Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. The lad you
Speaker 1: are here, Let's get into it. Volunteering in retirement at
Speaker 1: the old Benning Lane branch isn't so different from working there,
Speaker 1: except the clock ticks lower, the uniforms have vanished, and
Speaker 1: I'm the only one who ever volunteers for the late
Speaker 1: shift for shelving. I don't mind. I like being among
Speaker 1: books as the winter dust seeps in the blue glass
Speaker 1: beneath the reading lamps, making the aisles look under water.
Speaker 1: On Friday evenings, the library is all small sands caught
Speaker 1: wheels at tap. At the returns desk, Alice humming as
Speaker 1: she stacks the whole shelf, the eratic clutter from junior
Speaker 1: troubleshooting the ancient public printer. That's when I found the card.
Speaker 1: It was a battered rectangle, the color of old postcards,
Speaker 1: blue and cream, marble together and curved with age, shoved
Speaker 1: like a bookmark deep inside Astois spirits of the lower
Speaker 1: Estuary asterisk. I'd noticed the book as I saw did
Speaker 1: the day's returns, the kind of utkuo at a print
Speaker 1: local field guide on the are most loyal regulars ever borrow?
Speaker 1: When I found through its pages, A slip of faded
Speaker 1: plastic fluttered out and landed at my feet. First, I
Speaker 1: almost tossed it into the lost card bin, but there,
Speaker 1: above the faded logo, a branch name surrounded by a
Speaker 1: halo of seagulls discontinued. What I was a teenager was
Speaker 1: a name h Morrow. The serial number two, ending with
Speaker 1: an enormous hand printedy, caught my eye. I couldn't recall
Speaker 1: the font, and the back was stamped with an address panel
Speaker 1: nobody's filled out in decades. Curiosity flickered quick as the
Speaker 1: lamp light. I carried the card to the terminal at
Speaker 1: the reference desk, nudged aside Junior's laptop and pulled a
Speaker 1: borrowed database up fingers itching. Most cards from that period
Speaker 1: are usually starting with eight, two or five had been
Speaker 1: long retired, phased out in the eighties when the city
Speaker 1: were fully digital. But this number eight hundred thousand eight
Speaker 1: seemed an outlayer. I'd have remembered card numbered ZO, but
Speaker 1: when I tried to scan it with the bar coded reader,
Speaker 1: it pined red. No such a caount. How in the
Speaker 1: reference tune I used to souve nose on. Over two weeks,
Speaker 1: I switched to the ancient microfiche catalog. Nobody touched but
Speaker 1: me or alice there Faint and green phosphor was an
Speaker 1: entry for H. Morrow's card Live and Active as Anything
Speaker 1: loans going back to the sixties. Two to three books
Speaker 1: checked out every month, never a final lost item. According
Speaker 1: to the record, H. Marrow had borrowed Astors Burds of
Speaker 1: the Lower Estuary Asteris before and returned it every time
Speaker 1: within two weeks. A model patron if a not only
Speaker 1: invisible one. I scrolled through the recent loans, all ordinary
Speaker 1: sounding astors, Carbassans, forgotten astors, gaster As, Assault Churches of
Speaker 1: the Western Bay, asteriskasters four of the show lyin as
Speaker 1: Asterus Mariners Almanac nineteen seventy five, assk Asterisk gold games.
Speaker 1: We played Asterisk, not one overdue of flat does problem stock. Yet,
Speaker 1: running through my mental list of regulars, I couldn't imagine
Speaker 1: who H Morrow might be. Every familiar facing outwindling Glentil
Speaker 1: sidled along in my minds. I missed her Forbes with
Speaker 1: his cane and tote, miss Essilwell and clutching her garden mysteries.
Speaker 1: The after school students praying up the tablet chargers. None
Speaker 1: were morrow or had ever been. I set the car
Speaker 1: to one side, sliding it in a pencil envelope marked
Speaker 1: exceptions for privacy. For reasons I couldn't name, I decided
Speaker 1: not to mention it just yet. Instead, I scribbled down
Speaker 1: the list of books checked out in the past yere
Speaker 1: on a sticky note folded in the pocket of my jacket,
Speaker 1: and went to help Alice lock up. There was no sign,
Speaker 1: walking home in the fog that I'd begun something larger
Speaker 1: than a cattalogging oddity, only an insistent urge to know
Speaker 1: who was using an eight car to borrow from a collection.
Speaker 1: There By, all evidence shouldn't even allow it. Retirement, every
Speaker 1: one told me, would be simpler than working life, and
Speaker 1: yet old habits die hard. The next morning, I work
Speaker 1: before dawn as usual, a kettle screeching against the silent house,
Speaker 1: and sat with tea by the window while low cloud
Speaker 1: trailed over the roof. Ups For a moment, I watched
Speaker 1: for birds outside, thinking of the field guide to what
Speaker 1: small life was moving between the alley us and the
Speaker 1: muddy gutter at the kerbe. There's a comfort in cycles
Speaker 1: in pattern. My walk to the library took me down
Speaker 1: lanes littered with luster shells and over the stubborn roots
Speaker 1: lift in the paving stones. I love the sense of history,
Speaker 1: and the foot houses laid into old storefronts. A few
Speaker 1: hand painted numbers on doorphrains, a marine smell you couldn't
Speaker 1: quite wash out. This branch marble, trimmed and a bit neglected.
Speaker 1: Built in nineteen twelve, and as much a relic as
Speaker 1: a resource clawn on. Even as the city bled staff
Speaker 1: to the new community resource hubbed ten blocks inland, our
Speaker 1: regulars came for the piece, the view of the stuary,
Speaker 1: the big windows that let in the evening tide. We'd
Speaker 1: grown small, but not silent. Alice, three years from full retirement,
Speaker 1: ran the circulation desk with a precision encoded in her bones.
