Liberty's Sparkle (4)

   
   "Liberty's Sparkle (4)"
   
   Within her modest surroundings, encompassed by her own personal library, remembering her dead father's words, quoting Faulkner a bit:  "Read!  Read everything you can get your hands on.  Not just the classics.  The pulp fiction, the funnies, everything; next, write your own book--if you like it, keep it. If you don't--throw it out the window."
   Liberty was deep into the mystical literature of Philip K. Dick.  When she bought the book at her town's last remaining bookstore (print media is dying a slow, miserable death), the book clerk elegantly said:  "Quirky stuff."  
   Liberty smiled, not being able to wait and add it to her collection.  A real book.  One that she could manipulate without the blue light of a computer device keeping her awake after reading; plus, to open the squid stained pages and smell the aquatic ocean of a crazy man's bizarre intellect--it was a sublime synergy of reader and writer.
   Yet tomorrow:  work.  Stocking shelves with canned foods and trying not to get involved with the other workers, like Tommy Duncston, him always asking with a hornafied grin:  "Wanna get laid?"
   She pondered it, and totally--not with him.  Not some brute hellbent on discharging his greedy and sticky seed.  A yeast infection from a dude like that would resonate for years.  She remembered her grandmother had furiously dialed a 9/11 operator all because of a runny, oozing yeast infection flared to the itchy max.
  She got her mind off things, reality making her feel heavy.  Went back to one of science fiction's greatest prophets, turning pages like a mad woman, hungry to escape the hardcore drama of having no relatives or people that gave a damn.
   Then, she found her gift--the Crucifix.  Hoping, hoping, . . .