Moonlight & Vines Read Free

a nurse romance and she’d treat you with the same courtesy and respect. The store is crammed with books, literally, floor to ceiling. They gather like driftwood in tall stacks at the ends of bookcases, all around and upon her desk, in boxes and bags, filling the front window display except for the small cleared area where her Jack Russell terrier, Snippet, lies watching the street when she’s not ensconced on Holly’s lap. The sign painted onto the window, Gothic lettering, paint flaking, simply reads, HOLLY RUE, USED BOOKS .
    I think about what she’s just asked me and realize I don’t know.
    â€œWell, Saskia’s unusual enough,” Holly tells me. “Hang on while I go online.”
    Holly and some friends have been creating this huge database they call the Wordwood somewhere out in the Net, assuring themselves that the Information Highway will remember the old technologies—books and printing presses were marvels of technological import in their day, after all—at the same time as it embraces the new. I don’t know how many of them are involved in the project, but they’ve been working on it for years. The Net connects them from every part of the world, each participant adding book titles, authors, bios, publishing histories, reviews, cross-references and whatever else they might think is pertinent to this amazing forest of information they’ve cultivated.
    I tried logging on once when I was out visiting Holly and lost an afternoon glued to the screen, following some arcane trail that started with a short story by Sherman Alexie that I was trying to track down and ended up in a thicket of dissertations on Shakespeare’s identity. Holly laughed at me when I finally came up for air. “The Wordwood’s like that,” she tells me. “One of these days I’m going to go in there and forget to come back.” The way she talks about the place it’s as though she actually visits it.
    â€œGot something,” she tells me. “Her last name’s Madding, but she only uses her given name for a byline. We’ve got three titles listed—hey, wait a minute. I think I have one of these.” I hear her get up from her chair and go looking for it, roam-phone in hand, because she’s still talking to me. “Yeah, here it is. It’s called
Mirrors
and it’s her, let me see, second collection.” More shuffling noises as she makes her way back to the desk and looks through the book. “You want me to read one to you? They’re all pretty short.”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œOkay. Here, I’ll just do the first one, ‘Tarot.’ ”
    What she said:
You turn from me
as I turn
      from the cards
refusing to face
what we see
.
    Holly’s got this amazing speaking voice, rough and resonant, like it’s been strained through years of whiskey and cigarettes, though she doesn’t smoke or drink. It gives the poem an edge that I’m not sure would be there if I’d just taken the words from the page.
    â€œNice,” I say. “It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?”
    â€œMmm. There’s a lot of sadness in those few lines. Oh, this is cool.”
    The word’s just come back in fashion, but Holly never gave it up. She’s been known to say “far out” as well.
    â€œWhat’s that?” I ask.
    â€œI was looking back at the Wordwood and I see she’s involved with
Street Times
. She does some editorial work for them.”
    That is interesting.
Street Times
is a thin little paper produced for street people to sell in lieu of asking for spare change. You see them selling it on half the corners downtown. The vendors pay something like fifty cents an issue and whatever you give them above that is what they earn. Most of the material is produced by the street people themselves—little articles, cartoons, photographs, free classifieds. Every issue they run a