Speaker 1: She'd worked here decades longer than I had, through storms
Speaker 1: and renovations, and did everything with an efficiency that belied
Speaker 1: her dry Weit Junior, the latest desk assistant, mostly wanted
Speaker 1: ours for tuition and spent his gaps on the staff WiFi,
Speaker 1: but could fix a misbehaving scan of faster than I
Speaker 1: could blink, and always greeted the after school students with
Speaker 1: unruly warm our crowd was odd in its routines. Missesilwellan
Speaker 1: had been using the reading room since the carpet was blue,
Speaker 1: and would arrive each Friday demanding the new mysteries, not
Speaker 1: the ones with recipes. Mister Forbes always asked for the
Speaker 1: same battered copy of Astis Dictionary of British Lighthouses Astros,
Speaker 1: but now needed help carrying at home. The kids arrived
Speaker 1: in a noisy cloud at four, peeled off the coats
Speaker 1: in a puddle by the bean big chairs, and scrounged
Speaker 1: for comics. We even had a little monthly mystery book
Speaker 1: club some local teachers, and every quarter a few newcomers
Speaker 1: lost the half falls of the stacks. But the heart
Speaker 1: of the place was in its rituals. As sunset, Alice
Speaker 1: would flick off the porch lights and we'd walk the aisles,
Speaker 1: taking off returns in the handreton ledger. There were recent
Speaker 1: returned snowbook was a stubborn holdover from before my time.
Speaker 1: Alice wore it solved more confusions than the online catalog,
Speaker 1: ever could. Some routines were strangers still. After big coastal storms,
Speaker 1: we'd fine chair shuffold of paintings hung backward as if
Speaker 1: the building had, in Alice's words, stretched us back. No
Speaker 1: one took the stories seriously, but everyone claimed once to
Speaker 1: have got lost in the hallway or found the clock
Speaker 1: over the returns desk had begun for a day to
Speaker 1: run backward. The building's layout also changed, if only in
Speaker 1: rumor there was a half staircase rising too. What the
Speaker 1: blueprints call reading alcot now paint a plain white and
Speaker 1: used for storage ploss a mysterious pained to shut door
Speaker 1: behind the staff kitchen. Some years, the lower level, with
Speaker 1: its windowless arches, felt larger than it should be in
Speaker 1: every so often, the city's Facilities department would send a
Speaker 1: teen to once again verify fire code compliance. To me,
Speaker 1: these quirks were merely flavored proof of a place at
Speaker 1: lasting itself, and a staff too few and too devoted
Speaker 1: to be bothered by the small absurd. If h Morrow
Speaker 1: was another regular, they'd have had some story tangled up
Speaker 1: in these routines. Yet nobody in thirty years had ever
Speaker 1: spoken the name. My next step was simple enough, try
Speaker 1: to log the EPH card into the checkout system and
Speaker 1: see where its record led. After closing, I waited for
Speaker 1: the last patron to drift past the reference desk and
Speaker 1: tapped in the serial number. As expected, the modern system
Speaker 1: spatted out. There were no cards in the eight hundred
Speaker 1: thousand range in the books, and no way to overwrite
Speaker 1: manual entry, but are a microfiche there. The pattern was robust,
Speaker 1: dozens of checkouts every year from nineteen sixty two to
Speaker 1: the present, a span soo steady you could set a
Speaker 1: tied chart by it. I flipped first to the most
Speaker 1: recent titles. Some Astors Carbore Songs Forgotten asterisk I vaguely
Speaker 1: recalled seeing on the shelves. Others asterisk for Or of
Speaker 1: the Shoreline asterisk appeared in the catalog, but the borrowing
Speaker 1: slips code stamped with an initial, showed no sign of
Speaker 1: Morrow's hand. Most odd was Asterisks Soul Churches of the
Speaker 1: Western Bay asterisk. The microfiche said H. Morrow had checked
Speaker 1: it out three times in the last six years. Yet
Speaker 1: when I searched the master index, the blackbye under Alice
Speaker 1: still kept up by hand. There was no record of
Speaker 1: our ever having owned such a title. This was stranger
Speaker 1: than a missing card. I walked back into the stacks,
Speaker 1: scanning for Astros Salt Churches asterisk. It wasn't there the shelves.
Speaker 1: Call numbers jumped from travel Guard's nine hundred ten to
Speaker 1: Architecture seven hundred twenty, with nothing in between, no maroon spines,
Speaker 1: no sign the shelf had been squeezed recently. The absence
Speaker 1: felt deliberate. I wheeled my cart to the circ desk,
Speaker 1: where Alice had just begun taling the day's fines. Alice,
Speaker 1: I said, do you remember a book called Baster's Salt
Speaker 1: Churches of the Western b Asterisk Mauron Spine, probably local history.
Speaker 1: I can't find it in the catalog. She didn't look up,
Speaker 1: just squinted at her ledger. No such book. We might
Speaker 1: have had something about Salt Mine's old industries, but that
Speaker 1: was before your time. Card indixes from the eightiestone shirt.
Speaker 1: All the old blue cards like that she caught sight
Speaker 1: of the eighth card were recycled when the city went digital.
Speaker 1: Why nothing, I said, too quickly, just thought I'd seen
Speaker 1: the title before. She raised anybra. Maybe one of those
Speaker 1: books that gets mentioned but not born. But there are
Speaker 1: a few old timers who do that make up lost
Speaker 1: volume to tell a good story. I forced to laugh,
Speaker 1: even as my hands said to it car deeper into
Speaker 1: my pocket. It would have been easier to believe it
Speaker 1: was a glitch, someone duplicating old barkerds, or a middle
Speaker 1: manager transposing titles during the migration from paper. But the
Speaker 1: dates were too precise, the intervals too regular. I made
Speaker 1: a private note check who had catalog at which titles,
Speaker 1: when and how H. Mara's loans aligned with library closures,
Speaker 1: floods or city events. If a fandom card could plug
Speaker 1: itself into the microfiche, what else might have slotted in
Speaker 1: enow undetected? That night at home, my sleep came and
Speaker 1: fits scenes from the Return's Death, slipping in and out
Speaker 1: between half dreamt catalog entries. In the tap of rain
Speaker 1: at my window. I kept seeing the maroon spine, the
Speaker 1: sand dusty title, the faded gull stamped on the card.
Speaker 1: In the morning, I woked tngled in a single question.
Speaker 1: If H. Morrow's records are real, how could the books
Speaker 1: vanish and the borrower remain a ghost? I started it methodically.
Speaker 1: H Morrow, according to the cards, never borrowed more than
Speaker 1: three books at once. Every check out. The curd exactly
Speaker 1: two weeks part like clockwork, always a Tuesday or a Thursday,
Speaker 1: never a Monday or Saturday, and never coinciding with a holiday.
Speaker 1: The aps in the record sometimes stretched months but didn't
Speaker 1: line with no enclosures or strikes. The pattern looked intentional.
Speaker 1: A search for H. Marrow in the city's digital sensus
Speaker 1: turned up nothing, no listing, no obituary, no property records.
