Speaker 1: The thin dust in the alcove always made a sound
Speaker 1: a kind of brushing white noise as I pulled the
Speaker 1: old ledgers out, stacked the faded covers on my rolling cart,
Speaker 1: shuffled my way into the liminal hush you find only
Speaker 1: in libraries at the earliest hours. I volunteered here for
Speaker 1: years after full-time retired me couldn't quite retire from books,
Speaker 1: and I suppose it lent a certain rhythm to days
Speaker 1: that might otherwise collapse into themselves. The history occult sat
Speaker 1: under an awkward eave where the ceiling pressed low, always
Speaker 1: at least five degrees colder than the rest of the
Speaker 1: library books themselves seemed to shrink into the shadows down here,
Speaker 1: and I sometimes joked to Simon, our youngest shelver, that
Speaker 1: the stories hibernated between late November and April. This morning,
Speaker 1: I was nearly finished reshelving municipal census tomes when my
Speaker 1: gloved hand found a gap behind the bottom row. Not
Speaker 1: a rare thing displaced volumes, abandoned donations, even half-drunk thermoses
Speaker 1: sometimes turned up. but what I gripped was unfamiliar, a slim,
Speaker 1: nondescript hardcover bound in russet linen lacking a call number
Speaker 1: sticker or any handwritten spine code. I blinked at its plainness.
Speaker 1: No title. No author. Its gold edges had long ago
Speaker 1: faded to brass. I cracked it open, careful of the binding.
Speaker 1: Lines of careful, fluid handwriting not mechanical, not the machine
Speaker 1: type of a self-published relic. It had the undulating pulse
Speaker 1: of a pen lifted and lowered with intent. I read
Speaker 1: a page, and then another, curiosity deepening with each word.
Speaker 1: I felt abruptly hollowed out. The story was impossible. The
Speaker 1: first scene described a white-green river with copper islands, where
Speaker 1: children pulled makeshift boats between dissolved ruins. The protagonist was
Speaker 1: a shy girl called Lissy Mayers, a name I'd invented
Speaker 1: long ago and whispered afternoons to myself, growing up above
Speaker 1: the dry goods store in Ashland. Scenes tumbled out, one
Speaker 1: after another, echoing the plot I'd built in my daydreams
Speaker 1: but never dared write. Lissy's father fell ill, the children met,
Speaker 1: the forbidden side of the river, a hidden festival at
Speaker 1: dusk resolved their quiet rebellion. The invented words, the strange
Speaker 1: place names, the game currency of Vagesils, the ceremonial painted
Speaker 1: stones all from that private unspoken landscape. Even the peculiar
Speaker 1: Tristelissi learning the river had changed its course for her
Speaker 1: was nearly verbatim from the plot I'd spun while staring
Speaker 1: at sailing cracks as a child. I paced back and forth,
Speaker 1: searching for a signal of forgery or adult mischief, but
Speaker 1: none of it. My heart quickened, not with fear, but
Speaker 1: a kind of vertigo. How could this be? I hadn't
Speaker 1: written it. I hadn't told my sister or my now-gone
Speaker 1: mother or confided it to any diary. These were dreams
Speaker 1: conjured as a shy child and left there, shaped only
Speaker 1: in memory. I checked the in-paper nothing. The last page
Speaker 1: was blank, except for a blue-green ink splotch I'd abandoned
Speaker 1: in every imagined signature. For nearly an hour, I sat
Speaker 1: on the alcove stool, alternately reading and staring at my hands,
Speaker 1: hunting for stray details had I mentioned the story aloud,
Speaker 1: long ago, and forgotten. Was there some cultural osmosis, something
Speaker 1: I'd once described during a library story our years back?
Speaker 1: But no character names, invented dialect, made up rules peculiar
Speaker 1: to my own mind. It was too precise to be coincidence.
Speaker 1: The afternoon sun crawled in yellow squares along the linoleum.
Speaker 1: I was left in possession of an artifact that shouldn't exist,
Speaker 1: a book in an old library, recounting a dream I
Speaker 1: had never uttered nor written. A physical impossibility. I nearly laughed.
Speaker 1: If not for the paper's weight in my palms, I
Speaker 1: would have closed the book and told myself it was
Speaker 1: no more than powerful nostalgia. I rested the volume on
Speaker 1: my knees, listening to the stacks settling, the building's mild groans.
Speaker 1: My disbelief was total, but the evidence of my hands
Speaker 1: was direct. I ran my thumb across the embossed cover,
Speaker 1: a subtle ridge in the linen. The nervousness I felt
Speaker 1: was not fear, exactly, but a sense that the world
Speaker 1: had grown abruptly pours a gap between self and story,
Speaker 1: memory and artifact, opening right here at the edge of
Speaker 1: the shelf. I slipped the book behind the ledges where
Speaker 1: I found it. There was no cataloguing slip, no inside
Speaker 1: jacket stamped. It was as though the story had lived
Speaker 1: in the shadows all along, waiting for exactly this moment
Speaker 1: someone to remember it, or perhaps someone to need it.
Speaker 1: The rest of the building seemed oblivious as I rolled
Speaker 1: my cart away, books jostling side by side. Outside the alcove,
Speaker 1: a slant of weak sunlight filtered through frosted glass, I
Speaker 1: paused to listen to the ever-present humming, not quite quiet,
Speaker 1: that gave the library its peculiar sense of suspended possibility.
Speaker 1: The room, as always, weeded solidly to be noticed. By 9.30,
Speaker 1: I'd clocked myself in as usual, signed the opening log
Speaker 1: in cunt blue ink, and shuffled my jacket behind the
Speaker 1: main desk. This branch, the Buxton Library, was an old
Speaker 1: Edwardian hold of a floors warped by generations of civic duty,
Speaker 1: walls lined by panels that had buckled and been refitted
Speaker 1: so often that nobody knew the original colour under the
Speaker 1: brown paint. It was a place both solid and creased,
Speaker 1: dependable in the way of places that have outlasted their
Speaker 1: funding and retained their purpose through gentle attrition. Most mornings,
Speaker 1: the regular cotter of characters arrive like clockwork, each with
Speaker 1: their own cadences and minor rituals. Miss Esquint, our recent
Speaker 1: local historian and self-counted guardian of the town's half-remembered legends,
Speaker 1: was shuffling at 9.55, scarf-trailing, dropping her battered leather bag
Speaker 1: by the genealogy microfiche. Simon, enthroned in the world's most
Speaker 1: self-fitting sweater, usually immaterialized a step behind her, already balancing
Speaker 1: a stack of volunteers' returns on his hip, eyes bright
Speaker 1: with the thrill of solving a shelving challenge before his
Speaker 1: first coffee. Mr. Tran often greeted us with a soft
Speaker 1: click of the antique shop door across the lane opening
Speaker 1: just after 10, popping in for the right kind of
Speaker 1: silence when his own store filled with too much noise.
