even going so far as to gently cast her eyes upon the print, feeling as if she might further crease the page if she read too heartily. She wanted the book to remain in the position she’d bought it—thin, compact, uncreased.
It was why she resorted to using other books—as yet unread—as weights to try and get the pages of the book she was currently reading to return to their original state. Although the weight had flattened the book some, it had not completely. The top cover was still sticking upward, flapping in the wind of her heaved breath, seemingly laughing at her idiocy.
She never finished that book. She couldn’t stand to lift its pages yet again, to destroy it even more, to crease it beyond recognition. Instead, she let it collect dust on her shelf.
She did not want her life to crease in the same way. She knew that by accepting this ticket, by taking a chance on its mystery, she would likely crease the parts of her that had remained thin, compact, and flattened until now. She knew the thread-like fibers of her life, much like that of her books, when bent, would not return to their origins.
And that is why, in the time it took for the ticket to be tucked between the pages of a new book, August decided to go.
TO BE CONTINUED…