Eyes closed, the librarian moves through the stacks. They thumb over every volume, linen sleeves flowing behind them. There is no direct light in the library, everything glows between dream time and twilight. The windows are a chimera of architectural eras, but the panes are paper thin stone, rather than glass. They are dark now, the Canadian winter is not full of light, though the library is still gently lit.
The librarian’s hands, rough from work, but soft with age, are guided by the library. Their face is youthful, but kissed with indescribable age. The librarian’s eyes remain closed as they reshelve books, a dance of trust falls with the library as their partner.
The library has been beating for 150,000 years, growing and morphing with human hearts and human will. It wanders where it pleases, pushed and pulled by the human heart, and opening its doors to all who think to look.
Folk knowledge says the library goes where it is needed most. In the beginning, the librarian held this to be true. The more they saw, the more they wavered. How could a decision be made on who needed help the most?
Through the librarian’s eyes, the library is whimsical and illogical. It cannot sort through the scope of human suffering and so it does not try to. Mulling this over, the librarian’s hands slip. They do not drop the book in their hands, but their nails scrape the binding and break. They slip the book into place and stare at their bleeding finger.
The librarian shelves the last book and returns to the circulation desk, which is covered in open books and notes spiraling off the page on mountain trails of post-it notes. Sitting down in front of their research, the librarian began to read. As they read, a stillness that can only be achieved when every living thing holds its breath washed over the library.
There was nothing for the librarian to hear besides the ringing in their ears and nothing to see but the contrast between printed text and a blank page. They found themself reading the same sentence over and over. There was a time when the library was full of life. The library had been host to wanderers, questing trios, lost souls, and absolutely anyone with an honest question and need for answers. Past guests would stumble upon a door where there hadn’t been one before and be invited into a space that breathed in sync with you and danced with low light and laughter.
Now everything is quiet.
Fewer and fewer people could find their way into the library and the librarian didn’t know why. They could feel the library’s sadness and sickness; it was like their chest was caving in. The two of them shared a connection outside of language. For all that the librarian could feel what the library felt, they didn’t understand why the library was sick, for lack of a better word. Everything hurts and they have no idea how to fix it.
Right now, the priority is research. For two months, the library has remained stationary in rural Canada, the longest the librarian had stayed anywhere since first coming to the library.
They refocused on the page in front of them, the raw data of a study done on depression because they were hoping that even if the analysis was irrelevant to the current situation, something else would be in the data. They were running out of ideas. Had they been looking out the window, they would have seen the landscape morphing slowly. An unnaturally toneless white mixed with the already pale Canadian winter and pieces of opposite climates flickered through in pieces, chopped up by an unseeing whiteness. Eventually, the landscape settled into cornfields days away from harvest. The library’s foundation creaked and moaned as it settled, molding itself to the land.
An empathetic shock ran through the librarian’s joints in response, startling the study from their hands. They spun to face the window, part of them had started to wonder if they’d leave Canada. Small pieces of light, light an intersection of gold leaf and water, danced over the librarian’s face. They leaned into it for a fraction of a second and then rushed up to the loft. They pitched themself forward onto the balcony, breathing in fresh air finally free of the concern of frostbite. The relief was overwhelming. Slowly, tension dropped from their shoulders and they breathed deeply. Everything gold as far as the eye could see, the world was populated with a field of—wheat? Corn? Though the longer they looked the librarian was forced to realize, still, not a single person was nearby.
The librarian floated down on their dying flicker of hope back down to the circulation desk. Nausea cut through them as they pulled out the desk chair. Nausea and pain were the only ways their body knew how to translate the library’s sickness. They white-knuckled their pen and flipped open another reading selection.
Three days pass.
For two days, the librarian sits at the circulation desk with no visitors. Consumed by their research, they are spurred on by a sharpness behind their eyes that they know instinctively is the feeling of doors to the library closing permanently. Time was running out and they are no closer to a solution than they had been in Canada.
On the morning of the third day, the doors to the library swung open to Rumplestiltskin-colored cornfields and in rushes crisp apple fall air. The whole world draws a breath. A girl and her dog step inside cautiously, light at their backs. The pair crouch low and the girl leads them in slowly, squinting into the library.
“Hello?” She calls, hand raised halfway.
The librarian doesn’t answer. They sat hunched behind the circulation desk unsure of what had possessed them to hide, but too committed to back out. After a moment, they gather their nerve and stand. “Hello,” they say, making eye contact, “Welcome to the library.”
The girl opens her mouth to reply and the doors to the library slam shut behind her, cutting her off. She flinches and the dog barks. The foundation shakes and the stony growl is ear-splitting. The librarian looks out the window and sees the golden cornfields begin to warp away.
The girl follows their eyes and screams as the library shakes around her. She hugs her dog to her chest and widens her stance for balance.