Speaker 1: I liked the shape of the library's days, sometimes brisk
Speaker 1: with elementary classes and retirees, more often browsing at the
Speaker 1: pace of slow rivers, people scattered in nooks and side
Speaker 1: rooms as though mapping a private geography. Our budget never
Speaker 1: sufficed for new carpet, let alone technology so the grandfather clock,
Speaker 1: frozen at 2.37 these past nine years, became a running joke.
Speaker 1: When visitors asked, what time is it really, they'd check phones,
Speaker 1: or look for the old pen marks at the edge
Speaker 1: of the directory, remnants of a previous head librarian who
Speaker 1: saw rumour had it preferred ink to graphite, permanent to transient.
Speaker 1: I pridately believed this was part of why the library endured.
Speaker 1: It was not merely a vessel, a container for certified knowledge,
Speaker 1: but a landscape for all that might bloom unbidden. As
Speaker 1: a girl, hungry for stories with nowhere to go, I'd
Speaker 1: haunted the stacks after school, hungry for possibility, not just fat.
Speaker 1: Even now, handling battered returns and mending peeled covers, I
Speaker 1: habitually wondered, what stories never made it to ink? How
Speaker 1: many were tucked away in the minds of people, grown
Speaker 1: dusty and strange for lack of sunlight? Sometimes I thought
Speaker 1: libraries held far more than what the inventories ever showed.
Speaker 1: peculiarities abounded, but never seemed to prompt concern. I occasionally
Speaker 1: found books in the wrong section ancient atlases and cookery
Speaker 1: a private album filed under wildflowers. In the rush of returns,
Speaker 1: I chalked it up to hurried patrons or the noise
Speaker 1: of busy days. The stray volume I'd uncovered today felt,
Speaker 1: at first, like no more than another misspelled relic, except
Speaker 1: none of the usual explanations and none of the faint
Speaker 1: cataloguing signatures recalled its existence. At lunch, over to you
Speaker 1: at the front desk, Mrs. Quint launched into one of
Speaker 1: her gentle rants about the great shipwreck of local authors,
Speaker 1: lamenting generations of would-be chroniclers whose family stories, recipes, and
Speaker 1: minor epics had never been preserved past oral retelling. People
Speaker 1: used to write out their memories in scraps, tuck them
Speaker 1: in novels, even the phone directories she mused as she
Speaker 1: flattened her sandwich. The town would be richer if we
Speaker 1: weren't so squeamish about who counts as an author. Simon, overhearing, shrugged.
Speaker 1: You and me both, Mrs. Q, have got half a
Speaker 1: detective saga sprawled across grocery receipts. The only plot twist is,
Speaker 1: I never remember what I meant to write. He pulled
Speaker 1: a handful of receipts from his hoodie pocket and grinned.
Speaker 1: Maybe the library likes when you never quite finish a story,
Speaker 1: more interesting that way. Like those old puzzle boxes, always
Speaker 1: another piece missing. Mr. Tran, passing by with a cup
Speaker 1: of herbal tea that smelled impossibly sweet, chimed in. Careful, Simon.
Speaker 1: There are legends about this place. Ghost writers, you know.
Speaker 1: Not the real kind, the ones who never got started.
Speaker 1: My mother once said the library had a shelf for
Speaker 1: every unfinished thought in the city SHH. Maybe that's where
Speaker 1: I left my last invoice. The laughter ran gentle and teasing,
Speaker 1: but the feeling of the morning's oddity lodged like a
Speaker 1: small stone behind my ribs. It was, I realized, not
Speaker 1: impossible in this place for such anomalies to slip by, half-noticed,
Speaker 1: folded into the habits of all paper and routine. The
Speaker 1: building seemed both fixed and permeable as structure so battered
Speaker 1: by decades of expectations that now, at the far edge
Speaker 1: of its busy heyday, the overlooked niches might conceal stranger stories.
Speaker 1: I ran my hand over the ledger waiting for repair
Speaker 1: and tried to anchor my mind to ordinary work. But
Speaker 1: the untitled book haunted the periphery of thought, a whisper
Speaker 1: at the edge of scene. It fit nowhere with no barcode,
Speaker 1: no catalogue history, no plausible donor. Impossible, and yet achingly present.
Speaker 1: That night at closing, I lingered in the alcove far
Speaker 1: longer than needed, half hopeful. half-wary of confirming the day's strangeness.
Speaker 1: What would I say, if asked? Found a book I
Speaker 1: never wrote, printed in my own secret dialect. But no
Speaker 1: one asked. In libraries, stories slip through cracks. Have it,
Speaker 1: more than skepticism, reasserted itself and nudged me back to duty.
Speaker 1: Each day after, I slept into my rounds with the
Speaker 1: eleveness that follows a minor shock. The untitled book remained
Speaker 1: secreted away. I checked quietly to see if it had moved,
Speaker 1: but there it waited, undisturbed. Still, I had every unlikely
Speaker 1: gap with new suspicion, curiosity mounting, disbelief refusing to put
Speaker 1: the matter behind me. Two days later, while shelving the
Speaker 1: battered 1957 periodicals, I noticed a slim, handwritten volume protruding
Speaker 1: awkwardly from beside the local news file. Its cover, a
Speaker 1: fraying blue cloth, was labeled only with a date followed
Speaker 1: as 17, no year, no author. I hesitated before extracting it. Inside,
Speaker 1: the story ran in short chapters, each a vignette, three
Speaker 1: children building an underground city beneath the elm trees in
Speaker 1: the park, battling imaginary monsters, building booby traps out of
Speaker 1: sticks and weedy clumps of river clay. Catherine, a gem,
Speaker 1: and a little argued over the legend of the harbour's clock,
Speaker 1: a lost timepiece said to Grant wishes if one dared
Speaker 1: to climb the statue after dusk. I read on, my
Speaker 1: breath catching. These details were nearly verbatim from a local
Speaker 1: tale Simon had spun off handedly over coffee three weeks prior,
Speaker 1: describing a fantasy escapade with his childhood friends. He'd even
Speaker 1: added a flourish, the clocks ticking returned only at night,
Speaker 1: keeping wishes safe from grown-ups. The prose was different from
Speaker 1: the first books, the hand, too, tended towards stubby lettering,
Speaker 1: peppered with the slang Simon used in quick conversation. Pages
Speaker 1: peppered with drawings a winding spiral, a makeshift fort under
Speaker 1: dripping branches only deepened the uncanny resemblance. I thumped through
Speaker 1: the rest, noting a hastily sketched treasure map on the
Speaker 1: final leaf. A new theory surfaced and disintegrated just as quickly.
