It lay between a cold grey sea and a line of hills that appeared to have been left there by a distracted landscape designer and a man with a shovel. The town had one traffic light, two churches, three strong opinions about tourists, and an old municipal clock that had been seven minutes slow since 1989. Nobody ever dared repair it though, because the council feared this might constitute a considerable change leading to reams of unnecessary documentation.

At the eastern end of Gull Street, aptly named after the lone bird spotted there when they first broke ground on its construction, stood Harbour & Page’s Booksellers.

Harbour & Page’s Booksellers stood on the corner of Meridian Cove's Central Square with the air and authority of a place that had once expected better things but, over time, had merely settled for endurance. The shop had once possessed an ampersand and an apostrophe in its signage, along with a certain modest confidence in the future. The confidence was the first to go though, and the punctuation later followed during a winter storm, leaving the shop’s headline to announce HARBOUR PAGE BOOKSELLERS in the flat, stunned manner of a witness giving evidence.

It had a doorbell which no longer rang so much as register a complaint. Years earlier it had cracked down one side, and now, whenever the door opened it produced a noise of an aged silver teaspoon falling into a rusty old metal toolbox full of spanners while fully reconsidering its whole life journey along the way. Localad had been meaning to fix that bell for three years now, which in Meridian Cove, counted as practically imminently.

To be honest, this was a curious state of affairs because Localad could generally fix nearly anything. He could persuade a seized boat winch to move again, make a leaking roof regret its choices, restore a wireless whose interior appeared to have been designed by a herd of furiously inebriated spiders, and identify the precise floorboard responsible for a squeak from two rooms away. He could not, however, repair the doorbell. Not because it was difficult. Purely because it was his own and therefore, warranted no sense of real urgency.

He had also been meaning at some stage, to repair the warped cabinet door beneath the till, the floorboards by the Poetry section which had developed a moral objection to weight-bearing, and the unpunctuated sign out front, that now announced that HARBOUR PAGE BOOKSELLERS had fully given up on any idea of possession and preferred sounding more like an instruction than a family book store.

Other people’s disasters arrived with time-lines and direction. His own tended to indefinitely sit, quietly out of mind.

Localad was nearing sixty-four and looked like an old man who had once been built for more practical work and had been slowly repossessed by a need for literature. He had the hands of a builder, the shoulders of someone who had carried the weight of the world, along with too many boxes of hardbacks, and the expression of a person who’d spent most of his waking life listening politely to reality while privately preferring the worlds of his own fiction. His hair had the untidy quality of an ill-fitting wig that had repeatedly lost arguments with both weather and fingers, as did his face, which when taken as a whole, gave strangers the impression that if one needed a shelf repaired, a leaking pipe silenced, or a recommendation for a good melancholy novel involving the sea, at least one regrettable decision and a murder or two, he was the man to ask.

He liked mornings best, before any customers arrived and before the day had fully remembered to become itself. Localad opened the shop at seven each morning, although Meridian Cove did not begin buying books until nine and did not begin buying them enthusiastically until forced indoors by rain. The first two hours belonged to him, the dust motes and the books.

Meridian Cove was a place that woke in layers too. First would be the fishermen, who moved through dawn with the grave economy of men who considered small talk an easily avoidable leak in the day. Then the bakery would open, announcing its freshly baked bread to the town with all the persuasive force of theology. And then, much later, the tourists would come, who emerged in sandals and untarnished optimism while looking for saltwater taffy, novelty postcards, and a carefully curated experience of rustic charm that notably excluded any actual forms of inconvenience.

Harbour & Page woke gradually too. The pipes muttered. The shelves leaned into one another with the confidential air of old people at a funeral. Somewhere in the Travel section, a loose hardback slid forward every night and had to be pushed back each morning, as though attempting a slow escape to Lisbon.

For Localad, those first two hours were not commercial. They were sacred.

He made coffee in a chipped press-pot his grandmother had owned, a device that looked as though it had survived at least one or two naval engagements with the Spanish Armada. He sat behind the counter with a notebook whose pages had swollen from the sea air and severe overuse. The notebook was black, overflowing with inserted pages and all held together by an elastic band whose commitment to the project was now largely ceremonial.

Inside it lived Purradise, a fantasy world of cats, feuding knights and life choices for the key characters. And Localad was the author.

But nobody knew this.

To the town, Localad was simply Localad: the quiet bookseller, the son of Geoffrey, grandson of Albert, the man who knew where everything was even when it wasn't where it was supposed to be. He could identify a first edition simply by touch, remember who liked village mysteries and who preferred tragic romance, and, if cornered, he could discuss the decline of modern cover design with the intensity of a man describing our recent civic collapses.

The town had broadly concluded that nothing much had ever happened to him, which was a bit unfair, though fully understandable. Very little that showed had happened to him. He had gone away to a community college, where he studied literature because it was the only discipline that had ever seemed honest about human beings being both ridiculous and sad, all at the same time. Then his father got sick, and Localad came home, and after his father died, he stayed, because after all, someone had to run the shop. And grief, once arranged into routine, can disguise itself as duty for years.