Speaker 1: I tried city directories and came up black. But in
Speaker 1: the basement, exuming the dusty binders of old yellowing newsletters,
Speaker 1: I spotted a single clue. The nineteen sixty two yearboo
Speaker 1: of Westside Junior High shurda stone photograph labeled Henry Morrow faculty,
Speaker 1: underneath which no subject or further information was given. The
Speaker 1: staff roll Typerton skipped his name entirely. The old card
Speaker 1: catalog draw two hundred nine loan titles nineteen sixty nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine should have carried lending slits for the Morrow checkouts. Instead,
Speaker 1: several cards were missing. Of those remaining lending slips for
Speaker 1: dates when Morrow had borrowed asterisk four of the shoreline
Speaker 1: asterisk well there, but checker to some one else entirely.
Speaker 1: At G. Shaughnessy in tight black pen, I photo copied
Speaker 1: a few for comparison, then sat with the stack, muzzling
Speaker 1: the contradiction. Who then had actually taken the books? Oh?
Speaker 1: Was there an event? Unusual? Collective forgotten well ending records
Speaker 1: got scrambled, the slips mismatched with borrowers, and titles shifted
Speaker 1: scruvably between who checked what A'm When my doubts grew
Speaker 1: pricking at the base of my skull, I decided to
Speaker 1: soft the canvas of regulars. Miss Ccilwillan, perched beside the
Speaker 1: dusty radiator under the window, surprised me when I asked
Speaker 1: off handedly whether she'd ever read aster Assault Churches of
Speaker 1: the Western Bay asterisk. A face lit with immediate recognition.
Speaker 1: Though the maroon one, she said, gall on the spine.
Speaker 1: I got it out before they redecorated, maybe nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 1: There was a story in there, I'm sure, But the
Speaker 1: old lighthouse after the big storm. My cousin used to
Speaker 1: say her neighbor's bother build it. There's no record of
Speaker 1: a story like that. I said gently, you were not
Speaker 1: confusing it with asterisk light Houses of Inlet asterisk. She
Speaker 1: shook her head. No, this was different. There was a
Speaker 1: whole chapter about the church that used to stand where
Speaker 1: the playground is now tall with a weathered bell. Nobody
Speaker 1: else remembers it. But the book had a church, I'm certain.
Speaker 1: I pressed for more, but her story began to drift.
Speaker 1: A cousin remembered but died in the eighties. Maybe the
Speaker 1: book was actually in her church's library at not Os,
Speaker 1: but the certainty of the maroon'spine beguldis were too vivid
Speaker 1: to invent. Back at the sort desk, Junior overheard and
Speaker 1: offered a more modern solution. I could ask my booksmooth group.
Speaker 1: He grinned. They dig up rare editions all the time.
Speaker 1: There's a whole discord for out of Prince Staff. He posted,
Speaker 1: returned in a day with a dry shrug. Nothing read it.
Speaker 1: Library thing even world cupt no asterisks, ault church as
Speaker 1: asterisk in any language, closest as a magazine article about
Speaker 1: salt domes in Norway. So a pattern emerged. The deeper
Speaker 1: dug the shaky my understand and became physical. Books supposedly
Speaker 1: checked out were not on the shelf or had never existed.
Speaker 1: The lending slips overlap but didn't align. All stories gained
Speaker 1: detail but lost for it in the more I pressed,
Speaker 1: what was I seeing? A borrower from an adjacent collection.
Speaker 1: A disruption, a slip between two versions of our city's record.
Speaker 1: I began noting every address ever attached to h Mara's record.
Speaker 1: Each over decades, its mapped to a recognizable spot in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood, but none were valid now. The nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: eight entry thirty one Benning Lane was now the city's
Speaker 1: largest playground, at gleaming clause of steel and plastic, recently
Speaker 1: built atop the site of two vanished houses, The nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one address, seventeen Harbor Court had become a yoga studio.
Speaker 1: Its original clap was lost under modern glass. Each location,
Speaker 1: when I passed by, hinted at prior life a metal
Speaker 1: number sunken into acove. A stone slab inscribed with an
Speaker 1: upside down B beside the new cafe, a fragment of
Speaker 1: weathered vents. The traces were subtle, but undeniably there. A
Speaker 1: pat informed the card holder whoever were whatever they were
Speaker 1: kept moving to addresses a line precisely with sits about
Speaker 1: to change. Skulls closed at consolidation store frons demolished for retail,
Speaker 1: home storn out for parks, as if Age Morrow was
Speaker 1: always living where the city forgot itself fastest, Almost not
Speaker 1: a person but a presence, were a pattern, moving in
Speaker 1: step with the city's vanishing history. What if the library
Speaker 1: record didn't reflect an individual, but captured the shape of
Speaker 1: the city as it drifted. What if my hand had
Speaker 1: become the act of reading a hidden web of stories,
Speaker 1: some private, some collective, fetch weakly into our records, then
Speaker 1: lost the question busst inside me, I stopped thinking of
Speaker 1: h Morrow as a ghost or a glitch, and more
Speaker 1: as a kind of shud or an emanation of the
Speaker 1: library's quite continuity, stitching together the seams of a shifting city.
Speaker 1: One blustery Wednesday, I decided to search further. The sub basement,
Speaker 1: rarely visited except during city wide rills or the kind
Speaker 1: of routine inventory that Alice avoided, offered the best hope
Speaker 1: of stumbling upon Bret evidence. The oldest PLU print suggested
Speaker 1: a half level used a century ago as a staff
Speaker 1: cork croom and auxiliary book storage, now largely sealed. Armed
Speaker 1: with a flashlight, spe keys, and my battered notebook, I
Speaker 1: made my way past the collapsible chair stacks so high
Speaker 1: they nearly blocked the landing. The air was musty tinged
Speaker 1: with the sweet rot of leather bindings. An all card
Speaker 1: catalog draw broken as woodswollen from a flood years ago,
Speaker 1: leaned against a wall, lined without a circulation Encyclopedia sets
Speaker 1: oox'es stout chest high contained circulation reports before nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: discarded puzzles, A faded poster for a nineteen seventy one
Speaker 1: protein night but in a very back corner behind me
Speaker 1: and a rolling file cabinet that barely feed the width
Speaker 1: of the hallway, and noticed it tight gap just wide
Speaker 1: enough fur shell thus choke drop box disguised as part
Speaker 1: of the cabinetry. Its brass loot was itch within number,
Speaker 1: almost invisible until the light cut across eight hundred thousand
Speaker 1: eight the eight cards number. I felt a shiver, not
Speaker 1: of fear, but of a question about to be answered
Speaker 1: or deepened. The key from the lost property drawer long
Speaker 1: forgotten fit. After a few tense moments of coaxing, the
Speaker 1: lock turned with a protesting squeal. Inside, stacked edgewise were
Speaker 1: three or maybe four slim books, thick covers, battered and
Speaker 1: their pages called in unfamiliar script to nothing like the
Speaker 1: standard locks or guest registers. Each volume was unique. The nearest,
Speaker 1: the thickest bore the title behnd in an evening Castoriskincident
Speaker 1: Nights nineteen seventy two seventy nine asterisk. The next was smaller,
Speaker 1: a plain blue nowebok embossed faintly with an outline of
Speaker 1: the city's main street. But the namers and above salt
Speaker 1: bindels sent a spark through me. The very word misss
Speaker 1: Lewellyn had mentioned, I knelt him. Flipped through pages. These
Speaker 1: were not the official minutes of any municipal event. Instead,
Speaker 1: one was a colage of stories. Some ones called the
Speaker 1: day that I had left all the shells upside down,
Speaker 1: and children run the lane giggling in the red light.