Speaker 1: Simon had insisted, more than once. He'd never written down
Speaker 1: his stories, kept them in memory, daydreamed aloud, but never
Speaker 1: privately recorded. And yet... if this was some elaborate prank,
Speaker 1: it would require access to details he claimed never to
Speaker 1: have shared, except in moments of casual camaraderie. When the
Speaker 1: library quieted near the last hour, I found Simon at
Speaker 1: the returns desk, jotting in his battered notebook, tension furrowing
Speaker 1: his brow. I kept my tone breezy. He ever managed
Speaker 1: to write at that underground adventure story, the one with
Speaker 1: the wish clock? He snorted. God, no. Maybe someday. I'd
Speaker 1: forget half the best bits anyway. Why, are you doing
Speaker 1: a local legends display? Just curious. Seemed like the sort
Speaker 1: of thing worth preserving. He grinned, eyes unfocused. It's just rambling.
Speaker 1: My friends always groaned when I tried to work a
Speaker 1: puzzle into the plot. Real stories are for the people
Speaker 1: who finish things. I just like the dreaming part. Nothing
Speaker 1: behind his answer rang false. If he was in on
Speaker 1: a scheme, he hit it with knees I couldn't beat.
Speaker 1: I changed tack, asking about an overdue return. He shrugged,
Speaker 1: mounting his headphones already lost to another puzzle. I left
Speaker 1: the second book where I'd found it. The presence of
Speaker 1: not one, but two volumes item and impossibility yet distinct
Speaker 1: in voice and detail shredded my defenses. A pattern was
Speaker 1: taking hold. Some process, not random, was manifesting the unwritten
Speaker 1: tales and daydreams of the people who orbited this library,
Speaker 1: binding them in secret, readable forms. The contradiction was thrilling,
Speaker 1: a precise kind of intellectual itch. We were discovering not
Speaker 1: lost books, but stories that had never entered the world.
Speaker 1: Written by no one, yet physically extant. Impossible, yet here.
Speaker 1: That night, I circled through the stacks, scanning for out-of-place binds,
Speaker 1: the wrong covers, inconsistencies in the numbering. In a narrow
Speaker 1: crawl of hours, a library silence seemed charged with potential
Speaker 1: of feeling almost electric, like standing at the edge of explanation.
Speaker 1: Unable to sleep, I resolved to keep silent a little
Speaker 1: longer to learn what rules, if any, govern these impossible books.
Speaker 1: Earlier the next day, I arrived before the building's official
Speaker 1: opening formed with a clipboard falched from supply, intent on
Speaker 1: taking a kind of informal census. I began a quiet,
Speaker 1: systematic patrol, checking for anomalous volumes in deserted side rooms,
Speaker 1: mapping their locations in faint pencil sketches, flipping through each
Speaker 1: new oddity with building anticipation. My survey scene revealed a
Speaker 1: proliferation of genres and formats. In the engineering section, tucked
Speaker 1: neatly behind a shelf of soils analysis guys, sat a
Speaker 1: technical manual bound in modern stock, diagrams carefully rendered, each
Speaker 1: chapter outlining a series of bizarre contraptions. The final sketch,
Speaker 1: a kind of a perpetual music box machine, was nearly
Speaker 1: identical to an idea Mr. Tran had described to Ida
Speaker 1: last winter, complaining no one would ever buy such a complicated,
Speaker 1: impractical invention. His signature phrase, Jerry-rigged brilliance, too clever for
Speaker 1: the world, was mock-printed in the books forward. Near the
Speaker 1: poetry shelf, a stitched pamphlet of a regular meter and
Speaker 1: an orthodox punctuation spun a sequence of images I recognized
Speaker 1: from Mrs. Quint's coffee talk, Gardens at the Edge of Memory,
Speaker 1: Secrets Whispered Between Rain Cutters, the formal names of sunlight
Speaker 1: suggested only in riddle. The writing matched neither her casual
Speaker 1: speech nor her hasty handwriting, yet the motifs were unmistakable.
Speaker 1: She hadn't composed such lyric, at least not during her
Speaker 1: year's leading Welcome Wednesday at the Local History Society. At
Speaker 1: each turn, the contradictions mounted. The engineering manual's diagrams included
Speaker 1: jargon kind in the last three years' words I'd only
Speaker 1: sought at hearing after Mr. Tran joined the Neighbourhood Association.
Speaker 1: The poetry volume included a recent regional slang for dusk turning,
Speaker 1: a saffron falling, a term Mrs. Quinn favoured in conversation
Speaker 1: but had never published, as far as I could verify.
Speaker 1: The day's tally grew, seven volumes, no two in the
Speaker 1: same hand. Every book seemed to assemble itself from the daydreams,
Speaker 1: unspoken inventions, or private metaphors of this building's inhabitants. Some,
Speaker 1: I realized with a thromb of discomfort, belonged to people
Speaker 1: I'd met only in passing. A young woman who painted
Speaker 1: in the park, her musings about synesthetic sounds gets captured
Speaker 1: in a fragile blue notebook wedged in travel literature. Some
Speaker 1: books bore initials or hints I recognized from local legend,
Speaker 1: suggesting the stories had seeded themselves from overheard stories, playgrounds,
Speaker 1: the driftwood of the community's imagination. Testing my hypothesis, I
Speaker 1: began asking gentle questions. Approaching Mrs. Quint as she catalogued
Speaker 1: genealogy notes, I mused, Did you ever consider publishing your poems?
