It has been years since Sarah bought me and placed me on her shelf. I remember just how eager she was to start reading me. She used to curl up on her bed every night, place me in her lap and gently turn my pages over in the soft, orange glow of her lamp. I watched in silence as different emotions flickered across her face. Every new chapter would bring a twinkle in her eyes and every time she read something particularly appealing, her lips would tilt upwards in a small, soft smile. Our routine continued for a long time. New books would continuously join me on the shelf and with every new book that came, my time with Sarah decreased until, one day, she stopped reading me. When she would come to the shelf, she wouldn’t so much as glance in my direction.
Two years after that, on her seventeenth birthday, her parents gave her a present; it was a rectangular, flat device with a screen that glowed when tapped. To my shelf-mates and I, it seemed remarkably ordinary and dull but it was clear that it meant more than that to her. We would watch her tapping the little, flat menace that was taking her away from us. We saw how her eyes slowly lost their spark and how her laughter became hollow. Our non-existent hearts wept with emotion as we gazed at her, silently begging, longing to be read.
Years have passed and I still lie in my shelf. My pages are brown and dust covers every inch of my surface. I still think of how she stopped reading me and wonder, was it something I did?
*This was one of the top 5 stories at ChaiChalk’s 300 Word Stories competition
