Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Speaker 1: Let's get into it. It was a drizzly Thursday in
Speaker 1: mid April, rain pattering and the library stained glass skylights
Speaker 1: with the steady persistence of someone gently wrapping to remind
Speaker 1: you of the presence. My knees didn't much like the
Speaker 1: three flights up to the old letter Shire room anymore.
Speaker 1: But I'd promised myself, even after retirement, I keep volunteering
Speaker 1: a few afternoons a week at the community library, a
Speaker 1: place as much a part of my life as my
Speaker 1: own handwriting. I was shelving a cluster of hapazzod returns,
Speaker 1: the cots, squeaking and prodesse down the fiction aisle when
Speaker 1: my hand closed around a battered, cloth bound copy of
Speaker 1: To Kill a Mockingbird. It had the familiar blue jacket,
Speaker 1: gold title embossed crookedly from a print run long ago,
Speaker 1: and what I assumed would be the same slightly musty
Speaker 1: smell I remembered from every session of required reading I'd
Speaker 1: led over three decades. Something though made me pause. Maybe
Speaker 1: the doggy had pages thrusting from odd angles, or a
Speaker 1: slight unfamiliarity with the weight I always did have a
Speaker 1: feeling for book weight, the way a loyal chef notices
Speaker 1: a pan's slightly heavy in the hand. It was idle
Speaker 1: curiosity at first, an old friend in the hands of
Speaker 1: a life on librarian. I flipped book open to the
Speaker 1: first few dog lithump pages, making sure there were no
Speaker 1: rogue jamstain duscribbles. There near the middle, Atticus allw was
Speaker 1: Atticus Finch, grave and gentle like a tree, was addressing
Speaker 1: not Tom Robinson's jury, but a dark haired woman with
Speaker 1: a Scott, a surname I could not remember from any edition,
Speaker 1: norr any lesson I'd ever prepared. She was apologizing for something,
Speaker 1: and said Anatticus, in a voice I had never read before,
Speaker 1: told her, we are all children of superstition, missus MacAllister,
Speaker 1: even when we were grown men's jackets. He folded a
Speaker 1: letter and tucked it inside his vest, which as far
Speaker 1: as I could remember, he never did in the text
Speaker 1: I knew. The next chapter opened with Jemscat's brother preparing
Speaker 1: for a family meeting that included three cousins had never
Speaker 1: seen name Truman, Clarissa, and one cold fan. My pulse runed.
Speaker 1: I checked the copyright page happily U s Publisher class
Speaker 1: at nineteen sixty stamp nothing indicating a recent reissue of
Speaker 1: some enterprising pastixe of a foreign edition. The catalog sticker
Speaker 1: read Ficklee t K Hashtree, my own handwriting, penciled inside
Speaker 1: from a reorganization about a decade past. No notes, no
Speaker 1: abridged warning, not even an illustrator for children label. Brain
Speaker 1: fog the upper panes. The room felt thinner. Somehow I
Speaker 1: set the book atop my reshelving cart, headed under a
Speaker 1: recent thriller, trying to act as though nothing was amiss.
Speaker 1: Had I misremembered the original? Could there have been a
Speaker 1: lost edition? While silent publisher's revision I'd never noticed before.
Speaker 1: I wrapt my brain for memories of past readings spoken
Speaker 1: aloud in class rooms, lent out for summer assignments, even
Speaker 1: the well worn copy on my own bookshelf at home.
Speaker 1: But I would have remembered a Missus mac Allister, and
Speaker 1: certainly Claris and fan. Book in hand, I tucked a
Speaker 1: car behind a rolling display near the staff office, smoothing
Speaker 1: the cover like a conspirator in my My heart wasn't pounding,
Speaker 1: but curiosity, that lovely and patient old dog was at
Speaker 1: my heels, nudging me toward questions I could not yet name.
Speaker 1: The library always seemed to breathe better in this sort
Speaker 1: of weather. A diffused housewhoven with the quiet scuttle of
Speaker 1: shoes on marble jacket zippers muttered sell phone etiquette. I
Speaker 1: found myself slipping easily into my routines, pleasant small talk,
Speaker 1: seasoning the rest of my shift. Jaimie, our university page darred.
Speaker 1: It passed with an m node of graphic novels nearly scattering,
Speaker 1: a pile of language dictionaries, a mass Hathaway. My old assistant,
Speaker 1: though in truth she ran this library as much as
Speaker 1: anyone ever did, was already reorganizing the spring read's display
Speaker 1: by color, lips pursed and concentration behind alished tortoiseshell glasses.
Speaker 1: This library had always felt twice as big as its footprint,
Speaker 1: stone as old as memory, A grand entrance presided over
Speaker 1: by stone, bronze busts, and doors that sometimes stuck in
Speaker 1: the heat or in the wet, but only for certain people.
