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Copyright © 2026 by Zoé Duhaime
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In the third chapter entitled “The Wild Wood” in the book The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame, the character Mole had an umbrella stand with no umbrella. This is because it was stolen.
It had been quite some time since Noon Bonaventure had last seen a book move. Words just didn’t dance for her like they used to, the secret in the margins had gone on holiday.
She had forgotten about the man in the charcoal cloak—or something like forgetting—and had been showing customers to their books without care. Even to the shelves of rare landscape fiction, she hadn’t been too concerned. The worst that could happen, after all, was that a client would think they needed glasses, or had stayed up too late, or maybe that they should go to church. There had been no one in years looking on purpose at La Tobaganne, no one since her dad had passed and the households drifted.
It was a peculiar rainy day in the City Not-Unlike-Montréal when Odette came looking for her usual order of misprints. Odette visiting wasn’t itself odd—she was a spirited retiree who liked to backseat drive the failing English-language bookshop—but already that day things had gone quite wrong. The only other shop hand had given in her two weeks’ notice, a home visit for a private collection had ended with a marriage proposal from a septuagenarian, and the barista next door had visited to warn that their basement had entirely flooded. The misprint of The Wind in the Willows hadn’t raised any alarm bells, it was only a typo in the table of contents. The illustrations were all where they were supposed to be when Noon pulled it off its shelf for one of her only reliable clients.
Then, clear as day, the foreword stirred. Like sand in a sieve, a sentence percolated and reordered itself.
The man in the charcoal cloak fumed.
“Where the hell have you been? The draft is done and Wordsworth is over.”
Noon closed the book as casually as she could manage it and started to pull its neighbours: the letters of Jules Verne, A. A. Milne, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and other stars of her childhood. Odette, who wasn’t an easy customer at the best of times, watched coolly. Years ago she’d explained she was a retired archivist, and occasionally her temperament betrayed a fierce need for order, usually at the bargaining table or whenever a client of the café brought a coffee to the bookshelves.
“You know, I’d forgotten, but the Grahame is actually on hold,” Noon tried.
“That’s bad business, angel. I’d have given five for it yesterday.”
Five hundred for a typo in the table of contents was outrageous even for Odette. The young shopkeeper drummed her fingers on the cover and weighed a basement flood against the worst-case scenario for a fellow in a charcoal cloak.
“But I’d give seven today, I’ve got an appointment.”
“You might be interested in this—here, it’s got “The Sandman” (1816) by Hoffmann, and it’s Desplechin’s signed copy.” That was, she knew, Odette’s weakness—operatic set designers, lush illustrators.
“He’s intolerably dramatic—absolutely not.”
“Andersen’s diaries (1871)? It’s got a dedication—”
As if on cue, it started to thunder. Surely the basement waterline was rising.
“Seven is a fair price for Grahame and you know it,” Odette continued. The radio was doing nothing to cut the quickly growing tension between the two women. There had only been two customers that morning, and just yesterday there had been a hydro bill. Noon clapped the cover of the book together a few times, hoping maybe she could at least scare off any interlopers. Seven would give her a moment to breathe.
She hoped they weren’t by the riverbank, in the first chapter—that was her favourite part. But you couldn’t trust storybook characters who’d crawled out of their books to host a circus, not as far as you could throw them. At this point in her life, however, money meant more than the secrets of others: Money meant a break in the rain for the bookshop.
“Seven is more than fair,” she agreed. Every receipt she hand-wrote with her dead father’s fountain pen (always). We all know where this is going.
The apartment upstairs was only zoned for living by a prayer, but things were easier in the City Not-Unlike-Montréal. Inspectors were rare, and Noon Bonaventure was charming. The visits so far had ended with many comments about how difficult it was to run a business these days, much less as a young woman, and how well did books even sell, anyways. Inspectors were not the problem. The corner of Rue Bader Ginsberg and Blvd Rigaud was not the bookseller’s paradise that it had been, back before Noon’s life had gone to hell. On the bright side, there were now two dentists she could turn to in a pinch, and her smile had never been brighter. She was the last bastion of a dying neighbourhood trade.
