Tuesday night was the library's big Autumnal Equinox Celebration and if you were not there, you missed a hell of a time. Last minute we did have some unforeseen changes. Mr. Rabbit Pete, local entertainer for children, had to cancel due to a case of paw and mouth disease. Our circulation librarian Brenda has some contacts in the music industry though, and a little band called Carnal Death Punch was able to fill in and rocked the dust off the library shelves!
They came in the library like locusts into a cornfield. Sheets were torn from the hands of librarians. They ran through the stacks with wild abandon. The library scavenger hunt began in a fury.
At two o'clock in the afternoon on a normal Friday, masked men entered the library. Armed and spread out in a search pattern, they stalked over to the magazine area, into the fiction and nonfiction stacks, and around the children's section. Story time had just gotten started and moms bouncing toddlers to the tune of "Wheels on the Bus" tried to smile to not scare the children.
The library hums and clicks and clacks with the speed of time. Technology has replaced what came before; a baby's cry overcoming the death rattle. Yet we pretend these things are not so because who could replace us? Does being replaced mean we do not, have never, mattered?
Interesting things happen when you walk away from the circulation desk. You could come back to a line when you have not seen people all day. You could find a pile of materials, left for any reason but only a few logical. There can also be someone new when you get back.
A guttural scream rang throughout the library. Frustration mixed with anger. The voice was high and loud and filled with expletives.
I ran to the source of the sound at the front of the house near the circulation desk. We had several tables set up filled with holds. Brenda stood yelling at the books.
"The fuck?" I said.
Brenda turned to me, her mouth wide enough for her jaw to peak out below her lime green facemask. "Where are the Nguyen holds?"
"In the 'n' section?" I said.
"Don't be smart with me, ST. I will fuck you up."
At that, I decided to back away. I lifted my hands palms out. "No problem. No problem here."
"There is a problem. Mrs. Nguyen and the whole goddamn Nuyen family are out there right now. They made an appointment. They did everything right, and I can't find their holds." Brenda deflated, her shoulders dropping.
I felt my butt touch the circulation desk. I began sidestepping to the right. Best get the desk between her and me.
"We can figure this out," I said, rounding the desk.
"Figure what out?" came a voice from below me.
I may have let out a little pee and a scream.
The children's librarian sat on the floor behind the desk. Jaime had her legs crossed and her hands on her knees. Her fingers were in little circles that matched the fingers on her facemask.
I said, "What are you doing down there?"
"My afternoon meditation," she said uncrossing her legs.
"Okay. Sure."
Brenda picked up a box of sanitizing wipes and threw them into the stacks. "Doesn't anyone care about the Nguyens? Their holds are missing," she said in a voice that rattled the windows.
Jamie bounced to her feet. "Oh, the Nguyens are here? I'll go see how they are."
Brenda and I watched Jamie leave out the front door to the curbside table. The door closed to the sound of the children's librarian squealing. With a heavy thunk it closed.
I brought up the Nguyen mom's record. They had three holds available for pickup. Couple of DVDs and a biography of Robin Williams. At the second branch.
"Um, Brenda…" I said. I told her what happened. Her smile grew little by little, her heart lighter. I saw her shoulders unbunch as she skipped toward the door.
A bit later she came back in floating. She said, "They were so nice about it and they said 'thank you.' So nice."
"Too bad they have to go to the second branch," I said.
Brenda nodded. "RIP the Nguyen family. They will be missed."
Three days ago Brenda comes in and asks for the day after Thanksgiving off. I tell her no, sorry, we put in those requests two months ago.
But her kids are sick. They need their momma.
I say, her kids are both in their thirties. One of them has a family. The other might just be too damn stoned to see out the window. Plus, the children's librarian and the tech serv librarian are off. It's just me, Brenda, and the reference librarian all day.
"Why don't we just close?" she said.
I told her no.
She crooked her hand. Spitting on my office floor, Brenda spoke out the old Creole tongue. A wormy string of swamp words came out of her mouth and stained my ears. Then she took out a marker, drew a symbol on my office door, and closed it behind her with a bang.
The lights went out. Total dark filled the windows and cracks around the door. Silence filled everything but my chest thumping.
A little girl stood in front of me. Small, dainty in a white dress. She looked like my sister so many years ago. Then she pulled out a rubber mallet and slammed it into the desk. When the desk did not break, she climbed over it and came at me. I fought her off, pushing us back from the desk and toppling the chair.
Blows rained down. Thick heavy smacks. The child did not have the raw power or the instrument for any one blow to hurt, but goddamn they began to add up.
I threw her off me. Standing, I oriented myself toward the door. Within three steps a man stood in front of me holding a ruler. He had on a brown coat and red shirt. His hair was shorter than mine, but other than that he could have been my doppelganger. As if I had been left in the microwave a little too long.
He swung the ruler at my head. The smack came hard. I felt the light wood break against my jawbone. Painful, but in no way debilitating. I wrenched the broken end out of his hand and turned it on him. He died well, my alternate.