Speaker 1: She snorted. Not seriously, I like to talk them out.
Speaker 1: She glanced over. Why are you offering to be my agent? No,
Speaker 1: just admiring the imagery. Suffering falling, I've never heard that
Speaker 1: anywhere else. She tapped her pencil, eyes distant. I suppose
Speaker 1: I did say that a lot. It comes to me
Speaker 1: in the mornings. I nodded, tucking away the certainty. Whatever
Speaker 1: was happening was not grounded in conscious confession, nor ordinary authorship.
Speaker 1: Each subject reacted with bemused detachment, mild surprise, never ownership.
Speaker 1: As if the idea was someone else's trick, a dream
Speaker 1: they'd only borrowed. One volume, a collection of puzzles and
Speaker 1: brain-jesus seamed and tethered from any living patron, it intertwined
Speaker 1: codes and math games I didn't recognize. Others echoed city folklore,
Speaker 1: the urban myths that passed through old buildings unstoppably, stories
Speaker 1: anonymous and shiffing, alive only because someone somewhere repeats them.
Speaker 1: I withdrew a handful of books and placed them into
Speaker 1: box files under my desk, suspecting they might fade from
Speaker 1: view if directly disturbed. Several days later, Roustak, Shell, Sprout
Speaker 1: & You, untraceable titles, different genres, different hand, always describing
Speaker 1: some unarticulated hope or lost idea from my colleagues, or myself.
Speaker 1: Far from quelling the anomaly, my interference seemed to provoke it.
Speaker 1: Every act of attention drew more stories out. The process
Speaker 1: was active, not passive, the more I noticed, the more
Speaker 1: the library answered. The phantom books weren't static records but
Speaker 1: living accretions surfacing, shifting, vanishing. They multiplied in the presence
Speaker 1: of search. I began considering, was the library silence merely
Speaker 1: waiting for curiosity? Was every act of reading, of hunting
Speaker 1: for something overlooked, a trigger for these stories to become,
Speaker 1: for a brief span, real enough to be read? Each evening,
Speaker 1: I sat longer in the alcove, my charts growing dense.
Speaker 1: It was less like policing the shells and more like
Speaker 1: mapping a river's current improvisational, semi-invisible, always in motion. and
Speaker 1: within the current, a hint of tentative intelligence. The pattern
Speaker 1: of new books mirrored the interests and longing of whoever
Speaker 1: spent time between these walls. Still, no logic revealed itself
Speaker 1: in whole. Why some ideas and not others? Why the
Speaker 1: sudden blooming of impossible books now, after decades of routine?
Speaker 1: If the process had always run, why hadn't someone before
Speaker 1: documented the flood? Late on a Thursday, after closing, I
Speaker 1: met Mrs. Quint at her usual genealogical haunt, the ethic
Speaker 1: with the smell of paper and faint acid from the
Speaker 1: microphy films. We shared a thermos of her favourite black tea,
Speaker 1: and for a while, conversation drifted to old neighbourhoods, the
Speaker 1: vanished shops of her youth, the long-lost moon festivals the
Speaker 1: city used to celebrate. There are corners here, she told me,
Speaker 1: so forgotten, not even ghosts would bother. She traced the
Speaker 1: etch lines of her teacup. Do you ever wonder how
Speaker 1: many stories never leave these walls? I sometimes think that's
Speaker 1: the real wish people bring when they come just to
Speaker 1: be remembered, somewhere, even in rumour. She brushed away my laugh.
Speaker 1: I mean it. Some days, the only thing that feels
Speaker 1: real is what we talk about after closing, once everyone
Speaker 1: else has forgotten the town's official history. I stared at
Speaker 1: the mottled surface of the desk. Her words coaxed a
Speaker 1: new frame around all I'd seen. I'd been thinking of
Speaker 1: these unread stories as private memories, survivals carried forward by
Speaker 1: habit or accident. But maybe I'd been wrong. Maybe the
Speaker 1: essential axis wasn't memory, but asterisk possibility asterisk books not lost,
Speaker 1: but never realized, never made whole. The library might not
Speaker 1: be collecting the past, but curating the myriad potential futures
Speaker 1: that never happened. In quiet hours, I dug through the
Speaker 1: deepest carved catalogs, running my thumb over long faded names
Speaker 1: and impenetrable cold numbers. At the back of one index,
Speaker 1: I found an old, penciled note, many entitled, no known
Speaker 1: author record but did not catalog. No date, just a
Speaker 1: cryptic footnote, and nothing further. It was as if others
Speaker 1: before me had glimpsed this strange blossoming, only to lose
Speaker 1: their grip on its strangeness. Returning to the pattern, my
Speaker 1: mind whirled. If the library was not an archive alone,
Speaker 1: but an engine of living, generative note then what triggered
Speaker 1: the surfacing of unwritten stories? Was it how we paid attention?
Speaker 1: The momentary overlap of longing and inattention in the minds
Speaker 1: of wandering patrons? Or did the building itself possess some
Speaker 1: mysterious defense against erasure of stories half-born allowed briefly to breathe,
Speaker 1: not to be kept, only to be noticed? Further questions
Speaker 1: compounded the wonder some new book's reference technologies or wordplay
Speaker 1: not known even a decade ago. A detective's story appeared,
Speaker 1: using slang I'd heard only this year on Simon's lips.
Speaker 1: One children's book, written in a slang-laced idiom, captured the
Speaker 1: anxiety of middle school entrance exams none of our elderly
Speaker 1: patrons could have imagined. It wasn't just the past being
Speaker 1: stitched together below the radar, the present and future pressed
Speaker 1: in as well. I decided, for a time, to stop meddling.
Speaker 1: I ceased from moving, ceasing silent cataloguing. I left the
Speaker 1: phantom books where they appeared, even when I ached with
Speaker 1: curiosity for a kind of control. In their continued, shape-shifting presence,
Speaker 1: I found the strange fellowship, the sense of a place,
Speaker 1: alive and attuned, inviting stories into being, and just as
Speaker 1: quickly letting them fade. And always the core contradiction, if
Speaker 1: these books were not the remnants of memory but pulses
Speaker 1: of potential, who determined their appearance? Was it the patrons?
