Ghosts, Graveyards and Cypress Knees

The Dauphine Street Bookstore is the kind of place I want my dust to settle after I die; a place where my skin cells can reincarnate again and again in between the pages of a thousand stories. It is a place where booklovers can come to both rejoice in their passion, and commiserate tendencies toward hoarding. The door opened only halfway before it knocked against a stack of books the first time I stepped through its threshold; crossing over from the heat mirage of New Orleans streets in June. It was labrynth of sagging shelves woven into a space that was suspiciously small, given its lofty word count. It was ruled over by a calico cat, who sauntered between the rows and boxes - investigating each and every crevice and crawl space, stalking the ghosts of wayward antagonists dropped from between the bound covers. The shopkeeper, graciously awarded a meager existence by his feline companion, knows each title within the walls and knows the location of each cover with an accuracy only rivaled by his innate understanding the desires of each entering bibliophile’s heart.
“Truman Capote.” The shopkeeper’s voice scraped the walls of his throat during its haphazard escape to the world, its reverberations coarse with the same grit that lies underfoot all around the French Quarter - vestigial remnants of the riverbed that one dominated the city, and will one day take it back.
I accepted the recommended book, though I did not then know the power of its pages. It felt light in my hands - given the famous title I had anticipated a little more heft - and continued to walk between the stacks breathing deep to infuse my blood with a smattering of literary intrigue. Outside the city raged; the buskers volleying notes across the French Quarter - but their shots rebounded uselessly off the door to this sanctuary. These walls, groaning under the weight of their mission, serve to protect each and every character and piece of punctuation; they will stave off the flood of tourists, keep at bay the tears of storms and the lapping tongues of rising ocean tides.
The air in New Orleans hits you each time you breathe it in, hot and transient like summers spent kissing against wrought iron fences and gifting flowers to sun-drunk buskers; but the Dauphine Street Bookstore is an entirely different colored lense of hedonism. It has a refined sense of purpose, collecting snapshots of humanity’s underbelly, so that no story, no matter how dusty and worn - will go untold.