Her tastes were eclectic, but she was the child of a bookshop owner and an apprentice of surrender. Those days she was on a steady march of gardening memoirs, transport history, letter collections, and cookery. Fiction felt like an empty hall of mirrors.
If the basement next door hadn’t been flooding, Noon would have spent the night with her binding tools and a glass of wine, and might have entertained a date. Hell, she might have even sensed something was wrong. But as it was, she was up to her knees in swamp water and helping to haul up buckets. The café owner was beside himself.
“Ah fuck, there goes the eight ounces—Are you sure your dad didn’t tell you where he kept the pump?”
Long stacks of paper cups were sailing around the gurgling floor drain, now a whirlpool. The radio from upstairs was reporting on citywide flooding. Even the mayor and her pretty bicycle were lamenting.
“You know, I forgot to ask,” Noon shouted, a bucket in each hand.
“Can you call your mom?!”
Noon nodded and dragged the buckets up the stairs, past frantic baristas. If she’d been more approachable that year, they might all be friends. A napkin plumed by her, the door blew open, all things passed her by. She dialed her mom.
“Allô maman, how’s the dinner crowd?” A rainstorm in that city always meant more bottles of wine. Hardly anyone could keep track of their umbrellas, and everyone in a City Not-Unlike-Montréal looked better with wet hair anyways. Her mom said as much from her popular restaurant that she ran like a newsroom. “Did Dad ever tell you where he kept the storm supplies? The pump? No, I don’t know, he just said the pump. Oh, god—”
The door to the café burst open. A siren somewhere was joined by another. Noon’s hair was a river down her neck, and a cyclist spun across the intersection. There were a million things she had forgotten to ask when her dad got sick, and they ranged from inconvenient to devastating. Most she had made peace with, and then every so often there was a rainstorm.
Apparently her dad had lent it out to a friend. Then, of course, he’d gotten sick and died, and in the interim, they’d had bigger fish to fry at La Tobaganne, never mind in la famille Bonaventure. She was personally proud that she had made it out of brain cancer without a one-way ticket anywhere else. Of course, her dad had many friends, and those friends had many businesses, and she would bet that all of them had flooded basements at that very moment. There was a boom of thunder and a split of lightning. The rain was thick as pencils.
“I’ll add it to the list then, thanks, Mom! Courage!”
She took a deep breath and turned around. Her neighbour had made one of his employees cry.
“You know what, Joseph? I have no clue where the pump is, my mom doesn’t know, and I’ve got to get back.”
There was silence and a crash.
“Can you call the Lafitte boy?!”
The Lafitte boy was one degree of proximity too close to a bad time, but years ago, he’d been good with downspouts and drains and all that. Noon didn’t call for help, and she certainly didn’t call in that direction. Instead of answering, she stepped out into the storm.
Across the street, blurred by water, interrupted by bicycles leaving a wake behind them and children in ladybug jackets, was a man in a charcoal cloak. A mail carrier in yellow galoshes stomped past her.
She was a character in a story—she knew it, and she hated it.
On her desk was a stack of correspondence and bills in a puddle, plus an omen of doom. The notice had the City Not-Unlike-Montréal motif on the corner. All business owners flinched upon receiving one. Notices of road construction had closed the bookshop down the road, her favourite Cajun restaurant, and a florist. It seemed like Blvd Rigaud was under construction so often that Noon wondered if they’d gotten anything right the first time they built it. Only the dentists and lawyers survived.
Noon took a deep breath and did what had gotten her through the decade.
“This too shall pass,” she murmured, and shrugged off her jacket. Construction would eventually bring wider sidewalks and better foot traffic. Perhaps she could have a terrace, serve wine, and also have her bookshop. La Tobaganne needed a paint job too. Maybe she could take advantage of the slower traffic, and the loud noise, and the death knell of flimsier businesses. She’d give her contact at The Gazelle a call and see if they couldn’t do another joint event. Most importantly though, nothing was worse than brain cancer, and besides, she needed to get through the flood—first things first.
