Title: La Page Blanche
Fandom: MCU - Moon Knight and Spider-Man (Holland)
Characters: Michelle Jones and Layla El Faouly
Rating: G
Length: 675 words
Content and Author notes: no content notes; title from Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's poem, 1843

Summary: MJ doesn't write poetry any longer.



MJ still has more an hour to kill before meeting up with Ned. She's browsing the overstuffed shelves in this stuffy closet of a bookstore off Harvard Square and trying not to melt away.

Outside, it's January and sleeting atop last weekend's ten inches of snow. Inside, it's steamy and close. She's honestly a little surprised that the pages of the magazines and journals on display aren't wilting and curling.

Up at the front, the clerk is reading with the sort of fierce attention that can only be super-fake. There's a plastic radio wedged between the books above him playing WBUR's morning program. Coming up next: "illicit market for art and antiquities and the soul of the collector". Joining them will be a professor from Wellesley, a curator at the MFA, a rep from Sotheby's and someone from the Stark Foundation cultural activities wing.

Not anyone from the areas being discussed, of course. Iraqi refugees and Cairo ragpickers and Syrian artists don't get a say.

She left her earbuds back at the dorm and has already had a couple opportunities on the T to regret that lapse. She moves closer to the back and nearly knocks over a precariously placed box of chapbooks.

"Careful," the clerk calls without looking up. "You bend it, you buy it."

"So you've mentioned, yeah," she mutters back.

The chapbooks are all of 32 or 48 pages each, 8.5"x5.5" — the size of the zines she used to make, but way more professional-looking. They're printed on good paper, for one thing, the kind that has its own texture and heft. A lot of them aren't even laser-printed, let alone photocopied, but actually done on letterpresses. Big thudding rollers across inked type, slotted in by hand. The type pushes the ink into the paper, deep and sure. You have to know what you're saying to write one of these.

MJ used to write poetry, just like she used to draw. She stopped a little over a year ago; she doesn't really know why. It was probably just the stress of college admissions.

"Turn that crap off," someone says shortly after the bell on the door clangs. From back here, MJ can make out little beyond a big pea coat scintillating with snowflakes and a mass of dark chestnut curls that stand out around her sharp, expressive face like an ikon's halo.

The clerk glances at the radio. The station probably hasn't been changed since Mandela was still in prison.

"I called," the woman continues, then pauses to stamp the slush off her boots. "You have a postwar facsimile of Desbordes-Valmore on hold for me."

MJ edges up the side aisle. Drawn like something to a magnet, or a satellite, she has to force herself to stop and pretend to check the shelves.

"Ms. Grant?" the clerk asks.

"Hmm. Do you have it?"

MJ wants to be able to speak like that: firmly and certainly, but never rudely. Just clearly. She's tried her whole life, but it's always come out more as "weird mumbles" than "confident assertion".

Closer yet, and MJ feigns interest in the rack of regional poetry journals. Saskatoon and Kamchatka and Kozhikode are all represented, along with upper Maine and exurban Portland.

"And the new Darwish bio?" the woman's asking when MJ approaches the desk.

There's a whole pile of them, heavy hardbacks with a monochromatic portrait on the cover, right there, so MJ hands one to her.

"Thanks," she murmurs and flips immediately to the glossy pages in the center.

"I always do that, too," MJ offers. When the woman looks up, a little confused, MJ adds, "check out the pictures and maps first."

Grinning, she relaxes. "I'm so basic."

"Don't even tell me about it," MJ replies. She can't tell how old the woman is — somewhere around thirty? Maybe? — nor if this conversation is even going anywhere. All she knows is that she'd like to keep going, wherever it heads.