Sylvie Nettlewick's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Sylvie Nettlewick had never left Pinehollow in sixty years, but this morning she stood at the town gate with a packed bag and a plan to visit every library in her favorite travel memoir. The first one came first. She opened the book to the dog-eared page and read the author's words again. He called it "the Willow Room," a library where he once slept among the shelves. He gave no town. He gave no road. He gave only the nickname. Sylvie sat on a bench and frowned. A nickname could point anywhere. She could walk for days and reach the wrong place. The whole journey depended on this one address, and the author had hidden it like a joke. She turned pages backward, hunting for a clue. The author described a garden near the library. He wrote about an apple tree, a crooked fence, and a bad-tempered bird that guarded a nest by the door. "Mind the goose," he warned. "She rules the path." Sylvie had read that line a hundred times and laughed. Now she stopped. She knew a goose like that. One lived beside the old reading house two towns over, the place her grandmother once called by a pet name. Sylvie had heard the name as a girl and forgotten it. She needed proof before she walked all that way. Her hands shook as she dug deeper. In the book's last chapter, the author thanked the librarian who kept the Willow Room. He printed the woman's full name. Beneath it, in small type, he listed the building's true title and its town. Sylvie read it three times. The town was real. It sat a half-day's walk north, past the river, exactly where the reading house with the mean goose stood. The nickname and the fact matched. She had found it. She pressed the page flat and copied the name onto her hand in pen. Then she stood, lighter now, and tested the strap of her bag. A soft weight shifted inside. She unzipped the top. Her tabby cat blinked up at her, curled on her folded sweater. The cat had crept in while she packed and slept through the whole search. Sylvie stared. She could not walk half a day with a cat in her bag. She could not turn back and lose the morning. And she could not leave him loose at the gate, where a cranky nesting goose waited at the other end of the road. The cat yawned and tucked his nose under his paw. Sylvie zipped the bag halfway and sighed. The library's true name sat fresh on her skin. The road north was clear at last. But now she carried a passenger she had not planned for, and the first leg of her grand journey would begin with a decision about a sleeping cat.