Speaker 1: Each room held its own climate. The ground floor, with
Speaker 1: its stately circulation desk and community notice board, was bright
Speaker 1: with potted fronds. Upstairs, where I worked. Air was quiet,
Speaker 1: our close, with the scent of old glue and decades
Speaker 1: of shoffing feet. If you looked, though, you'd noticed oddities
Speaker 1: beyond the usual library chaos, the way acquisitions slips would
Speaker 1: sometimes list from verified donation, or a set of encyclopedias
Speaker 1: would bear stamps from different ears. Old timers would drop
Speaker 1: off boxes of books from their attict editions. We are
Speaker 1: already owned, but with unfamiliar cover art or odd prefaces
Speaker 1: by authors long since dead. We joked about it in
Speaker 1: the Library of Ghosts, Jamie would say, but nothing ever
Speaker 1: truly felt out of order. A city this old collect's stories,
Speaker 1: and so does its library. All afternoon, my thoughts flickered
Speaker 1: back to The Mockingbird. I half wondered if I'd imagine it,
Speaker 1: but the book remained exactly where I left it, lurking
Speaker 1: under a jack reach of paperback. Once, as I was
Speaker 1: guiding a small group of third graders passed the chapter book,
Speaker 1: Ale miss Esbriggs, one of our friendliest book club organizers,
Speaker 1: beckoned me over her arms full of little women. Though
Speaker 1: you absolute wonder thank you, thank you, she beamed. I'd
Speaker 1: never read it through before now, and what a beautiful
Speaker 1: ending Beth's wedding. Nearly had meant hear such a relief
Speaker 1: after everything else. I must have looked like I had
Speaker 1: been bopped on the head with a copy of Moby
Speaker 1: Dick Best Wedding. I repeated, careful not to sound patronizing
Speaker 1: my recollection. Surely everyone's was of Beth's death, quiet and
Speaker 1: heart wrenching, not a walk down the aisle. Misses Briggs grinned,
Speaker 1: hugging the book to her chest. I know, right, the
Speaker 1: perfect choice for the book club. I'll recommend that addition
Speaker 1: to everyone. After she left, I found myself turning the
Speaker 1: unfamiliar copy over in my hands. The publisher information matched
Speaker 1: our standard for Prince. The inside pages bore the faded
Speaker 1: stab of our children's annex, and yet there it was
Speaker 1: an entire final chapter, Beth in Elai's dress. The March
Speaker 1: family gathered in full, Joe giving a delightfully speech of
Speaker 1: fine toast. It wasn't the original, It wasn't even one
Speaker 1: of the bodleized children's editions before the library was built.
Speaker 1: Before I'd show of my first book, no published version
Speaker 1: ever ended this way, but here it was. I asked Jamie,
Speaker 1: who was shelving board books near by. If she remembered
Speaker 1: Little Women's ending, James quinted, considering, I thought Beth died,
Speaker 1: or maybe not always tisn't there a movie where she
Speaker 1: gets better? Maybe the publisher made a happy ending. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they do that, you know. I pressed a point. We
Speaker 1: found another copy. It plainly ended with Beth's step had
Speaker 1: seen Joe beside her, same old heartbreak. Miss Sess Bragg's
Speaker 1: volume still had Beth walking arm in arm on the lawn,
Speaker 1: the rest of the family alive and well. Mister Dugado,
Speaker 1: who taught American literature before retiring here, happened to be
Speaker 1: reading tea as Ellet by the reference desk. I showed
Speaker 1: him both versions. He flapped the pages with the skeptical
Speaker 1: briskness of a man accustomed to sorting myth from fact.
Speaker 1: Publishers used to butcher books all the time, bodorized, localized,
Speaker 1: senitized for sensibilities not in common. But I don't recall
Speaker 1: hearing about a wedding ending. Are you sure these are
Speaker 1: both from the same publisher. I made him check. He frowned,
Speaker 1: admitting he'd never heard of any edition quite like this.