He rang up paperbacks for Mrs. Alvarez from the coffee shop/diner next door, who consumed novels at a pace that suggested either extraordinary discipline or a complete indifference to sleep.

He dealt with distributors whose invoices had begun to arrive with the delicate menace of polite creditors.

He swept the floor, reshelved any book returns, and watched the ravenous gulls outside commit acts of extreme airborne piracy over abandoned chips left on the beach with an enthusiasm usually reserved for revolutions.

And at five minutes past six, when the last customer had left and he flipped the sign on the shop’s door over to CLOSED, he returned to the only place that really mattered.

This place he called Purradise.

Purradise had begun when Localad was nine, three years after his mother died and several decades before he acquired the vocabulary to fully explain what that had done to him. Children are often told imagination is an escape. This is inaccurate. For Localad, imagination is a country one builds after the original government has failed.

In Purradise, cats ruled and spoke only when silence would be less dramatic. Mountains sang in the crosswinds. Rivers sometimes changed direction because they had remembered an appointment. The horizon was not just a line, but a wound in the sky, left by an ancient god who had attempted to open the universe with the wrong key.

There was a warrior named Jasmine who carried her dead sister’s sword, although “carried” did not quite cover it. The sword accompanied her like grief accompanied everyone: heavily, inconveniently, and with a tendency to become part of the furniture if left unexamined. She had spent most of the book trying to decide whether she was honouring the dead, obeying them, or allowing them to continue ruining her life from a position of irritating moral advantage. Localad admired her enormously, chiefly because she kept going, all while being significantly less certain than the heroes in most books are generally allowed to be.

It had knightly orders who believed the wound in the sky had ruined whole kingdoms through battles long fought and lost in forests with diverse and wide-ranging opinions. It had a complex history, theology, weather systems, migration patterns, half-invented languages, and a succession of ancient maps so heavily revised they looked like battlefield surgery scars.

There was also an un-named boy in the story, not unlike Localad himself, who believed that if one walked far enough toward the horizon one might eventually reach the wound in the sky and discover whether the world had been broken by accident, design, or the sort of administrative oversights common to all large creation projects.

Localad had been writing some version of this story for twenty odd years now.

Three earlier drafts had already been abandoned to the small and crowded graveyard where earnest manuscripts often go when they die due to some serious overthinking. He had finished none of them. This fourth version was different though. This version had begun, at last, to feel like a proper book instead of a private weather system.

At eight-fifteen, Marjory Vale crossed the square from her flower shop carrying a bucket of tulips and the expression of a woman who had already encountered three easily preventable problems and was willing to make it four. Marjory, had known Localad since childbirth, which meant she had access to versions of him he had attempted to discontinue and delighted in using this against him. And they both believed adulthood might be better organized if nothing else.

She possessed the kind of beauty that never seemed to have made any plans about it. She was broad-shouldered, quick-moving, permanently one windblown strand of hair away from either radiance or combat, and had the sort of face people told secrets to by mistake. She arranged flowers with the practical briskness of a field medic and spoke to most nonsense as if it were mildly contagious. Where Localad folded inward, Marjory expanded into rooms and improved them by force of opinion.

She entered. The bell performed its tragic announcement.

“You still haven’t fixed that?”

“It’s developing character.”

“It has character. What it lacks is structural integrity.”

She set the tulips on the counter. They leaned toward Localad as if seeking asylum.

“Unsold?” he asked.

“Unappreciated. There’s a difference. Unsold is commerce. Unappreciated is civilization collapsing.”

She noticed the notebook beneath his hand.

“You were writing?”

“I was making inventory notes.”

“You write inventory notes with dragons?”

“They’re a specialist order.”

Marjory looked at him. She had a way of looking at people that removed several decorative layers of nonsense before breakfast.

“How far are you?”

“In the book?”

“No, Localad, in competitive yachting.”

He closed the notebook. “Nearly finished.”

“You’ve been nearly finished since the first Gulf War.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“So does your progress.”

She softened, because her sharpness was not cruelty. It was tenderness in a long dress while wearing sensible shoes.

“One day,” she said, “you’ll have to let somebody read it.”

“One day.”

“Yeah right, your favourite date sits comfortably between Never and After I’ve Completely Ruined and Wasted My Life.”

The bell clattered again. Mrs. Alvarez swept in from the diner, carrying gossip in the manner of a ceremonial flame.

“Localad,” she announced, “I require a murder.”

“Fictional?”

Mrs. Alvarez considered. “For now.”

The day had begun.

Localad sold a mystery, repaired a child’s wind-up submarine with nothing more than a paperclip, reordered three cookbooks nobody would buy, and took a call from a distributor regarding an invoice that was thirty days overdue. The distributor used the phrase “account resolution pathway,” which meant ‘money now!’, but dressed in casual evening wear.