Speaker 1: Others more pointed out nineteen seventy eight sirens, all houses emptied.
Speaker 1: Families lined the cricket ground in the hot dusk, waiting
Speaker 1: for the mayor to turn the lights back on. Mother
Speaker 1: packed a salt bindell for supper, lamonade wrapped in oskin.
Speaker 1: No one gone missing, but nothing felt the same. The
Speaker 1: red tide and sit into the words I could in
Speaker 1: my mind. No one had ever reported a city wide
Speaker 1: of evacuation in any year I could remember, let alone
Speaker 1: in the seventies. The next book was written in a
Speaker 1: playful dialect, a blend of our local English childhood's line
Speaker 1: and words not quite right whistle deek for front porch,
Speaker 1: salt bindell for packed lunch, sind a slap for a
Speaker 1: type of wind. Some words were close enough to guess,
Speaker 1: while others seemed to shift, meaning chameleon like. Line by line.
Speaker 1: My hands went cold, but my excitement burned. If these
Speaker 1: were Morrow's books, then he'd written in overlapping, slightly impossible city,
Speaker 1: one where stories grew as extensions of local memory and
Speaker 1: disaster were celebration, left of faint mark, even when unrecorded elsewhere.
Speaker 1: But what if they weren't his? Had the books been
Speaker 1: written by civil hands or by a collect of that
Speaker 1: path The eighth card along at a kind of talisman.
Speaker 1: I carried the books upstairs in a canvas back, promising
Speaker 1: myself not to mention the discovery until I'd read them
Speaker 1: through in private. My sense of the library and my
Speaker 1: place in it had shifted again. No longer was I
Speaker 1: merely hunting a missing patron. I was rough in the
Speaker 1: edges of two histories intertwined, and only half legible preserved,
Speaker 1: not in marble minutes, but in fragile stories left behind,
Speaker 1: whether the city would soon forget on a night of
Speaker 1: driving rain. As at hunched at the kitchen table, the
Speaker 1: sub basement books splay open before me. At first glance,
Speaker 1: they seemed mestates crossed out in jokes, darting between accounts
Speaker 1: of storms, festivals, and municipal decisions that almost but not
Speaker 1: quite matched the records in city hall volumes, margin nearly abounded.
Speaker 1: Asked miss Essie about the night the benches vanished. Check
Speaker 1: against Baylight incident is its same mirrors, first mural snippets
Speaker 1: of poetry, riddles, shopping lists. Yet the tone was never grand,
Speaker 1: nor did I feel like someone was writing for history,
Speaker 1: but buried among the stories details leapt up Astorisk incident,
Speaker 1: knights Asterrois, reference to Tid Sirens nineteen seventy eight, mapping
Speaker 1: the event on to real stre t Reetarborreau now by
Speaker 1: Glynda had never in my experience been evacuated for any reason.
Speaker 1: Rituals were described that nearly matched those lingering in the
Speaker 1: library's current foc or closing at sunset, the way the
Speaker 1: side door jam during spring, even a big sale council
Speaker 1: by Red Light warnings. None of our cities minutes were called.
Speaker 1: The dialect book was even stranger. The introduction, scrawled in
Speaker 1: pale blue pen, read for the keepers, the blinkers, the
Speaker 1: ones who shuff their stories twice, terms like parlor, glee men, salt.
Speaker 1: Bindel repeated the mutated. Some words I lady remembered hearing
Speaker 1: in childhood, phrases used by grandparents or out of jokingly
Speaker 1: in the schoolyard, never written down. Others I realized I'd
Speaker 1: simply never christened before. For hours, I compared the handritten books,
Speaker 1: events and diction to the citied official timeline. Again and again.
Speaker 1: Contradictions arose, events that didn't quite fit, tales that seemed
Speaker 1: to explain half joking what official records avoided. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: even found annotations in the margins not the real year,
Speaker 1: double check bakery ledger or matches Forbes fishing story, ask
Speaker 1: about colored landon. Whoever kept these books was not just
Speaker 1: for recording a hidden history, but testing it against community memory,
Speaker 1: cross referencing every substantial oddity. The pattern that had only
Speaker 1: bothered at the edges of my mind now sprang full,
Speaker 1: growing The card, the books, the addresses, even the stories
Speaker 1: told half constantly by our regulars, all belonged to a shadow,
Speaker 1: where by an alternate time line, perhaps or meurely the
Speaker 1: sum of what people thought could have once been true.
Speaker 1: I searched for a passage that might tie it altogether.
Speaker 1: Cross referencing the red Tied incident with city council records.
Speaker 1: Our town's official documents from nineteen seventy eight said only
Speaker 1: that its scheduled power interruption had occurred, with no mention
Speaker 1: of city wide evacuation, feuge shortages, or sirens. Yet here
Speaker 1: in this abasement spatteredly book was a crowd gathered at dusk.
Speaker 1: The bench is ringed by lemonade jugs and soft talk,
Speaker 1: an exaggeration or slippage, a place where two memories met
Speaker 1: in blended. By now my sense of calm had transformed utterly,
Speaker 1: not inter fear, but robust, burning curiosity. I couldn't see
Speaker 1: myself in these margins, but my neighborhood, my routines, even
Speaker 1: my silly faith in the library's completeness began to refract.