The mobiles her dad had hung up, wooden whales and toboggans and somersaults of flowers, spun on their threads. A toy train slowly rolled around a table of locomotive memoirs, each carriage a candleholder. The glass lamps glowed like honey jars in the dark, and the toboggan nailed above the door cast shadows that looked like dentures. A portrait of her dad and Vermillion Forrest was framed behind the front desk. Just out of frame, though she felt their presence constantly, was her as a girl and her best friend, the bad time mentioned above, the king of sour nostalgia and good shoes, museum curator of never letting go, Munro Singh Forrest. Beside that photo was a painting of Millie as a girl, something Noon had inherited after the woman’s death, artist unknown. There were many, many feature pieces from The Gazelle, also framed.
Along the floor was a thin spiral of sand, leading from the desk to the door.
Noon looked up again, to be sure of what she had seen on her way over—beyond the blur, through the rain, the man in the charcoal cloak. More than anything, he annoyed Noon, a nuisance from a folktale she tried not to entertain. She didn’t wave, and wondered gloweringly what they wanted this time.
It was a quiet life, but she was making it work. That was true until she saw beneath the notice of construction a grey envelope.
June Clara Bonaventure, La Tobaganne, proprietor
852 Rue Bader Ginsberg
A City Not-Unlike-Montréal
***
The Spectacular!
9 o’clock this evening, in the garden behind the library.
Come as you are.
It had been years since she’d last seen the red seal on the back, pressed on a long white feather and dusted with a gold lustre. The seal had the mark of Saturn, crested in flowers and ringed with two orbiting moons. There were marvellous things just down the street, and luxuries she didn’t look at. The invitation might have been recycled there and then, like the rest of them, if she hadn’t first noticed that her fountain pen was missing, and then lost her damn mind.
The umbrella thief stole only one mention of the Magic Umbrella from L. Frank Baum’s Sky Island (1912), so the plot still works marvellously, and to this day, no one has noticed which instance is missing.
Next, he ended up taking two parasols from The Good-Luck Horse (1943) by Chih-Yi and Plato Chan, one orange and one teal.
Before La Tobaganne had belonged to the Bonaventure family, it had been stewarded by Millie Forrest, grand dame of the best walk-up in the City Not-Unlike-Montréal, in a country that, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call Northland. There was before, as there is now, a home on Boulevard Sainte-Luthier, with three doors, three floors, and uncountable lost things.
The home was commonly called a walk-up, meaning that it was attached on both sides to other homes of its likeness, and together they were all lean and colourful and had extremely dangerous wrought-iron staircases. This home had two proper families, each behind their respective bay windows, and always, a small sign hung above the second-floor door, reading “La Tobagannerie.”
There were two children in this home: One would grow up to be a thief, the other a collector, and they could never agree on which.
On the ground floor lived the grandmother upon whom, arguably, this story is built—Vermillion Forrest—and all of her treasures. She was an older, rickety woman, long dead by chapter one, with the habits and wisdom of a sensible woman who had seen many odd things. For example, she never lost anything, she could read The Wind in the Willows in almost any language, and her enormous bookcases were filled with many wonderful and arcane things. Millie had never been married, but she would often say the gold swan ring she wore was from the love of her life, no elaboration.
Millie was the root of the family who lived the next floor up, and the nasturtiums on each floor came from her. When she was feeling romantic (which was rare), she told her daughter and grandson that they got their noses from her, the storyteller’s hook. Under her care, La Tobaganne was a tight ship.
On the second level lived a pair of mothers who were also history teachers, Esperanza and Anjali Kaur Forrest, plus their little boy, Munro. These two women lost nearly everything, in the grand tradition of history teachers, and had a large collection of reading glasses spread across almost every surface in the home. Their son was a tiny genius at collecting things, the apple of his grandmother’s eye and hated most of all the end of story time—while we’re at it, he hated endings in general. There was also a silver cat, Spinoza, who was timeless and appeared out of nowhere one day, choosing Munro.
