Welcome to B’s Book Labyrinth & Bistro!

(a SilkWords Shared World series)

My name is Brontë Austen O’Neill, and I have the best job in the world. If you took even one course in English literature, you can probably figure it out just from my name. (My moms are both literature professors.)

Yep, I manage the world’s last bookstore. Or at least the last one in Seattle. Well, maybe not the last, but certainly the biggest. In the heart of the Fremont neighborhood, which is accepted by all Seattleites (or at least the ones living in Fremont) as the Center of the Universe, is a funky old turn-of-the-century mansion, just south of the world’s only real troll-under-a-bridge. Its architect was insane, or possibly a drunk. Six floors, piled atop each other in higgledy-piggledy fashion (much like a stack of books someone has tripped over and righted without bothering to straighten), connected by a staircase winding like a corkscrew through its heart.

Please don’t call me Brontë. No one does. (Except my moms. And Brody, whom you may learn more about later.) It sounds horribly pretentious in an East Coast, Ivy League sort of way. To patrons and employees alike, I’m just B. You’ll find me behind the central desk on the first floor, or sometimes in my matchbox of an office on level six with the gothics. Look for a girl with pink curls piled high on her head, studying you over the brow line of her unapologetically hipster black glasses.

The reason I have the best job in the world is a rich aunt left my biological mom a bunch of money, and Elena used it to buy me the most amazing graduation present ever. Books are my life. They were my playmates as a child and my BFFs in high school and college. Now I get to spend every waking moment with them.

We’ve got a kind of magic going at B’s, or at least I’ve worked hard at circulating the rumor that we do. We are the number-one first-date destination in Seattle. I know I’ve got an uncommonly well-developed skill for exaggeration, but that’s the god’s-honest — you can check the Seattle Times.

Because Seattle is full of readers. It rains too much to do anything else. Oh sure, beautiful mountains, and ocean, and lakes, and blah blah blah. I get that some people are into that. Why actually visit those things when you can curl up in an overstuffed armchair next to one of our giant windows overlooking the Fremont Cut and the north end of Lake Union and read about them, all while sipping the best latte (or microbrew) in the Pacific Northwest?

You could say I’m proud of my little establishment.

So here’s what you’ve got at B’s: every book that’s worth meeting (in B’s humble opinion), and a cozy little book-lovers’ bistro, candlelit and decorated daily with fresh bunches of tulips or daisies, depending on the season. People come for miles for our marionberry scones and our grilled cheese/tomato soup combo.

And people come for love — to find it or stoke it — because as I said, we’ve got a kind of magic going at B’s. Interesting things get started here. Sometimes they play out right in the store, in dark little book nooks on the upper floors (where you’ll find romance, gothics, and erotica). And I’ll tell you a juicy rumor that made its way into The Stranger, the local alternative paper: they say we’ve got an underground passage, and a sister establishment where customers can live out their favorite storybook fantasies.