Speaker 1: I had always thought of the library as witness and reser.
Speaker 1: But what if it was something stranger and murmuring and
Speaker 1: complete bridge between plausible pass between the stories people wish
Speaker 1: it happened and those that actually did. It was past
Speaker 1: two in the morning when I leaned back, pinched the
Speaker 1: bridge of my nose, and realized something both exhilerting and terrifying.
Speaker 1: The IT card was not a relic, not merely a
Speaker 1: leftover from half forgotten bureaucracy. It was a passport to
Speaker 1: through line, threaded through two overlapping narratives, one my own,
Speaker 1: the branch I knew and could touch, the other of
Speaker 1: library not fully seen, where wild evacuations and lost books survived,
Speaker 1: and where stories might slip from almost true intil never happened,
Speaker 1: and back again. The next morning, the world looked subtly changed.
Speaker 1: The damp pavement on Bending Lane seemed, for the briefest
Speaker 1: moment to shimmot With the second story, I found myself
Speaker 1: scanning the library's odd angles, searching for new cracks in
Speaker 1: the blueprints of my assumptions. I resolved I would check
Speaker 1: the building's architecture, or compare staff memories, probe the points
Speaker 1: where history knotted and frayed. Good places, I wondered, accumulate
Speaker 1: alternate recollections nested in their walls, waiting perhaps for someone
Speaker 1: to notice if so, our eighth cord was the bridge
Speaker 1: not just to another patron, but till version of the
Speaker 1: city recorded, loved, nearly forgotten, but never quite raised. Junior
Speaker 1: was the first to catch me early the next morning,
Speaker 1: his backcack open on the staff desk, ere but dangling
Speaker 1: from one ear, screens of the glimmering wild collars across
Speaker 1: his glasses. He looked up when he saw the cluster
Speaker 1: of handrton books touched beneath my arm. You digging up
Speaker 1: the library secret codes? Messsaar, He grinned, stretching until his
Speaker 1: holy hem barely covered his stomach. You working on the
Speaker 1: basement thing again? For a second, I almost asked if
Speaker 1: he remembered the side reading room, or if he'd ever
Speaker 1: noticed the building getting fought around storms or after those
Speaker 1: inventory nights. Instead, I held up the top volume and
Speaker 1: waggled it old returns. Perhaps I wanted another look at
Speaker 1: the blueprints. You good with the scanner? Are you? Junior
Speaker 1: perked up. If I needed a sheep feeder or a
Speaker 1: USB cable. His mood always brightened digitizing the blueprints are
Speaker 1: in the tiny foul closet. Want a hand. His helpfulness
Speaker 1: was a form of permission. I set the sub basement
Speaker 1: books down in my metal cubby and called up the
Speaker 1: oldest architectural plants from the file. There was the familiar
Speaker 1: ground plan, circulation desk, four reading rooms, branching stow will,
Speaker 1: the lay out nearly unchanged since nineteen twelve, but overlaiden
Speaker 1: pencil was a fine shadow outline a barely the room
Speaker 1: labeled art Woe side reading staff, only right off the
Speaker 1: storage corridor. I'd never seen such a room. Its line
Speaker 1: ran directly behind the shelves where I'd found the box
Speaker 1: with the edge gate. Look, I said, sliding the paper
Speaker 1: beneath the scanner light harp, WoT doesn't exist any more,
Speaker 1: but the wall should butt up. I dropped my fingers
Speaker 1: along the edge of the russograph. It just were the
Speaker 1: new returns cart always sticks getting around the bend. Do
Speaker 1: you ever notice that totally, Junior said, the cart jams
Speaker 1: every third Tuesday. I always thought it was a construction error,
Speaker 1: like the building was designed for right handed people or
Speaker 1: a different cart size. He was only half distracted, toggling
Speaker 1: between a playlist and the scanner's progress bar. Hey want
Speaker 1: me to try the side crawl? I bet I could
Speaker 1: get into the drop panel. If you want more photos,
Speaker 1: I pass him my phone. Take a few, please, and
Speaker 1: see if you can hear an echo in the wall.
Speaker 1: I waited as he disappeared into the stacks, a slim
Speaker 1: shadow blending with the gray corridors the gap between the shelves.
Speaker 1: I watched him kneel, press nearer to the dusty panel
Speaker 1: and knock lightly. Thank Then a quieter return knock, not his,
Speaker 1: but something echoing sideways. Junior's brow furrowed. Definitely hollow there,
Speaker 1: he called softly. It runs all the way to the wall,
Speaker 1: like a brickton closet. There was paint over a board,
Speaker 1: but it rings if you hit a dead center. It
Speaker 1: was a kind of proof the space remained, even if
Speaker 1: the door we had vanished within hours. I'd circled back
Speaker 1: to the main floor and flowered Alice as she filed
Speaker 1: large print returns. You remember a side reading room behind
Speaker 1: the storage wall, I ask, keeping my tone neutral. Alice paused,
Speaker 1: lips pressed tight. Maybe in your first year. I know
Speaker 1: the plan said as much, but it was always locked.
Speaker 1: Didn't make sense then either, doors that go nowhere, staircases
Speaker 1: till lit those staircases. Building's always been backward but do
Speaker 1: you recall it in use? Did you ever see anyone
Speaker 1: in there? She froned, No. Some say it was a
Speaker 1: cloak room. Some people said it was just their The
Speaker 1: older stuff said the library built extra space to grow
Speaker 1: into after the war, but then forgot what for the
Speaker 1: shape keep shifting why I hesitated, But the urge to
Speaker 1: share was stronger. I think the shifting's part of it.
Speaker 1: The weighty old blueprint overlays with the wall, the dead
Speaker 1: drop box. I think there is a correspondence. May be
Speaker 1: times when the spaces change were well more than one
Speaker 1: version coincides. Alice's laugh was short, but not dismissive. I'd
Speaker 1: believe it. When the storm's flood bending lane. The carpet
Speaker 1: always smells echine, like low tide. Records go missing. Sometimes
Speaker 1: my own memory skips, like I might swear we had
Speaker 1: a wall of city directories, then discover we never did.
Speaker 1: She gave me an assessing look, then bent looat plucker
Speaker 1: returned from the drop slot, fingers careful, what are you
Speaker 1: looking for? What's the end? I didn't know how to answer,
Speaker 1: but in that moment found I wanted her to be
Speaker 1: a partner. Novsceptic. I think I'm trying to find out
Speaker 1: how much of this is the building, how much as
Speaker 1: if there's a real overlap, and if it's possible to
Speaker 1: see it happen. She pad in my hand. If any
Speaker 1: place would lay the past on the present, it's here.
