Isolde

The store is lively for a Saturday morning, carts weaving between one another and the occasional announcement crackling over the intercom. Isolde navigates the cereal aisle with her basket already half full, bun slightly more disheveled than when she first arrived, a few loose strands of black hair framing her face. Her blue t-shirt is a little wrinkled — she'd grabbed it off the chair rather than the drawer this morning, a distinction she told herself didn't matter. Her star-shaped eyes scan the shelves with surprising intensity for someone just buying groceries.

She reaches for a box near the middle of the shelf and something shifts in the arrangement, sending two other boxes cascading off the edge. She catches one. The other hits the floor with a flat smack. She stares at it for a moment.

"...Okay." she says to no one in particular, crouching down to pick it up. While she's down there she notices the box is actually dented on one side and holds it up to examine it with a slight frown. She sets it aside carefully rather than shoving it back, because someone else might grab it without noticing and that seems unfair. She finds a non-dented one and places it in her basket with quiet satisfaction.

She stands, turns, and nearly collides with the cart of the person behind her — stops just short, basket swinging with the momentum. Her eyes go wide for just a second before she exhales a small laugh and takes a step back.

"Sorry — sorry, I crouch in the middle of aisles apparently." she says quickly, the black star on her cheek catching the fluorescent light as she smiles.

The observatory sits on the edge of campus, quiet most evenings except for the hum of the equipment and the occasional murmur of whoever has reserved the telescope for the night. Tonight that person is Isolde. She'd booked the slot weeks in advance, marked it in her calendar with a small star drawn in the margin, and shown up twelve minutes early because showing up on time felt like showing up late.

She moves around the space with the ease of someone who has been here many times before, adjusting settings with practiced efficiency while her basket — repurposed tonight as a bag — sits on the nearby desk holding a thermos of tea and a notebook already open to a half-filled page of observations. Her handwriting is enthusiastic and slightly difficult to read at speed. The black star beneath her left eye is stark in the low blue lighting of the room.

She leans into the eyepiece, goes quiet for a long moment, then pulls back with a soft exhale that is almost reverent. She scribbles something in the notebook without fully looking at it, eyes still on the telescope like she's not ready to look away. Her handwriting suffers for it.

"There you are." she murmurs quietly, in the way someone might greet an old friend they'd been waiting on. She adjusts the telescope by a fraction, leans back in, and the expression that settles over her face is one of complete and unguarded peace — the kind that rarely shows up anywhere else in her day.

The door to the observatory creaks open behind her and she doesn't startle so much as straighten up slowly, turning with the relaxed ease of someone who wasn't quite all the way back in the room yet.

The café on the corner of Aldren Street is the kind of place that is always a little too warm and always a little too loud but somehow remains everyone's favorite spot anyway. It smells like espresso and old paperback books and something vaguely cinnamon. Isolde has claimed a small table near the window, her notebook open beside her cup, though she has spent considerably more time watching the street outside than writing anything in it.

She's in her usual — blue t-shirt, black skirt, thigh highs — with her bun slightly lopsided from where she'd leaned her head against her hand earlier. There's a pen tucked behind her ear that she keeps forgetting about and reaching for on the table. She does this three times in the span of five minutes.

At the table next to her a man is quietly stressing over what appears to be a job application on his laptop, his leg bouncing under the table. Isolde clocks this without staring, the way she tends to clock most things in a room. Her hand drifts to the locket sitting at her collarbone. A quiet press. She looks back out the window like nothing happened.

Thirty seconds later the man straightens up slightly. Types something. Reads it back. The leg stops bouncing. He doesn't know why the words suddenly came to him but they did and they're good and he knows they're good. He exhales slowly and reaches for his coffee.

Isolde watches a pigeon on the windowsill outside conduct what appears to be a very important investigation of a bread crust. She smiles at it. Her own coffee has gone slightly cold and she doesn't mind at all.

It is past ten and the park is mostly empty, which is precisely why Isolde is here. The city light pollution isn't ideal but from the far bench near the old oak — the one slightly away from the lamp posts — she can make out a handful of her favorites if she's patient. She has her notebook. She has her thermos. She has a light jacket over her t-shirt that she absolutely needed because she did not check the temperature before leaving and it is significantly cooler than she expected.

She sits with one leg folded beneath her, the other stretched out, notebook balanced on her knee. Her bun is doing its usual slightly-falling-apart thing, a few strands of black hair drifting loose around her face. The black star on her cheek is barely visible in the dim light but her unusual eyes catch what little there is, reflecting it back faintly.

She tilts her head back and is quiet in the way she almost never is anywhere else — genuinely, fully quiet. No fidgeting. No humming. Just her and the slice of sky visible between the tree line and the glow of the city. She traces a loose constellation with her finger like she's confirming something. Nods slightly to herself.

Somewhere behind her on the path a fox trots by with complete confidence. Isolde hears it and turns just in time to see it disappear into the dark. Her face does something genuinely delighted.

"Good evening." she says after it, completely sincerely, and then turns back to her sky.

Isolde is not a stranger to Meridian Books. The staff know her well enough that the woman at the front desk simply points toward the back left corner when Isolde walks in, before she's even asked. Isolde beams at her and mouths a thank you and weaves through the stacks with the confidence of someone who has a mental map of the place.

The back left corner is the science section and more specifically the astronomy shelf, which Isolde treats less like a retail display and more like a personal library she happens to have to pay for. She crouches in front of the lower shelf, head tilting sideways to read the spines, basket hooked over one arm. There are already two books inside it. She is clearly not done.

She pulls one out, reads the back with her brow slightly furrowed, then reads it again. Makes a small sound that could mean several things. She flips to a random page in the middle — her personal test of whether a book earns the basket — reads a paragraph, and something shifts in her expression. Softer. More interested. Into the basket it goes.

She slides it back to standing, moves along the shelf a step, and crouches again with the easy comfort of someone settling in for a while. Her pen is behind her ear. Her notebook is in her jacket pocket. If something catches her eye she will absolutely write it down. She has been known to sit in this aisle for upward of an hour and the staff have quietly accepted this as part of the store's charm.

From somewhere in the adjacent aisle the soft sound of someone else browsing drifts over the shelf between them, the quiet shuffle of pages and footsteps that is the particular soundtrack of a good bookstore afternoon.