The Bluestockings: Prologue
Meet Eleanor Black 🖤
Welcome to The Nook! The Bluestockings is my latest novel, which I’m releasing in serial form one chapter at a time. These posts are free for you to read, but they were not free for me to produce. If you’d like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or purchasing your own copy of The Bluestockings. Thanks for being here!
Everyone in Hawthorn, Georgia, believed that Eleanor Black’s mother was dead.
Everyone, that is, except Eleanor.
It had been six long years. Six. Two-thousand-and-ninety-one days, give or take a few. Fifty-two-thousand-five-hundred-and-sixty hours. Enough time that Eleanor knew now, even if she hadn’t at first, that her mother wasn’t coming home.
A missing persons case that had gone cold almost as soon as the first police report was filed, the strange disappearance of Vera Black—beloved mother, wife, and owner of the local bookshop, Bluestocking Books—could only be labeled as such:
Strange.
Six-year-old Eleanor and her grandmother, whom Eleanor called Poppy, had come home from Eleanor’s gymnastics class that night to the horrifying news that Vera was missing. In the days following her disappearance, everyone in Hawthorn was baffled. Multiple witnesses had seen Vera enter the bookstore that morning. Nothing had seemed amiss, and Vera had appeared her typically friendly, if quiet, self.
She simply had never returned home that evening.
Eleanor understood how her mother would sometimes disappear into herself, how her thoughts sometimes took up more space in her head than there was room. Eleanor’s brain was like that, too, except she wasn’t quiet like her mother. Eleanor talked. She didn’t have a choice. She had to get the words out in some logical order, or they would spill out on their own and ruin everything. Eleanor’s memories were littered with the messes her words had made. Birthday parties. Crushes. That one time she got sent to the principal’s office for repeatedly correcting her English teacher when he said “agreeance” wasn’t a word.
But there was one thing Eleanor had long ago decided she would keep to herself.
In the weeks after her mother’s disappearance, Eleanor’s family had little to offer anyone who asked them questions. There was no evidence of foul play. No evidence of anything. All anyone had to go on was a missing mother and an otherwise ordinary day in an otherwise ordinary place. Only the lack of Vera’s presence was proof of something gone wrong.
Eleanor remembered police officers murmuring in low voices and the quiet house her mother had left behind. A tomb, with its inhabitants still alive, but only just. She remembered standing in the bookstore her mother had named, her family’s bookstore, running her small fingers over the spines of the books they’d read together, a quiet knowing settled over her.
Eleanor’s mother hadn’t been harmed. She had left.
Eleanor believed that deep in her bones, even if she had no way of explaining it to others. She still felt her mother’s presence in the world—a tether, an umbilical cord still connected to both of their bodies. Invisible, yet strong. But how could Eleanor ever put those thoughts into words? She had never even tried because, honestly, who would listen?
It was a secret tucked into a corner of Eleanor’s heart, where it would remain.
Hidden, but never forgotten.
A story within a story.