Speaker 1: The staff? Or was the library itself this creaking, battered
Speaker 1: building expressing a quiet agency of its own? On a
Speaker 1: Saturday bright with autumn sun, I decided to test matters
Speaker 1: more directly. Enlisting Simon, under the pretext of beyond normal shelf-cleaning,
Speaker 1: I began an official-looking inventory. We listed books that didn't
Speaker 1: match NEG record, noting who might plausibly have invented their stories. Simon, half-joking,
Speaker 1: proposed we hunt for lost puzzle objects inventions only ever
Speaker 1: mammared between friends, jokes and fifth for publication. Our methodical
Speaker 1: sweep unearthed more patterns. Books plainly linked to regularism assesses.
Speaker 1: Quincegard and riddle prose, Mr. Tran's madcap engineering, Simon's elaborate
Speaker 1: puzzle stories tended to cluster in the quiet of stacks,
Speaker 1: remaining civil days before vanishing. Books no one could identify
Speaker 1: or lay claim to faded first, sometimes half-read, sometimes not
Speaker 1: at all. Once, while shelving in children's fiction, I found
Speaker 1: a volume that blurred in my peripheral visions, title winking
Speaker 1: in and out of legibility. When I looked straight at it,
Speaker 1: the cover was blank, spine and letter, contents gone. A
Speaker 1: greater contradiction surfaced as certain books contained ideas so radical,
Speaker 1: so uncomfortable, that none of the likely authors would ever
Speaker 1: have admitted to conceiving them. One pamphlet, found in the
Speaker 1: philosophy section, posited the abolition of all work. It used
Speaker 1: terms of phrase that echoed the political joke Simon had told,
Speaker 1: yet he blanched and denied any knowledge when I referenced
Speaker 1: its argument. Another, in the health alcove, described the method
Speaker 1: of ritual healing both old-fashioned and faintly impossible. Neither Miss
Speaker 1: Esquint nor any of the elders recalled rumours of it.
Speaker 1: More fascinating yet, when we tried to formally catalogue one
Speaker 1: particular volume assigning it a number, placing it in the
Speaker 1: visible new arrivals section it vanished within a day. In
Speaker 1: its place, a small slip appeared, written in rush, if
Speaker 1: facing hand. What is seen is lost, what is noticed returns. Handerton,
Speaker 1: never matching Simon's, nor mine, this was the library speaking,
Speaker 1: if not in voice, then in rules. It was responding
Speaker 1: to scrutiny the way a stream hides itself when down,
Speaker 1: surfacing instead in quieter tributaries. Eager to probe further, Simon
Speaker 1: and I ventured into the rare books room. There, a
Speaker 1: faded margin note in a 1920s Buxton City Folklore volume wandered.
Speaker 1: Does this place collect more than dust, perhaps the silhouettes
Speaker 1: of wishes yet unmade? Another, in child's hand, marked a
Speaker 1: 1940s hymnbook, Leave a Wish Behind, Watch It Grow. The
Speaker 1: clues stacked against ordinary explanation. Over lunch, I ventured my
Speaker 1: working theory to Simon and, later, to Miss Esquint, that
Speaker 1: the library was interleaved with the hopes and inventions of
Speaker 1: its community, pulling them into materiality only when curiosity and
Speaker 1: a kind of gentle need sharpened itself. Not haunted, not cursed,
Speaker 1: but a living archive of what might have been, continually
Speaker 1: generating new stories from the silent crowd of dreams we host,
Speaker 1: sometimes without knowing. Mrs. Quint grew thoughtful, her gentle skepticism
Speaker 1: replaced by a kind of sparkling wonder. Maybe that's the
Speaker 1: point of libraries, she mused, sipping her tea. Not just
Speaker 1: to remember what's been set down, but to keep alive
Speaker 1: whatever we almost dared to imagine. Maybe we're not just
Speaker 1: preserving memory, but dreaming together, letting the world expand by inches. Simon, half-joking,
Speaker 1: wondered if his half-finished puzzles would serve as someday's artifacts.
Speaker 1: If someone finds my unfinished crossword, I hope they solve
Speaker 1: it better than I ever did. That evening, after closing,
Speaker 1: I stepped through the stacks, alert not to the shadows,
Speaker 1: but to the undercurrent of creative possibility. The walls did
Speaker 1: not close in, but seemed to lean outward, swollen with
Speaker 1: what might exist if only someone dared to look. Not fear,
Speaker 1: but awe, I was coming, at last, to understand the
Speaker 1: library as a field of living potential, a mechanism for
Speaker 1: hope and untold beginnings. It was not memory, not nostalgia,
Speaker 1: that I brushed up against in these volumes, but the
Speaker 1: tremulous frontier where story takes its first, unconfident shape, buoyed
Speaker 1: by the quiet but insistent curiosity of those who pass
Speaker 1: among the shelves. It was a peculiar current that ran
Speaker 1: under my skin, returning me to the same stroll where
Speaker 1: the first unwritten book had made its quiet landing in
Speaker 1: the world. I'd grown attuned to the shelves aware not
Speaker 1: only of what belonged, but what didn't, and, more intriguingly,
Speaker 1: the invisible seam between here and elsewhere that seemed to
Speaker 1: breathe beneath the old wood and paper. Light from the
Speaker 1: octagonal dome overhead cut through dust, giving the stacks a
Speaker 1: honeyed sharpness. Each sound a carp wails over tile, pen
Speaker 1: scratching in the ledger, Simon's stifled yawns were sharper and stranger.
Speaker 1: The strangest thing, truly, was how ordinary such wonder had
Speaker 1: begun to feel. I found my hunger for answer was
Speaker 1: only sharpened, knowing the impossible took shape here did not
Speaker 1: tame its pull. If anything, the mystery ripened a demanding
Speaker 1: not proof, but meaning. So I widened the search, moving
Speaker 1: from stray volumes to the people who haunted these halls
Speaker 1: as surely as I did. I began quietly, with small
Speaker 1: talk and misdirection's questions folded inside questions drawing out recollections
Speaker 1: from the people who'd orbited this library over decades. Mr.
Speaker 1: Tran was first, met in his cramped antique shop amid
Speaker 1: clocks whose chimes misaligned with any hour. Ever find a
Speaker 1: book you couldn't explain? I floated, eyeing an intricate music
Speaker 1: box gathering bitter-smelling dust. He brushed a velvet cloth over
Speaker 1: a green teapot and eyed me side-on. Once, this was Lord,
Speaker 1: ten years back, I remember because it rained steady for days.
