Congratulations on Getting Hit in the Face by a Book!

The book will soar over the crowd of men and women striking each other with hard and softcover editions of little indie press titles that will likely never be seen by anyone outside of this gallery. It will arc so perfectly that there will be no question in your head, years later, that it was meant to do anything but strike you in the face. At this point in your life you will not believe that that book was ever intended to be read.

It will catch you just below the eye, a particularly painful spot that will make you feel as if your skull is popping open, your ocular cavity expelling the tiny orb within it, nerve and all. Of course, it won’t be. It’ll be just fine and you’ll be just fine, albeit on your knees in the middle of a milling crowd of bookish twenty-to-fiftysomethings shouting, cavorting and hurling titles at one another with tremendous ampolmb.

It’ll be a miracle that you won’t be kneed in the head by one of the various celebrants at the book fair. But the real miracle will come when she finds you, in search of the person she struck with her book. She’ll have realized, seconds afterwards, that a hardcover copy of a thousand and four page piece of experimental prose might not have been the best item to hurl during a light hearted book fight. When she discovers you she’ll pick you up and guide you delicately out of the book fight. Her beauty and your pathetic appearance will keep anyone from attacking you for a while.

She’ll stay by your side until you finally open your eyes again. And when you see her, see those sleepless raccoon eyes and delicate curving smile articulating those full, hungry lips, you’ll know that you can never go back to sleep again without thinking of her, of her face.

You won’t tell her this until your fourth date, when you know, fully know in your bones, that you want to spend the rest of your life with this woman. But you will, to your credit, immediately summon the courage to ask her out, without invoking the pity play your eye will afford you. You’ll tell this story to your daughter years later, when she asks why you always look at her mother that way. She won’t understand what you mean at the time.

Congratulations on Getting Hit in the Face by a Book!