The librarian scans every surface in sight, eyes flickering in thought. They skip over the girl and her dog, forgetting to factor them into the problem. Their stomach sinks deep and twists, “Something’s wrong,” they call out to no one.
“What?” The girl shrieks and the librarian is forced to remember that there is a living, breathing human experiencing this disaster with them. Their muscles tense and relax and they run for the girl to grab her hand. They barrel into her and the two of them tumble underneath the circulation desk. The girl’s hands slip and the dog goes flying with a yelp.
“Sorry, so sorry. I don’t know what’s happening,” the librarian says. The sound escalates, after that, it is too loud to hear anything.
The girl opens her mouth as if to scream, but nothing comes out and it is much too loud to hear it if it had. She pats the ground around her thoughtlessly and then bolts up. She peers out from under the circulation desk, eyes wide, and shaking at an even higher frequency than the library.
The dog. The librarian realizes and tries to warn her, “It’s not safe!”
The girl yells something that sounds to the librarian like the name ‘Clarence’ and pitches herself forward into what has become a torrential downpour of books.
There was a loud crack and the librarian withdrew from the edge of the desk and curled in on themself. They squeezed their eyes shut and focused on breathing. Books pounded against the circulation desk and the librarian retreated within themself.
When the rumbling finally stopped, it took the librarian an unclear amount of time to return to their body. When they did, they held their breath and counted to thirty. Then slowly, the librarian crawled out from under the circulation desk to survey the damage and see if the girl and her dog had survived.
Books are everywhere. Stacks lean against each other and broken glass litters the ground. In the middle of it all, the girl is wrapped around her dog in the fetal position, fiercely protecting Clarence (?). A perfect two-foot radius of clear floor space surrounded them: there was a perfect circle where nary a single chunk of debris had fallen. The librarian had never seen anything like it.
The girl didn’t move as the librarian walked up slowly. Anxiety flooded their sternum and with extreme awkwardness and unease, the librarian croaked, “Um, hello. Hi,” they winced.
Slowly, the girl unwrapped herself from Clarence and he sprung out, investigating with a strong sense of purpose.
Blinking, she watched him explore, though she didn’t seem to be looking. After a beat, questions stumble out of her mouth, “What is this place? And what,” she emphasized harshly, “did you do to me?” She finished getting up in the librarian’s face with something wild in her eyes.
The librarian raised their hands and squeaked, “Nothing! This is the library.”
“I need you to understand that that means absolutely nothing to me,” she hisses, “there’s no library in the fields, I would know,” She backed away. “Clarence!” she called, “we’re leaving!”
The librarian looked between the girl and the perfect, debris-free, circle where she’d shielded her dog and then too late, realized what she had said. Their half-hearted whisper of “Wait,” went ignored.
The doors open and they knelt to inspect the books, it was already vanishing, but if they squinted just right there was a thin white line detailing the circumference seared into the floorboards.
“What the fuck?” The girl’s words echo off of every surface in the library. Desperately she pulls Clarence back from the edge of the steps, where he growls at the great expanse of nothing. “Where the fuck are we?”
The librarian stands and rushes to the door. What they see knocks the wind out of them. There was nothing above or below and no end in sight. There was simultaneously no light and an impossible brightness that came off looking rather grey to the average set of human eyes. Though not human, Clarence is the only one who saw something similar to a wash of grey.
The girl turns towards the librarian, but her eyes stay on the nothing and her knuckles stay white around Clarence’s collar, “Who are you and what did you do to me.” It wasn’t a question.
“I didn’t do anything,” the librarian starts, “I don’t know what’s happening,” and as an afterthought they added, “I’m the librarian.” They stared into the nothing, “I have no idea where the library brought us.
“Brought us? It can move?”
Clarence barked loudly at the nothing, but its timbre turned it into the equivalent of a question.
The librarian could feel their breathing getting unsteady so they closed their eyes, trying to ignore the girl’s frustrations. They reach out to their ever-weakening connection to the library and feel the enormity of the thing and place, and then out. They stumble back, breathless and shaking. There is exactly nothing outside the library. They aren’t tethered anywhere.
“We’re nowhere,” they process out loud, “we’re floating in the middle of nowhere.” They turn to her, wrapping their head around it, “floating isn’t right, but we’re stuck without a connection?” They frown in thought, focusing on the phrasing rather than the reality of the situation.
Kes Trainor is a second year Visual Critical Studies major. They love telling stories, and chose to come to the School of Visual Arts to better hone their craft at storytelling in all mediums, be it animation, writing, comics, or other forms of storytelling and image-making. They are concerned with the state of the world at large, and often deal with that and its emotional implications in their work.
Find a more suggestive way 2 say this??
“The” or “the kind of”