Speaker 1: Ask around at Memory Knights, see what people bring through
Speaker 1: the door. Memory Night was Alice's brain child, and she
Speaker 1: insisted on it monthly. Once attendants dropped after the city's
Speaker 1: shiny resource center opened that evening, we drew the curtains,
Speaker 1: set out a scattered plate of pascotti, and left the
Speaker 1: door unlot later than usual. The room filled with a
Speaker 1: quiet bustle of neighbors, muss the oil and shuffling in
Speaker 1: with a battered in Mister Forbes, hobbing with a stack
Speaker 1: of seepy photos, to younger couples holding hands as they
Speaker 1: placed a polaroid or a folded city map on the table.
Speaker 1: I watched the room fill and thought, these are the keepers,
Speaker 1: the ones who store I'll turn a time lines in
Speaker 1: their pockets. When at kin time for open stories, I
Speaker 1: wove my turning carefully, holding up one of the slim
Speaker 1: Handrton books. Found this in the old staff dropped some
Speaker 1: strange local tales bits in dial like anyone ever hear
Speaker 1: of the term salt bundle for a lunch or know
Speaker 1: about the red tide of vacuation In seventy eight, stories
Speaker 1: say the whole city waited on the cricket ground with
Speaker 1: lemonade and oilskins. The crowd shifted uncertain, then miss esil
Speaker 1: well and brightened, as if a childhood memory had been
Speaker 1: dusted off. Salt bundle was something my grandmother used to say,
Speaker 1: not for lunch, No for when you pack handing salt
Speaker 1: and a rug to keep produced coal for market, pack
Speaker 1: your salt bundle, and don't forget the cheese. Should say,
Speaker 1: but there never was an evacuation, dear, that's an aldrill,
Speaker 1: old drolls, all hurry, but never a true disaster in
Speaker 1: this town. Thanks. Her neighbor interjected, I was a teenager
Speaker 1: in seventy eight. There were power cuts, yes, but no
Speaker 1: sirens unless you mean a time the air raid system
Speaker 1: tested during the parade, Mister Forbes Leafing drew his stack,
Speaker 1: pulled out a photograph benchs vanished from the park, only
Speaker 1: land of children on blankets in the dusk. My family
Speaker 1: claims it was a summer blackout. Not a disaster, but
Speaker 1: all the lanterns were out. We thought the world had ended,
Speaker 1: as children do. My sister says it was for the
Speaker 1: maple rehearsal, but I say it was for something big
Speaker 1: or funny. Isn't it how memories to us? The young
Speaker 1: mother piped up my uncle loved Scarce with the story
Speaker 1: about the bent lamplight Patrol, said the mayo and dotted
Speaker 1: all lighting candles with a crooked stick. Though only now
Speaker 1: I think he'd read it in a book or dreamed
Speaker 1: it from some old family tale. Gradually, memories tangled. The
Speaker 1: more people chimed in the fuzzy the facts became, until
Speaker 1: they were riffing on one another's stories, swapping details, laughing
Speaker 1: as they realized how little could be nil down. I
Speaker 1: read a passage from the Handreton book, changing names, hoping
Speaker 1: not to call it. Their reactions. Mother port lemonade on
Speaker 1: the green in an oskin pale, while the lanterns flickered.
Speaker 1: Red Missee said don't look at the tower if you
Speaker 1: want to sleep tonight. Alice, hovering with the bascutdy plate,
Speaker 1: grinned at the phrase. I do remember the lanterns, but
Speaker 1: Red must have been after the parade. As I closed
Speaker 1: the book, it struck me here in the thick of
Speaker 1: mutual startling, new details grew by the minute. Someone claimed
Speaker 1: to have seen the parade's costume room. Another remembered shivering
Speaker 1: beneath the benches the night the park lights went out.
Speaker 1: False memory, collective invention. It didn't matter. What began as
Speaker 1: a record of a disaster no one agreed on had
Speaker 1: become communo folklore, self sustaining. But more than that, as
Speaker 1: I listened to miss Eesilwellyan and mister Forbes said it
Speaker 1: warn another's stories, dissecting which here was the real parade,
Speaker 1: in which was just thunder? I felt the Eighth Card
Speaker 1: was not a passport into a fixed history, but a
Speaker 1: magnet drawing people's all turn of recollections out into the
Speaker 1: open of focus, accumulating probability. Afterward, as we cleaned up,
Speaker 1: Alice turned to me, Funny, isn't it how people remember
Speaker 1: what they never saw? I was left with the thrill.
Speaker 1: Whether or not their red tight had happened, its story
Speaker 1: persisted alive in the swapping and stitching of memory. Maybe
Speaker 1: that was what the Eighth Card really borrowed, Possibility made
Speaker 1: physical for a moment and then gone. I returned to
Speaker 1: the sub basement the night, the hundred and books tucked
Speaker 1: under my arm. They no longer seemed like forgotten relics,
Speaker 1: but tools means for surfacing what had never been official,
Speaker 1: only believed half inherited. Back behind the stacks, Junior was
Speaker 1: waiting foam flasklight ready check this out, Missessa look at
Speaker 1: the system after a storm, after the computer's due their update. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: like for five minutes, our shelfless shows books that aren't
Speaker 1: really here. He tapped at the search green see astros
Speaker 1: carbra Soon's forgotten asterisk there now gone. Even Ellis wore
Speaker 1: she put it in large prine last Tuesday. But it's
Speaker 1: not physically anywhere. Does it happen often? I asked, leaning in.
Speaker 1: He grinned. Only right after those peraglitches, or when the
Speaker 1: storm knocks a breaker, some deep freeze on the cattalog clears,
Speaker 1: something comes and goes. Ghost entries, But only when something
Speaker 1: reels happening in here. Sometimes even the light flicker just
Speaker 1: at the moment the record appears, and then proof my
Speaker 1: heart thudded dies the lock ever show who checked those
Speaker 1: books out? He shook his head. It just says act
Speaker 1: of lone end weirdest thing there never overdue. Every weird
Speaker 1: entries returned on time. Sometimes on days were closed, we
Speaker 1: spent that afternoon comparing the microfiche record with the current
Speaker 1: digital shelf lists. Sure enough, on stormy days, books borrowed
Speaker 1: by Age Marrow would briefly appear on our inventory sheet,
Speaker 1: then vanish at the next tribute. Alice returning from launch
Speaker 1: and sisted to shelf asters Cowbo songs forgotten aster as
Speaker 1: curself right before the surge. I'd bet my pension on it.