Speaker 1: Someone left a volume near the crafts table, looked new,
Speaker 1: but the title was smudged. I picked it up to
Speaker 1: show the board, swear it was gone before they turned
Speaker 1: their heads, like a trick of the eye. Figured I'd
Speaker 1: just fancied it. You know how this place is. I
Speaker 1: let the conversation meander at asking about invasives and slow seasons,
Speaker 1: watching how his mind orbited back to the library's peculiarity
Speaker 1: as one or two of my own thoughts did now.
Speaker 1: He recalled the sensation of unreality more than content, like
Speaker 1: you almost remember the face of a stranger from your
Speaker 1: dreams gone once you blink. I thanked him, parting with
Speaker 1: a dusty puzzle tin and a furrowed brow, my collection
Speaker 1: of feigned accounts and oddities expanding. Mrs. Quint I found
Speaker 1: after hours, cross-legged in a cramped den of genealogy files.
Speaker 1: I offered her a cup of strong tea, waited for
Speaker 1: her to riffle through notes before broaching the topic slantwise.
Speaker 1: Did you ever find a book about something you only imagined,
Speaker 1: something too private to have ever been written, but there anyway?
Speaker 1: She took this question not as an intrusion, but a
Speaker 1: challenge worthy of a historian. Her reply was slow, deliberate. Once,
Speaker 1: as a little girl, I remember a book on the
Speaker 1: station shelf. It was about three sisters who built a
Speaker 1: town in the roots of a great tree. That story,
Speaker 1: I had told it to myself alone, in the dark,
Speaker 1: so many times, but never written it. Saw it there,
Speaker 1: on a Tuesday, thick as anything. But when I described
Speaker 1: it to Mother, it was gone. I think I'd forgotten
Speaker 1: it myself until now. She peered over her glasses. You
Speaker 1: think the place remembers for us, when we can't. Her
Speaker 1: memory had a shimmering quality, like a painting glimpsed through
Speaker 1: water vivid, fleeting, half-suspected truth. The ghost books left impressions,
Speaker 1: sometimes faint, sometimes sharp, but always dislocating. And always more
Speaker 1: real for being shared. Others, too, yielded fragments. One former custodian,
Speaker 1: tracked down by a phone call routed through three sets
Speaker 1: of relatives, offered a furtive laugh. Don't tell me you
Speaker 1: found the ghost index, she said. We used to joke
Speaker 1: about them books that reshelved themselves. Notes appearing in books
Speaker 1: we'd long since weeded. I thought it was bed tracking,
Speaker 1: or sleepwalking. Libraries are strange, you know. More listening than watching.
Speaker 1: I grew bolder, combing every alcove and locked room read
Speaker 1: and excused by generations of the city's crappier kids, the thick,
Speaker 1: unloved underlayer of government rickrots, the rickety third floor attic
Speaker 1: few ventured in to save for tales of hidden safeboxes.
Speaker 1: And the anomalies scaled with my effort. Books surfaced in
Speaker 1: corners I'd never searched before, slim histories of vanished neighbourhoods,
Speaker 1: unreadable pamphlets in cryptic ciphers, a set of picked grams
Speaker 1: that seemed to record recipes for festivals that never were.
Speaker 1: It was here I found the next contradiction, one that
Speaker 1: threatened not only logic, but the very calendar of possibility.
Speaker 1: In the blue-copited reference section, a volume prop behind the
Speaker 1: dictionary's board date that might have been in a sprint
Speaker 1: during next year. Its content, in a loose, almost giddy hand,
Speaker 1: sketched out a plan to modernize the city's riverfront a
Speaker 1: project Simon would offhandedly propose, as I later learned, months
Speaker 1: hence relying on a pattern of pedestrian paths discussed nowhere public.
Speaker 1: The genre wobbled between planning proposal and speculative fiction. Its
Speaker 1: potential author was not yet an author the story's moment
Speaker 1: had yet to reach the mind that would birth it,
Speaker 1: though here it already lay, folded and waiting. When Sinon
Speaker 1: eventually wandered back, wholly ignorant, to discuss a mild headache
Speaker 1: and a particularly vexing crossword, I showed him the planned
Speaker 1: abstract map, masked as a quirky lost item. He squinted, grinning.
Speaker 1: That's neat. We used to imagine fixing out the river walks.
Speaker 1: I haven't. Wait. I was going to. Never mind. It's nothing.
Speaker 1: And there it was again, the glancing touch of premonition,
Speaker 1: a halfway glimmer of what the library seemed oddly willing
Speaker 1: to conjure. Patrons who noticed such artifacts responded with a
Speaker 1: spectrum of amusement, delight, or, in a few rare cases,
Speaker 1: the fright defensiveness. One businesswoman, whom I cornered in the
Speaker 1: gardening section, shrugged off the offering of a short story
Speaker 1: mirroring her childhood field trips, insisting it was a just
Speaker 1: good universal plotting someone else wrote it, I bet, folk stories. Others,
Speaker 1: less certain, fingered the pages with a mixture of embarrassment
Speaker 1: and quiet pleasure, as though memory itself had rebelled against
Speaker 1: straightforward accounting. For a brief, explosive week, I experimented with
Speaker 1: copying the book's photographing pages, transcribing their oddities, or, with
Speaker 1: Simon's occasional help, attempting to scan them wholly. The results
Speaker 1: were maddeningly inconsistent, sometimes the photos developed as perfect blanks,
Speaker 1: whilst the letters blurred after a day, lines calling into
Speaker 1: nonsense under the scanner's light. Once, I tried reading a
Speaker 1: transcribed text to Mrs. Quint, and the words themselves wavered,
Speaker 1: her recollection darted, the meaning slipped, the book itself gone
Speaker 1: when we checked the original shelf. It was as if
Speaker 1: the stories only stabilised under direct, sincere attention, a human reader, believing, watching,
Speaker 1: drawn out the contours with a mix of curiosity and care.
