Literary Student

She’s in the last 100 pages of Faulkner’s ‘Light in August’ sitting sideways in the train seat with her thin legs in black fitted pants crossed at the knee, and one small foot clad in a two toned pink suede shoe hangs in the aisle.  She is wearing a forest green denim bomber jacket over several tops including one in pilled turquoise and another in black and grey stripes. Wound loosely around her neck and arrayed in a bright profusion of tropical colours is a summer scarf.  Her only jewellery is a small gold wedding band.

She clasps the worn paperback with her long thin fingers, and her brow furrows as she flips through the dog eared pages without disturbing the numerous torn paper book marks held in its early pages, occasionally she chews her bottom lip and her eyes look tearful.  Her face is small and her skin is freckled but otherwise clear and healthy.  Her short curly hair is pulled back into two tiny pig tails perched on the back of her head.  What happens in the front is a wild profusion of messy ringlets in various lengths which jangle and flop across her face.

A good quality tan leather handbag sits in her lap, the lining of which mimics the colours of her scarf; alongside this is a large bag in heavy calico with a long shoulder strap.   The bag is emblazoned with the logo of the ‘Kids Bookstore’ and is marked and dirty; it has carried many books and seen better days.   Today it contains her course notes, five new books, a muesli snack wrapper and the most recent copy of Meanjin.

The young woman lives happily in a small apartment just south of the Windsor Train Station with her husband who is a physiotherapist, and their two small boys.  Both boys have thoroughly modern names with attitude, like Jasper or Cashel and each is an avid reader, hungrily consuming the books their mother brings home from the big library in the city in her calico bag