Speaker 1: But it's not there. Is it? Redcover that blackdoodle of
Speaker 1: the estuary gone? A possibility crystallized the catalogs, like the stories,
Speaker 1: sometimes breed. Digital overlapped with paper. One reality's inventory briefly
Speaker 1: bled into the next, especially when the library's routines opening
Speaker 1: closing renovations were disrupted by weather repair. I pulled the
Speaker 1: municipal wreckers out for the nineteen sixty four and nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine renovations, tracing the periods when rooms were closed
Speaker 1: or combines. In the fine print a note temporary removal
Speaker 1: of art war stack for structural work missing inventory not
Speaker 1: to be returned to main Indix Sea branch manager. My
Speaker 1: pulse raced. It was as though the gaps were expected,
Speaker 1: even sanctioned. Our systems had always allowed for inventory anomalies,
Speaker 1: which staff were not to pursue too closely. Junior leaned
Speaker 1: on the desk, reading over my shoulder. Could the eighth
Speaker 1: card just be like a generic cross listing? Staff would
Speaker 1: issue we of cards to slip between catalogs, keep track
Speaker 1: during renovations, then forget. But the pattern is too long,
Speaker 1: too careful, I said, almost whispering. The cardbrocurves across decades,
Speaker 1: always tracking the same circle of stories, always attached to addresses,
Speaker 1: changing just as the city is about to forget them.
Speaker 1: What if the eighth card's function is to what serve
Speaker 1: as a passport when things overlap? He nodded, then shrugged
Speaker 1: wild not even ready would believe it. The more I
Speaker 1: considered it, the more alluring the idea became. The eighth
Speaker 1: card is a transitional object, not just for books, but
Speaker 1: for the memory of the city itself, bridging to library realities.
Speaker 1: To test this, I began to chase stories outside library walls.
Speaker 1: I stopped by the bakery, hoping to talk to Gloria,
Speaker 1: the barrister whose uncle was notorious for his outlandish memory.
Speaker 1: Gloria was for stocking crosses. When I brought up the
Speaker 1: bent lamp plip patrol, my uncle of that one, she said,
Speaker 1: smearing jam on her apron. He'd say, after the big blackout,
Speaker 1: the mayor went down the ro lighting lamps with the
Speaker 1: crooked stake, wearing red galoshes. But then he'd segue to
Speaker 1: the story about the flooded clock tower, or the time
Speaker 1: the city gave every one lemonade in ozcin jugs after
Speaker 1: the parade. Sometimes the stories ran together, like he was
Speaker 1: inventing scenes because he liked the feeling they gave. Her
Speaker 1: tone was affectionate, not skeptical. I pressed gently. Did he
Speaker 1: ever claim it was from a book? Maybe to Rosan?
Speaker 1: Some days it would be fiction, other days he'd swear
Speaker 1: by it. He'd tell those same stories at every holiday.
Speaker 1: He even mailed a letter to city Hall insisting the
Speaker 1: city used to have a parade just for the library
Speaker 1: banners with seagulls. No one else remembered, but he insisted
Speaker 1: there was proof in a lost book. I thought it
Speaker 1: was a joke, but the way he said it made
Speaker 1: me nearly believe. I thanked her and left thinking no
Speaker 1: one could separate written stories from or tradition. Not in
Speaker 1: this part of town. Every impossible book echoed folk memory
Speaker 1: and every family's oral history, wove bits from written sources,
Speaker 1: even imaginary ones. The cycle was seamless. I next visited
Speaker 1: the post office, tracking down mister Lubbeck, a retired mailman
Speaker 1: who'd lived through all the library's modern history. He greeted
Speaker 1: me with a amuse smile, sorting fliers at the counter. Oh. Yes,
Speaker 1: after the big storms sometimes we'd get a ton of
Speaker 1: redirected mail, letters addressed to houses that didn't exist any more,
Speaker 1: or had never been there. Once I delivered apostle to
Speaker 1: thirty one Benning Lane, weeks after they bulldozed it for
Speaker 1: the playground. My robe bricaded listed clear as day. I
Speaker 1: thought it was an old era, but even my senior
Speaker 1: guy said those addresses kret back after storms, like the
Speaker 1: city forgot what homes it had lost. I asked whether
Speaker 1: any letters were ever addressed to h Morrow. He shook
Speaker 1: his head thoughtfully, don't recall the name. But there were oddities.
Speaker 1: After every renovation, addresses that pulston and out of existence.
Speaker 1: We always blamed the city database, said the storm Water
Speaker 1: Council was two years behind. Maybe your card holder just
Speaker 1: lived between the lines. The phrase felt significant between the lines.
Speaker 1: As the days passed, my puzzle deepened. Written stories, oral tales,
Speaker 1: and lost catalog entries all encircled the eveh card without
Speaker 1: quite overlapping. I realized that, in a sense, the story
Speaker 1: was neither about missing books nor factual history, but about
Speaker 1: possibility that was nearly real, given shape by the right
Speaker 1: artifact at the right moment. The eighth card kept turning
Speaker 1: up with the record slat, pulling desperate memories into proximity,
Speaker 1: then vanishing. Before anyone grew too certain, I reached out
Speaker 1: to doctor Raleigh's, a linguistic's professor at the community college,
Speaker 1: and handed her the handwritten dialect book. She read for
Speaker 1: a long moment, then mused some of this as genuine dialect.
Speaker 1: Regionalisms all playground slam, but the blend is artful, almost
Speaker 1: a conscious invention. See here. Wi Solick was sometimes used
Speaker 1: for porch, but saught bindel never in parlor gleam. That is,
Speaker 1: half fair tale, half local collar. Some one meant these
Speaker 1: stories to seem plausible but not fixed. Could it be
Speaker 1: a hoax? I asked, hopeful for resolution, she shook her aid.
Speaker 1: Too careful for parody, not careful enough for deliberate invention.
Speaker 1: Whoever wrote this had a deep love of the city
Speaker 1: and a scholars ear for the line between fact and fiction.
Speaker 1: More than that, a playful respect for what was possible.