Speaker 1: Remove the living, searching gaze, and the remains vanished back
Speaker 1: into the substrate of possibility. At first, this felt like
Speaker 1: an affliction and inability to gather hard evidence to drag
Speaker 1: the phenomenon into the star-lit light of day. But a
Speaker 1: subtler logic started to surface. The boundaries of the library
Speaker 1: were not just architectural but psychological, and its inventory was
Speaker 1: a function of those who sought not just what was
Speaker 1: looked for, but how it was looked at, and by whom.
Speaker 1: One Tuesday, while we're stacking a series of biographies abandoned
Speaker 1: in the main reading room, I let myself rest just
Speaker 1: a moment, knees complaining beside the crook-backed radiator. It hummed weakly,
Speaker 1: heat unreliable, driving the scent of paper and four generations
Speaker 1: of forepolish into the air. Simon turned up, arms weighted
Speaker 1: with donations. He noticed my notebook, thick with drawings and scribbles.
Speaker 1: You cataloging yourself into madness? He teased. Or did the
Speaker 1: great puzzle book finally escape? I pushed the notebook his way.
Speaker 1: Have you ever had that feeling on the verge of
Speaker 1: remembering something, but you know it's not formed yet, not
Speaker 1: a forgotten memory, but something that could be, like a
Speaker 1: crossword answer you almost know, except it's not in the grid?
Speaker 1: He considered this, face brightening with the pleasure of a
Speaker 1: new logic toy. Isn't that why people keep coming here?
Speaker 1: Hope you'll surprise yourself. Find something you didn't know you wanted. Maybe,
Speaker 1: I said, the library helps with that. Maybe it doesn't
Speaker 1: store what we've created, but what we haven't. What's unfinished,
Speaker 1: or never dared into the open. Maybe that's why it's gentle.
Speaker 1: With its ghosts, they are not quite dead. Simon's grin
Speaker 1: softened into something less defensive. I like that. Not quite ghosts.
Speaker 1: Like placeholders. Null values in the great catalogue. That'd make
Speaker 1: a good story if I could finish one. I left
Speaker 1: into his repairs and drifted once more through the echo
Speaker 1: chamber hash of the basement archives. Soon, a picture started
Speaker 1: to form not a solution, but a constellation of half-lit stars.
Speaker 1: The more intently I looked, the more possible or rather
Speaker 1: than remembered a story surfaced. It was a double act,
Speaker 1: creative hopes and idle wishes from the patrons, and the searching,
Speaker 1: prying curiosity from those who walked the aisle paying attention.
Speaker 1: Was it unique to Buxton? Perhaps our town's slow rhythms,
Speaker 1: its aging facade, the generations' cribbing history from oral half-truths
Speaker 1: might have opened the membrane. Or perhaps, in more libraries
Speaker 1: than most, wherever longing and wandering lingered, the phenomenon could
Speaker 1: take root. One evening, I tucked my notebook beneath the
Speaker 1: reference desk, watching Mrs. Quint assemble her bag for the
Speaker 1: walk home. I hesitated, gathering the question into some manageable form,
Speaker 1: wanting not so much an answer as company in my uncertainty.
Speaker 1: Do you ever think, I asked, that all this is
Speaker 1: a kind of memory just not for what happened, but
Speaker 1: what might have? She paused on the thresholds pooling around
Speaker 1: her boots. History always has holes, you know. Most things
Speaker 1: worth remembering never made it to the archives. We're fonder
Speaker 1: of could have beens than actual facts. Half the time,
Speaker 1: maybe stories need a place to drift into being, even
Speaker 1: if it's just borrowing a dusty shelf for a little while.
Speaker 1: She turned, scrolling a half-note on the outgoing, slipped a
Speaker 1: CU in the stacks and was gone. If the appearance
Speaker 1: of unwritten books was not an accident, then perhaps it
Speaker 1: was a dancer closing of a circuit between two needs
Speaker 1: to create and to be noticed creating. Longing and curiosity
Speaker 1: coiling together in a place built specifically to invite the unfinished,
Speaker 1: the not yet real, briefly into existence. The following week,
Speaker 1: the air of expectation in the library was palpable, humming
Speaker 1: in the click of plastic chairs in the soft creak
Speaker 1: of leather bindings. I felt as if walking through overlapping
Speaker 1: timelines past, future, and imagined one dimension breathing alongside the other,
Speaker 1: overlapping but not bleeding together. My small experiments resumed, now
Speaker 1: with a new intent. Instead of seeking further proof in
Speaker 1: yet more volumes, I set myself to understand the process itself.
Speaker 1: Were stories more likely to surface if I focused on
Speaker 1: their holes, their missing endings, and unconstructed antagonists, a trouble
Speaker 1: never resolved. Would oddities bloom, or if I invited patrons, unwittingly,
Speaker 1: to wonder aloud about what might belong here but didn't?
Speaker 1: Could the library hear what no one dared admit, or
Speaker 1: only what was gently, privately possible? Some result were inconclusive
Speaker 1: books hovered just out of sight and mind, titles reconfiguring
Speaker 1: in seconds. But occasionally, when my mind was quiet, the
Speaker 1: world receded, the shifting undercurrent broke the surface. More than once,
Speaker 1: I returned to a shelf and found a blank, untitled
Speaker 1: book occupying precisely the space I had just left with
Speaker 1: my intention floating somewhere above, like a wisp of breath.
Speaker 1: A theory began to crystallize, subtle at first. Perhaps the
Speaker 1: library was not creating the stories, nor were we rendering
Speaker 1: them into being in any ordinary sense. Instead, space itself
Speaker 1: functioned as a condenser, a transformer with a throne of
Speaker 1: possible stories, inventions, and lives perennially drifting its societies which
Speaker 1: might briefly achieve mass, thick and material, given the attending
Speaker 1: act of search and patience. The evidence collected in thousands
Speaker 1: of details. Marginalia and century-old returns echoed the same pattern,
Speaker 1: looked for but never found again, someone had penned in 1943.