The top floor of this household belonged to a chef and a lawyer, Élizabeth and Arial Bonaventure, and their precocious daughter, June Clara. Unfortunately, at the time of this story, she couldn’t say June, so she settled on Noon. Munro couldn’t pronounce either one, so instead he said Spoon until they were about five, and thereafter only when he was feeling mischievous.
Élizabeth and Arial kept a happy enough household, much louder than that of their downstairs neighbours, with the chef dancing to fiddle music as she cooked and the lawyer walking a serpentine path, floorboards creaking all day long as he negotiated on the phone. Although the tapping of a chef–and–step dancer and the pilgrimage of a family lawyer might sound like the mark of difficult neighbours—the two households adored one another, and so their patterns belonged together.
Of the two children, Noon was the faster reader, but she had half Munro’s certainty. Everything she did was towards the ultimate goal of knowing more stories, more than ever before and certainly more than Munro. She did not hate endings, and while this put her at odds with Munro, they were in perfect alignment in the spirit of their competition. Neither child quite liked the fact that their neighbour was also clever with words, and as it hadn’t occurred to them that they could collaborate, they tried feverishly to outdo one another with increasingly elaborate shows of child brilliance. Paper planes that could sail farther than they rightly should, secret and teasing notes in every crack of the house; you name it, they clamoured over it. Even so, both children would often climb down the iron staircase just before dusk so they could curl up on Grandma Forrest’s deep emerald couch, listening to obscure children’s stories by the fire until their families stomped on the floor to call them up to bed.
The night of their first Spectacular, it was Noon who had noticed that something was amiss—she had a good narrative intuition. Story time never ended before nine o’clock, but Grandma Forrest hadn’t put the usual third log on the fire. There was no offer of second cookies or another cup of tea, and usually, the first story of the night wouldn’t have been so long. There were no pearls laid out by the golden mirror for Noon to try on, no croissants baking in the oven. Something was off with the rhythm of things.
“Off with you now, we don’t want to ruin the next day by staying up too late,” Millie said. Noon and Munro were on the couch, stunned. Their blanket was still cozy. In moments like that, when the veil fell, they couldn’t quite believe how Millie Forrest could be so many women. Just before, she had made shadow puppets in the flickering lights of the fire, and had done all the voices in the hour-long version of “The Sandman” by E. T. A. Hoffmann (traipsing occasionally into the translation, “L’homme au sable,” and back again, as was her custom). She had been a storyteller, a bookseller, a grand dame of starfall—and now, she was salt of the earth, in proper order.
“Grandma Forrest never goes out,” Noon said conspiratorially as soon as they were out the door. Munro was still trying to get his sweater over his head, and poked his face out quizzically.
“Quoi? What do you mean?”
“Just that she’s off somewhere good, probably.”
“Well, then we should follow her. It’ll be the third story tonight.”
Rather than sneak back out, they hid behind the hydrangea bush at the base of their stairs. The air smelled like fresh rain and the peppery end of nasturtium season. Eleven years old is almost past the point of irony, but the two of them managed to be quiet when they heard the doorknob turn, the rattle of keys, and then the clip of high heels in the night. There was a faint grinding sound of sand along the sidewalk. They were silent in the clovers. Behind them, they could see the second and third floors awash in golden light.
It was the first time they had snuck out together, and it seemed safe enough, following a grandmother. The two children took a long look at each other, then followed Millie Forrest down the road. Spinoza the silver cat was one step behind them, never seen. They dipped behind cars, and took long, secretive pauses behind the many boulevard gardens of the neighbourhood. They passed by their neighbours, walking to and from Station Dunyazad, the nearby metro stop with the enormous fountain. Before long, they came to the back of the library and its woods.
The woods behind the library were ordinarily a special place, strung with lanterns and paper cranes. It was a place full of birds and lovers, the best playground in the city, and on that night it was humming with music that was not music at all. It felt like ages, waiting for Millie to primly navigate the gnarled old willow roots and brush under sweeping honey locusts. When the tch-tch of dodging hosiery snags had finally subsided into the sound of a still night on the verge of magic, the children scrambled through the underbrush.
