I wasn't prepared to take part in Blogcritics' Bookfair or add anything to Natalie's great lineup and I was sad. Luckily I remembered a few scraps of paper I had found in the Adriance Memorial Library in Poughkeepsie a long time ago. I had been poking around in the stacks and was interested in that magic place between one line of books and the next, backs facing out and their stories, their innards facing each other.

That is a place where the stories live and little boys can lose their way when they venture too far into the library all alone. I found a few pages in a childish hand and, curious, I saved them. He wrote this:

"I was little. Maybe as little as that grasshopper knee we hear so much about. Maybe bigger than that. I am not Alice of Wonderland, just David of the library shelves. The only pills marked 'eat me' here are in Alice's book and one called PDR where they have lots of pills. I'm little and I don't like pills. I am not sure if I like Alice all the time, either.

Library-shelf David isn't my name. Actually, it is. I am David and I live in the library shelves now but it was, simply, David and another name before. David Windless, I think it was. I was a little boy who was normal and lived in a house, then. I was a little boy who was normal and played in the back yard with balsa wood gliders and plastic ships. I was a little boy who was normal and had a chemistry set and a kit to make electronic gadgets that worked sometimes when I did it right. I was a little boy who was a little abnormal because I only had a mother and we didn't have a lot of money so I didn't have a cell phone and my computer was old. We had a TV but it wasn't big enough to crawl into and, besides, it wasn't very interesting except for some movies and documentaries about space and animals and stuff.

One night after I hid under my sheets with a flashlight so that I could read Tom Sawyer again, he, Tom, came to the foot of my bed and invited me to come out into the night and go to his island to play. I couldn't say no to Tom. He could talk a dolt into whitewashing his fence for him - how could I say I didn't want to play on his island? I did want to, after all. We hung out all night on that island of Tom's and Huck's. Huck was only mentioned once or twice and never came. He had family problems. Some old dude named Samuel looked in on us and smiled but he left us alone to play so it was ok.