Speaker 1: The story erased on rereading was it mine, from a
Speaker 1: 1977 batch of Weedings. The phenomenon, I realized with a
Speaker 1: prickling sense of kinship for all the past staff, predated me,
Speaker 1: predated Simon, even predated Mrs. Quinn's tenure. That afternoon, huddled
Speaker 1: with both Simon and Mrs. Quinn in the over-warm periodical's alcove,
Speaker 1: I outlined my findings, drawing diagrams and half-laughed idealizations on
Speaker 1: the tissue edges of the local newspaper. The library, I
Speaker 1: told them, might be the only place left that feeds
Speaker 1: on what isn't yet, what never quite becomes, not a
Speaker 1: sight of memory, but of creative possibility. Maybe these volumes
Speaker 1: or invitations echoes of what any one of us could imagine,
Speaker 1: so long as another is here to seek them out. Simon,
Speaker 1: ever practical, countered, or maybe we're misremembering, or combining things
Speaker 1: we saw in childhood, and the mind invents a matching
Speaker 1: object as a kind of error, like when people swear
Speaker 1: they remember a cartoon that never existed. The sesquint, Eyebrow's Arch,
Speaker 1: offered a folkloric twist, A My Great Dance Village. There's
Speaker 1: a tale about the whisper basket's wicker boxes left empty
Speaker 1: for dreams to catch themselves. If nobody opened them in
Speaker 1: the morning, the dreams would slip out into the cracks
Speaker 1: and plan the day for you. What if the books
Speaker 1: are just our way of catching the drift? Near the
Speaker 1: theory was fully satisfying both, had empirical holes and emotional ballast.
Speaker 1: But what mattered was not so much the explanation as
Speaker 1: the function, the library, by its very nature, on a
Speaker 1: day veem as surely as knowledge. It met invention with possibility,
Speaker 1: weaving a system where the unspoken had its chance to become.
Speaker 1: and those blank spots on the shelves with the subtle topographies,
Speaker 1: the stories surfacing only to vanish were the world's way
Speaker 1: of saying that each person contained boundless volumes still waiting
Speaker 1: for the right reader. I grew less concerned with tracking
Speaker 1: the manifesting books and more focused on attention itself. The books,
Speaker 1: after all, only persisted while their possibility was alive in
Speaker 1: someone a reader or author or dreamer. Disbelief, or even certainty,
Speaker 1: erased them as surely as a chalkboard wiped clean. It
Speaker 1: was this, above all, that stood as the central revelation.
Speaker 1: The library's greatest role was not as archive, nor architect,
Speaker 1: but as a place where reality was negotiated with the
Speaker 1: half-born lives of stories, half-invented loves, almost built cities, all
Speaker 1: the sheer wilderness of inner experience could billow into shared
Speaker 1: space for as long as attention, curiosity, and a kind
Speaker 1: of collective doubt allowed them to exist. The lifespan of
Speaker 1: a book, how long it remained readable, or even real,
Speaker 1: did not depend on the story's merit or author's will,
Speaker 1: but on how fiercely someone, somewhere, believed in its possibility,
Speaker 1: and how gently another was willing to receive it. The
Speaker 1: process demanded not just creation, but audience. The act of seeking, longing,
Speaker 1: was as generative as writing or imagining, the observer transformed
Speaker 1: the observed. This explained, too, the vanishing stories those many
Speaker 1: books that never had a reader or whose authors recoiled
Speaker 1: from being recognized. The moment curiosity dimmed, or the moment
Speaker 1: doubt snuffed out hope, the volume faded, leaving no wind
Speaker 1: or residue, only a faint pressure, like a memory too
Speaker 1: young to grieve. Even though future stories fell into place,
Speaker 1: each of us carries not only what has been, but
Speaker 1: what is still to be thought, the seeds of invention
Speaker 1: germinating unseen. A library, it seemed, was not a testament
Speaker 1: to what had already happened, but a perpetual gathering of
Speaker 1: what might yet exist, each entry leaning forward into possibility.
Speaker 1: Simon Press, so what now? Do we just keep reading, collecting,
Speaker 1: what waiting to see what comes next? But the answer, somehow,
Speaker 1: had already changed. This was not a secret to be
Speaker 1: cornered and caged, but a phenomenon to be lived with tended, fostered,
Speaker 1: cared for. A sesquence mild, folding her bag. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: enough to know we're part of it, that, now and then,
Speaker 1: the world is willing to surprise us if we keep
Speaker 1: looking up from the catalogue cards. For myself, I found
Speaker 1: a certain humility settling, displacing every earlier hunger for domination
Speaker 1: or certainty. Every patron who wandered in, every lost soul
Speaker 1: who combed the stacks searching for something to rescue them
Speaker 1: from the exhaustion of the ordinary, now appeared imbued with
Speaker 1: creative potential. Perhaps they, too, bore within them a Martin
Speaker 1: book's unshaped inventions, poetic moments whose outlines I would never see,
Speaker 1: but which, in the right conditions, might someday find a
Speaker 1: spine and a shelf for the span of a single
Speaker 1: attentive gaze. I passed the afternoon in slow routine, mending bindings,
Speaker 1: returning errant pens to the caddy, sponging the shallow cracks
Speaker 1: in the woodwork. The surface of the world shimmered slightly,
Speaker 1: and I let it. There was no need now to
Speaker 1: chase every angle or record every fluctuation. Mystery was not
Speaker 1: the opposite of knowledge, but a condition of it. Curiosity sustained, shared,
Speaker 1: undemanding became the nearest thing to mastery this place would allow.
Speaker 1: Later that week, Reaching for a well-thumbed poetry collection lost
Speaker 1: to the center cart, I found myself holding another kind
Speaker 1: of artifact, a blank journal, crisp, unsigned, newly arrived. Its
Speaker 1: cover was pale gray, its pages fringed in the faintest blue.
Speaker 1: I ran my fingertip down its spine, no call number,
Speaker 1: no trace of previous use. For a long moment, I
Speaker 1: did nothing at all, allowing the presence of the unknown
Speaker 1: to stretch through me. I shelved the journal at eye level,
Speaker 1: a gap in the fiction section almost invitingly wide, the
Speaker 1: faint hush of the building a kind of exhale. It
Speaker 1: would wake ready, perhaps, for the next person to imagine
Speaker 1: into being the book only they could conjure. The library,
Speaker 1: I realize, was not its inventory, but the quiet tension
Speaker 1: of all that might yet be caught briefly on the
Speaker 1: edge between longing and attention. And if I was right,
Speaker 1: then every one of us passing by the window, paused
Speaker 1: in a patch of dusty sun, or lost among the stacks, might,
Speaker 1: at any moment, become the story the world had been
Speaker 1: waiting to read. And that is the end. Thank you
Speaker 1: for listening, and I will see you in the next one.