The back of the library had a circus tent made out of hundreds of umbrellas.
Neither child wondered why they hadn’t seen it from the road; they were too hung up on Grandma Millie, of all people, leading them here.
“Maybe I had her all wrong,” Munro wondered. He had never met any proper friends of hers, although sure, the neighbours loved her. Anyone would trust her with a book recommendation or a question about how to modify a knitting pattern, carve a chicken, or iron the curtains.
“Maybe we had her right, but—maybe she just likes the circus.”
The moment they took their eyes off the tent, it could have been anything—a collection of beach glass in your palm, a crow’s clutter of sparkling treasures, or a pile of rain boots at the front of a kindergarten. There was something shifting about the light, the mottled colours stretched across a dazzling network of spokes. It was flush with the back of the library, the corner of which Millie had just disappeared behind. There were people milling about, neighbours even, but the adults were all sipping wine the colour of starlight and meandering. There was no sense of urgency or recognition, and years from then, Noon and Munro would compare the crowd to spa attendants at an absinthe tasting.
“We have to follow her,” Munro said.
“What if it’s private?” Noon asked.
“It’s my Grandma Forrest, nothing’s private.”
“Are you kidding me? Everything’s private.”
They looked at one another. Munro felt very sure he knew Grandma Forrest’s favourite cakes, the sort of music she wouldn’t entertain, and which stories could turn her from a drill sergeant into a cabaret witch bartender. Her best hair stick had a mother-of-pearl inlay, and her best necklace, which she never wore, was a delicate pendant, a cameo of Saturn wrought in flowers with two orbiting moons.
“We’re going. It’s my birthright,” Munro said. It wasn’t quite the natural conclusion of realizing you weren’t really sure who your own grandmother was, but his pride needed a crutch of certainty.
Noon rolled her eyes, but what was she to do? She hardly knew herself in a household where she was half of a whole, one of two monkeys, readers, tobogganers, and late-night-sneakers. Munro reached out his hand, she took it, and together the two of them scurried after Grandma Forrest, to the front of the library.
Folks were milling about, drinking wine amongst the roses and shrubberies. Music that was hardly music gave the impression that they were in a storybook, somewhere otherworldly, before the adventure really started. If Noon and Munro had paused to look, they would have recognized grocers, orchardists, bakers from their life. But they didn’t—they were running up the stairs behind Millie, hardly looking behind them. They ran straight past a man in a charcoal cloak, of indeterminate age and beauty. They pushed through the doors, along the stacks, past hundreds of stories they had loved before.
And at the end, where they were sure had been a janitor’s closet, they ran through a glowing door, beyond which the stories had come to life.
The man in the charcoal cloak stole an umbrella from the pages of Madeleine (1939) by Ludwig Bemelmans, not from the row of schoolgirls but from a passerby, who was then forced to run for cover by Notre-Dame.
In a matter of minutes, Noon’s composure had frayed. Her father’s fountain pen, the blue Waterman Philéas, was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t under the desk, in the pocket of her favourite cabled cardigan, or where she liked to keep it, tucked beside her receipt book.
Uncharacteristically, sobs of panic started to crest. Her chest was tight, and she imagined her loss around every corner. It wasn’t until ten minutes in, with a true litany of tears on her face and the unkempt hair of someone returned from war, that Noon thought to stand up and look across the street. Of course, the man in the charcoal cloak had left—he had what he’d wanted; she knew that immediately. The storm blazed on, and the Spectacular was in town, with the pen her dad had left her in his will probably already a star attraction. That was just how spectaculars worked—they rambled into town, half carnival, half theatre, they disrupted and enchanted, and the next day they vanished.
She’d lost a lot over the years, and had learned that if you spent your precious time on this earth pre-emptively mourning the living, you missed their presence—if you were with them to the end, then at least you had the consolation that you’d been there the whole time. The dead dad, okay—she’d reacted then, she hadn’t yet known. Back then, she’d cried hers. . .
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