Speaker 1: Sometimes that exactly what a living memory feels like. That
Speaker 1: was my turning point. I sat alone in the sub
Speaker 1: basement that afternoon, reviewing the books, the photos from Junior,
Speaker 1: the notes from the city Ledger are stories told at
Speaker 1: memory night. I started to see the entire structures less
Speaker 1: like a puzzle and more like a braid, three chords
Speaker 1: woven when the conditions allowed, then pulled apart again. Turning
Speaker 1: through the pages of the sub Basement Ledger, I noticed
Speaker 1: something new. Faint, nearly erased, was a pattern annotations at
Speaker 1: the foot of each page, boxes drawn around capital letters.
Speaker 1: What if they were more than simple margin notes. I
Speaker 1: copied the letter sequentially, THHG d O O R s
Speaker 1: t U r N slash thh E s h E
Speaker 1: l v E s sh A f T. A chill
Speaker 1: ran down my arms. The phrase felt like an instruction,
Speaker 1: or perhaps a description. The doors turned, slushed, the shelf shift.
Speaker 1: I spread every city map in blueprint. I had cross
Speaker 1: referencing days from h morrows of a lap loans with
Speaker 1: the years the library's structure physically changed in nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four, nineteen seventy nine, nineteen ninety seventh year
Speaker 1: of heavy flooding, a decade back. Without exception, every improbable
Speaker 1: landing OAR address appeared at exactly these thresholds. Times when
Speaker 1: the building or the city itself was physically rearranged, when
Speaker 1: rooms were repurposed, books moved, addresses deleted, even renovation logs
Speaker 1: noted missing catalog entries box four slash seven. In each moment,
Speaker 1: the echoing anomaly returned temporary records, evanescent memories, stories no
Speaker 1: one else could find. In the morning, the realization landed
Speaker 1: as quietly as dawned. There was no one agemorrow. There
Speaker 1: was instead the role of a reader, invoked by the
Speaker 1: write out effact at the right moment, someone who could
Speaker 1: check out, return, and referred stories when the city and
Speaker 1: library briefly overlapped with what had almost been the card
Speaker 1: was a passport vallid. Wherever the thresholds touched, whenever shells moved,
Speaker 1: whenever doors turned in the architecture. I had spent weeks
Speaker 1: searching for an explanation, grounded in lost books, memory falts,
Speaker 1: deliberate misfallings. But here as a pattern emerged, I saw
Speaker 1: something simpler, the library itself not just a record, but
Speaker 1: a machine for possibility. Every few years, at the axis
Speaker 1: of some physical, social, or narrative change, the shells shifted,
Speaker 1: ever so slightly, reconfiguring what was possible, allowing glance in
Speaker 1: contact with what might have been an accidental phenomenon made
Speaker 1: visible by a novel to defunct card and a handful
Speaker 1: of haundred in books no one remembered writing. I felt
Speaker 1: a wash of all the urge to possess the solution
Speaker 1: faded into pure spechless reas the eighth card their reader
Speaker 1: belonged to possibility itself, not to any one memory, any
Speaker 1: one reality. All the vanished stories, the misremembered prades, the
Speaker 1: lost addresses, they weren't evidence of failure or bureaucratic error,
Speaker 1: or even urban ghostliness. There were the natural turbulence of
Speaker 1: collective life, made tangible only for a moment at a
Speaker 1: medium building, where their story and attention, my skepticism, my
Speaker 1: need to pin every detail to an objective event, melted
Speaker 1: in its place, flooded humility. We do not own our past.
Speaker 1: Our stories overlap and contradict and sustain us all the same.
Speaker 1: The library, sturdy as marble and old as the city's
Speaker 1: own memory, simply included that fact. After that, the evidence
Speaker 1: no longer mattered, there was nothing left to solve. Instead,
Speaker 1: I returned each week, sometimes shelving, sometimes simply listening to
Speaker 1: the squeak of a stare, of the hush of page turning,
Speaker 1: watching the flicker in the overhead bulbs as a storm
Speaker 1: mold above Benning Lane. I caught myself paying gentle attention
Speaker 1: to mistaken reshovings, to moment when a book reappeared in
Speaker 1: an unfamiliar spot and no one quite remembered who checked
Speaker 1: it in. There was no urge now defoul a report,
Speaker 1: only to honor what was fleeting and true, even if
Speaker 1: or because it was slip away before any one else
Speaker 1: looked up. And the people too became subtly different to me.
Speaker 1: I chat with Alice and Junior, watching for changes in
Speaker 1: their own recollections, half wondering if they become leaders in
Speaker 1: some terne of the shelves, some rearrangement yet to come.
Speaker 1: I asked the regulars about the new arrivals, the long
Speaker 1: lost books, lest to fetch the facts and to celebrate
Speaker 1: the very act of remembering. I found myself smiling whenever
Speaker 1: someone told a story that didn't line up with any
Speaker 1: local history. When missescil well and claimed the lighthouse once
Speaker 1: went dark for a fortnight, but Junior joked, but see
Speaker 1: a but Vanish or Alice rolled her eyes, refusing to
Speaker 1: admit her own memory. At skipped Each contradiction I now
Speaker 1: understood was proof of a city, a library in a
Speaker 1: neighborhood far richer than the sum of its documented facts.
Speaker 1: One gray morning, as the wind last fleet against the
Speaker 1: library's old stained glass, I paused at the sub basement
Speaker 1: book drop on, thinking, I set my pomp flat against
Speaker 1: a cordi metal trace in the faintly each date, for
Speaker 1: breath or two, I thought I heard another world's bustled
Speaker 1: children laughing on prey day, crowd gathered from Amonade under
Speaker 1: Crimson lanterns, the creak of a Vanish lampite move somewhere
Speaker 1: just out of view. I left the eighth card in
Speaker 1: a special folder by the Exceptians box, half hoping some
Speaker 1: one would come one day to claim it, whether the
Speaker 1: catalog were for a moment list an impossible new return.
Speaker 1: And I returned up the steps, feeling the city's polls flickering,
Speaker 1: knowing that every library contains more than one city, that
Speaker 1: every card holder, seen or unseen, might be reading in
Speaker 1: a place just next ours. Even now, when I listen
Speaker 1: as stories are told in the reading room, I wonder
Speaker 1: how many versions of a place are quietly remembered in
Speaker 1: the spaces we share. And could it be if I
Speaker 1: look and listen, I'll find my own story tangled with another's,
Speaker 1: waiting gently for a dishlve to shift. And that is
Speaker 1: the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see
Speaker 1: you in the next one.