"You're going to die at that damned counter, and they'll find your skeleton still revising chapter one."

"I'm past the first chapter," said Localad.

Marjory narrowed her eyes. "Past it in the sense of 'have written more pages', or past it in the sense of 'have emotionally given up and accepted that stories don’t need endings?'"

"I object to that question."

"That’s not an answer. It is a cardigan pretending to be a person."

Localad, who was indeed wearing a cardigan of unusual defensiveness, ignored this.

Marjory peered at him with the affectionate exasperation of someone who had known him since childhood and had long ago accepted that much of her life would be spent encouraging him to do things he was perfectly more than capable of doing but had developed strong principles against.

She smiled anyway. Marjory always smiled at him as though she could see the version of him he hadn't quite grown into yet and somehow still found the delay forgivable.

That night, after closing, Localad walked upstairs to his home above the shop. Meridian Cove at night had the peaceful look of a town that would be appalled to discover any history happening anywhere nearby. Boats knocked gently against the pilings. The ice cream shop had its metal shutter abandoned halfway down. The town's only traffic light blinked yellow, having apparently lost confidence in the concept of its own authority.

In his coat pocket was an unopened letter from the bank. It had arrived that morning in a windowed envelope, the natural habitat of bad news. He held it for a moment, then placed it beneath the till rolls.

This was not cowardice, he told himself. It was sequencing. He had not opened it yet, largely because unopened bad news remains, for a few extra hours, like Schrodinger’s news, only theoretically bad news. And right now, theoretically bad news is much easier to carry. But he already knew what it would say anyway. The shop’s ledger had been speaking in ever increasingly clear threats on that count for months. Harbour & Page was not doing well at all. The loan renewals now loomed while invoices multiplied in drawers like pessimistic rabbits.

So, he thought, instead, about his Purradise.

That was the useful thing about invented worlds. They could be saved by simply writing the right sentences. Real life however, demanded numbers, signatures, and really awkward conversations with men in dark suits. But a fictional kingdom, however imperilled, could still be redeemed by extreme courage, sacrifice, or a well-timed revelation or two, especially when high up on a fantasy range of mountains.

Outside, the harbour darkened. The tide came in with its usual indifference and the same tide filled the area with the confidence of something that had never once needed approval. Inside, Harbour & Page gathered itself around Localad: cracked bell, leaning shelves, missing punctuation and all. He carried on up the stairs, made himself a dinner he forgot to finish, and at the kitchen table, by weak lamplight, Localad bent over the page once more and wrote until one in the morning, filling page after page in his cramped, slanting hand:

 

“The feline’s forest did not just have a colour; it had a pulse. It was a rhythmic, emerald thrumming that vibrated in the marrow of Jasmine’s bones.

She stood at the edge of the Jade Verge, the point where the natural world suddenly ended and the bioluminescent anomaly before her began. Behind her lay the grey, dusty reality of the dying outlands. Before her was a cathedral of light, a tangled web of silver-barked trees and leaves that glowed with the intensity of a radioactive neon.

The locals called it the "Chlorophyll Ghost." They said the forest wasn’t growing; it was merely remembering.

Jasmine adjusted her backpack and stepped over the threshold. The air changed instantly. It wasn't the humid, rotting scent of a swamp anymore, but something sharp and ozone-heavy, like the petrichor air right before a lightning strike. Every breath now, felt like she was drinking cold water.

As she pushed herself deeper, the shadows became an inky-black against the searing lime glow of the canopy. The light didn't come from a sun she couldn't see; it bled from the veins of the leaves themselves. Every branch was a neon filament, every trunk a pillar of liquid light.

She was looking for the Heart — the central spire of the forest where the very first seed had once landed decades ago. They said if you stood beneath it, the forest would share its dreams with you.

"Jasmine," a cat’s voice whispered.

She froze. It wasn't a voice to be heard with ears, but a vibration in her teeth. She looked around, but there were only the ever-shifting green haze and the skeletal silhouettes of the branches to be seen.

"Jasmine, stay."

The ground beneath her boots felt soft, almost spongy. Looking down, she realized she wasn't stepping on dirt now, but on a carpet of glowing moss that recoiled slightly from her weight, leaving behind dark footprints that slowly filled back in with light. The forest was watching her, tracking her every move through the interconnected root systems below.

She reached a clearing where the green was so bright it blurred her vision. In the centre stood the Great Trunk, a behemoth of a tree that pulsed like a slow, glowing heart. Its branches didn't just reach for the sky; they seemed to weave into the very atmosphere, knitting the fog into a solid light.

Jasmine reached out, her sword carrying hand now trembling. As her skin brushed the bark, the green light surged, racing up her arm like a warm current. She didn't pull away. She steadied herself and concentrated on what was before her… She held her nerve. And slash, went the blade of her sword.

The forest hadn't just let her in. It was now coming home with her!”

 

Localad slowly lowered his pen and carefully re-read what he’d just written. In Purradise, the mountains had finally begun to sing.