The Robot and the Girl at the Old Bookstore

Birthday. The girl stretches on a wooden stool. But the duster won't reach the top shelf where the old books are lined up. Her November sigh vanishes into white mist. When she gets off the stool, there is a loud metallic sound at the front of the bookstore. When she goes to check, a muddy, old robot is leaning against her light truck, which is loaded with old books to be discarded. Its battery must have run out. Hesitating, the girl kicks the robot into her shop, which also serves as her home.

The girl charges the robot using a pre-war power plug. She looks up at the robot as it stands up shortly after. "Where did you come from?" No matter what she asks, the robot remembers nothing. Not even its own birthday. As she wipes off the mud, she decides to turn it over to the police once it is fully charged, and goes back to tending the shop. When she is struggling to clean the bookshelf again, the robot takes the duster from her hand and dusts the top shelf for her.

The girl and the robot sit at the top of an observation tower on the outskirts of town, which was used until the end of the war five years ago. The old bookstore looks small from here. While talking about the day they met exactly a year ago, the girl eats the butter cake the robot bought for her. It was her birthday cake. The robot remembered that the girl had once told it that she used to eat it often with her parents on her birthday before the war. Instead of shedding tears, the girl punches the robot.

To know yesterday is to know today. Because the girl repeats what she learned from her parents so often, the robot eventually starts reading old books when there are no customers in the shop. Novels. Dictionaries. Math books. Autobiographies. Travelogues. It reads through every kind of book, but there is one type of book that the old bookstore does not have. On a winter night when the girl has fallen asleep, the robot touches a pile of books in a cardboard box marked 'refused for purchase' with its cold iron hand.

A few days later, the robot looks down at the snowy town alone from the observation tower. The robot has learned its birthday. What it read was a record of the war. It was the robots mass-produced the year before that ended the war five years ago. Today, six years ago, when the weapons were built, is its birthday. It thought it was fortunate that it could not fly. The robot places its dirty hands on the rusted railing. The falling snow looked as if it were rising toward the sky.

The sea of old books rejected for purchase and discarded softly catches the robot. In the bed of the light truck driven by the girl in her pajamas, the robot lies spread-eagled, looking up at the sky. Kicked by the girl, the robot sits in the narrow passenger seat. While fixing her bedhead, the girl stretches her legs and steps on the accelerator. Without even looking at the robot, which is looking down, she says, "I wonder if the butter cake shop is still open."

Something I wrote before