The little girl screamed. She hit my shin with the mallet. I kicked out, getting her in the face. She stumbled, and I pounced. I grabbed her arm and leg, lifted, and threw her where I judged the window to be. In the darkness she vanished to the sound of glass breaking and screams.
"You should not have done that. The Past is perfect," said a voice of stone.
I could feel the edge of my desk. Lowering my hand, I opened the second drawer. The revolver filled my hand as I turned and faced the stranger.
"Yep," I said and shot the pale figure in the forehead.
The lights came back. All the light, from the windows and the fixtures. I closed my eyes to think. The smell of cordite filled my nostrils as I dumped the revolver on the desk with a heavy thud.
After a few breaths, I picked up the phone. Dialed the circulation desk.
"Yes?" Brenda said.
"About Thanksgiving."
"Yes," Brenda said.
"No," I said, and hung up the phone.
The bathroom door stood ajar. A sliver of light came from within. Two librarians stood staring.
"If that thing rolls off the table, we're all dead," the soldier said to the librarians.
Everything smells like a barbeque at that uncle's house, the one that also knows exactly how much tannerite costs with tax down at the Guns and Go.
The library sits atop a battleground of old dead things whose bones were covered first by lava, then by sand and water, and finally by a building where people complain about Dan Brown.
Elder being Nyarlethotep came to the library this weekend to see how curbside delivery works.
One branch library is testing a new "book launcher" to give patrons safe access to library materials.
The front line of the library, the staff of the circulation desk are well-mannered and personable. They greet patrons. Pound for pound, they see more people than the rest of the library combined. Brenda, the circulation librarian, would have said it was a privilege to serve her hometown like this, but she also believed she was a silver dragon.
When Brenda was six, she saw snow for the first time. In the deep south, snow falls are rare. Snow that sticks and piles even rarer. Over thirty years before, the snow fell so thick Brenda could not see her sister Amy as Brenda screamed for help in the dark woods.
The two of them had been walking the area around their house. They often did, even on cold wet days that required thick jackets and rain boots. The two Berry girls wandered through the underbrush, cutting their way with the ease of youth and experience. They would tell their mother when they got home they had been exploring, but more often than not they had walked over familiar land, has rested in the same spots, had played around the same thick pine trees. The subtropical climate caused the bushes and vines to grow and twist and make the woods seem as if each time was the first.
The snow came and it was a first. The first time coated in cold. The snow fell with thick pats on Brenda's already broad shoulders. She watched Amy in front of her disappear behind the winter veil. The blond hair winked out like a light flipped to off. Just like that she lost her way.
The snow lasted a day. They found Brenda just off a timber trail. She had burrowed down during the night into the soft pine needles and huddled there. The man who found her, the pharmacist named Shepherd who let her and her sister decorate the Christmas tree, he said, "She was poking out of the snow like a little bird." Her mother cried and held her close.
Amy cried, too. Brenda laughed and told them about the moon.
After the snow fell a foot deep, she screamed for her sister. She knew she was lost. She had cried. Then the moon came.
"It said, 'don't worry, little bit,' and its voice was calm and deep, not like mom or Mr. Shepherd but kind just like them. It said to dig down in the snow and find the pine needles and hunker in. So I did," little Brenda had told everyone. "Then it told me I was a dragon born of the dark of the moon and that it loved me and wanted me to be safe and help people."
To anyone that would listen, Brenda told her story. Her momma would say, "What did the moon say, baby?" and Brenda would tell it just the same each time. After a while, people stopped asking. They started talking about hospitals and concerns for Brenda's mind. Teachers had her tested. Children teased. Amy began to ignore her sister and make a new path. Brenda learned not to talk to anyone about the moon, about what she was. Anyone but momma.
But she helped people. She dreamed of opening her wings and breathing fire. The fire would not burn but heal, cold and sharp as icicles. She dreamed of flying back to the moon after she helped everyone she could.
All her dreams and beliefs came true when she found a book in the library that told her story. The Director ordered it and a bunch more from new sources. He had changed, and she liked the change.
To Be Continued…
I left out the years of wandering, the restaurant jobs in resorts and the girl with the ever changing hair. Nobody needed to know what woke me up at night.
More shopping carts appeared on the library steps and I got concerned. Three days they stuck around, Walter and Brenda berating them, then they slipped away. I wondered if we had space in the basement for all of them.
Back home in the south, we call them "buggies." We also call them "shopping carts," the wire mesh baskets on wheels that live in grocery stores. When one showed up at the library, we knew we had an opportunity.
The director said the bell would stay on the circulation desk. Brenda complained that someone was always there, but the director said the bell would stay. Brenda pouted and stood, arms crossed, glaring at the little metal object.
Celeste sent the children away as the phone rang. Celeste waited like she was taught and caught it on the second ring. Thank you for calling the library. This is Celeste. How may I help you? she said.
The person on the other end of the phone let out a gasp and then a long shuddering sigh.