The Stars Did Wander Darkling by Colin Meloy

Author:Colin Meloy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Randy Dean’s eyes were going.

These were the words he was thinking as he screwed up his face and peered through the lenses of his glasses at the dark green computer screen. Experimentally, he lifted the frames from the bridge of his nose and let them hang at the top of his brow, now looking at the screen with his naked eye. That was worse still. He sighed and let the glasses fall back into place. Slightly blurry would just have to be the standard. He hit the enter button on the keyboard and turned to the printer, waiting.

Nothing happened.

It had been six months since he’d installed this computer system at the store, replacing the pen-and-paper method he’d been using since he’d opened, and he still hadn’t gotten used to it. It was his cousin’s suggestion, his cousin who owned a movie-rental shop in Salem. Easier way to keep a tally of inventory, he’d said. Better bookkeeping. So far, it had only given Randy Dean headaches. Headaches and paper jams. Which was what he guessed was happening now. He pulled the plastic cover off the top of the dot-matrix printer and peered into the guts of the machine. Sure enough, he saw a mash of paper accordioned into the space below the roller.

“Blast it,” he said. “Stupid thing.”

He loosened the wheel and pulled the paper from the printer. The paper tore as he did so and he cursed again, loud enough that he had to announce a polite apology to the only customers in the shop, a father and son browsing the kids and family section together. Having finally freed the paper, Randy ended up with a kind of rat’s nest of crumpled dot-matrix-printer paper in his arms; he imagined he must’ve looked very foolish when the father and son approached the counter with a copy of The Secret of NIMH to rent.

“Sorry,” Randy said through the eruption of paper. “Still working out the kinks.”

It was another twenty minutes of tinkering before he’d managed to load the printer again, and another fifteen before the computer was printing the late-fee notices he’d meant to start making that morning. Feeling somewhat accomplished, Randy picked up the wad of paper from the floor and headed out to the garbage bins.

It was a sunny day, and Randy briefly paused at the sidewalk to take in the weather. He’d lived in Seaham for nearly ten years now, and the feel of the summer coastal air affected him as much as it had the first day he’d arrived. The ocean still held a kind of magic to him, a man who’d spent most of his life in landlocked Wisconsin. With a new spring in his step, Randy continued around the side of the building to the back alley, where lived the large green dumpsters he shared with the nail salon next door.

He’d just emptied his arms of his load of printer paper, hissed a quiet “good riddance” to the maw of the dumpster, and was about to return to the store when he heard someone say his name.

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