Speaker 1: That night, as closing hour approached, I ducked into the
Speaker 1: dim backnoe by the east Ax and began assembling my
Speaker 1: own comparison. I lined up as many classic titles as
Speaker 1: possible on the central table. The Great Gatsby, Charlottes Wipe,
Speaker 1: several detectives, and of course every edition of To Kill
Speaker 1: a Mockingbird and Little Woman I could lay hands on
Speaker 1: without triggering suspicion from the staff, who preferred the book's
Speaker 1: returned to circulation on time. For the next Door. I
Speaker 1: felt like a botanist surveying Rahea, the smatched flowers. The
Speaker 1: Great Gatsby, the Navy one with Gold tremended, not with
Speaker 1: next born back ceaselessly into the pass, but a quietly
Speaker 1: optimistic speech at Gasby's graveside daisy attendants, Charlotte's message to
Speaker 1: Wilbur and the Bonlough shifted from some pick to a
Speaker 1: good friend. A Sherlock Homes story one I'd read about
Speaker 1: a hundred times, had less trade, not homes announced in
Speaker 1: the murder, and made mention of Scotland yard inspector who
Speaker 1: simply didn't exist in the canon. Furious, I checked Barcode's
Speaker 1: publication listings. My own catalog notes none with a whiff
Speaker 1: of prank or forgery. The acquisition locks were all in order,
Speaker 1: right down to the sticker, with my own handwriting a
Speaker 1: little flourish I'd used for years on donated fiction, now
Speaker 1: pasted inside a volume of characters and endings I could
Speaker 1: not have cataloged. Patrons wanted passed, some offering nervous smiles
Speaker 1: at my clutter table, while others leaned in to ask
Speaker 1: if there was a book sale. I engaged, as naturally
Speaker 1: as possible. A teenage regular, Sarah told me my mom
Speaker 1: read The Outsiders to me, but everyone gets expelled in
Speaker 1: the and Bright, not just Ponyboy. I blinked, No, only
Speaker 1: pony Bay was suspended, not expelled, but their addition laid
Speaker 1: it all out plain as day, expulsion for all. I
Speaker 1: pushed the book into the growing stack of anomalies, half
Speaker 1: expecting the words to shift under my eyes. One must
Speaker 1: have gotten around, because a mess Hathaway appeared two minutes later,
Speaker 1: hands folded. Gaye Steady getting ready for a comparative literature
Speaker 1: workshop or we harold, she teased, but there was a
Speaker 1: carefulness in her tone. I need your help, Norah, I whispered,
Speaker 1: gesturing her over every copy he is wrong or right,
Speaker 1: But in ways they never were endings intag characters lines
Speaker 1: on them. She's quoted by the table flipping through Gatsby
Speaker 1: her brow furro, but she betrayed nothing more than her
Speaker 1: usual sphinx like composure. He might be overdoing it, Harold.
Speaker 1: Publishers make mistakes, new printings, international editions. You know that.
Speaker 1: But these are cataloged as our copas. I wrote half
Speaker 1: these tags even that little women. Look at this final chapter.
Speaker 1: I thrust it forward. She skimmed, went very still, and
Speaker 1: then quietly. You've certainly picked a strange day to get philosophical.
Speaker 1: Perhaps sleep on it. If you still think something's amiss,
Speaker 1: bring it up to morrow and we'll look deeper. Jamie,
Speaker 1: overhearing us, chimed in, are you two playing spout the
Speaker 1: fake book? Do we get to invent all? Turn it
Speaker 1: endings to? Like what if? Charlotte wrote delicious pig, and
Speaker 1: Wilburby came Bacon. I tried to smile. Mister datl god
Speaker 1: of catching the edge of our conversation, claimed to recall
Speaker 1: different plot details from his own memories, but dismissed it
Speaker 1: with a joke about faulty memory and too many late
Speaker 1: night publications. Yet the more I checked, the more I
Speaker 1: found the threats of certainty in reveling under my hands.
Speaker 1: With every comparison, every unique, conflicting physical copy and pitching recollection,
Speaker 1: I felt like my brain was being gently tupped farther
Speaker 1: from land. It wasn't memory alone that failed, It was
Speaker 1: the stubborn physical certainty we used to anchor the truth
Speaker 1: of a book. The library, once so familiar, now felt
Speaker 1: as unsteady as a raft caught in an unpredictable current.
Speaker 1: I retreated to the staff room, notebook, open jarring dent
Speaker 1: titles and line discrepancies. None of the anomalies I found
Speaker 1: appeared in our digital listings or the online previews. I
Speaker 1: pulled up on the bat at staff computer, the digital
Speaker 1: Mockingbird match the edition I remembered, and no Scottish Missus MacAllister,
Speaker 1: no extra Finch cousins, every line just as carved in
Speaker 1: memory as ever before leaving. I pulled my old quosition
Speaker 1: ledger from a filing cabinet. Behind the reference disc of
Speaker 1: batter blue book crowned with years of notes and catalogings,
Speaker 1: I found the mocking Ver tagging entered by me two
Speaker 1: years ago from a routine reordering, no note about any
Speaker 1: unusual edition, no unfamiliar introduction, nothing to suggest to one
Speaker 1: off printing oroddity. Even the Little Woman with BET's Wedding,
Speaker 1: the copy had our nineteen eighty six label inserted. When
Speaker 1: the children's annex was shuffled up stairs, the sticker was
Speaker 1: inisputably my own, the same arching leap in the ahe
Speaker 1: of Harold. The next morning, unable to leave the puzzle alone,
Speaker 1: I waited until the library softer opening hour, when only
Speaker 1: a handful of regulars filtered through, I made my way
Speaker 1: to Amiss Hathaway's office. The door jar, her hand poise
Speaker 1: over a stack of baddia and reports. She didn't greet me.
Speaker 1: I placed both copies of Little Woman Waiting and Death
Speaker 1: Bit beside her teacup, along with my note book, several
Speaker 1: borrowed Acquisisan's slips, and of faded copy of The Great
Speaker 1: Gatsby with the alternate ending. I can't explain it, nor,
Speaker 1: I said, voiced lower than intended. I'm not misremembering, and
Speaker 1: neither are you. These are physically different books. What's more,
Speaker 1: our acquisition records mind say, we've had these for decades,
Speaker 1: but I'd swear we never did not in these versions.
Speaker 1: She reached for her glasses, giving me a long, unreadable appraisal.
Speaker 1: For a moment, I thought she'd laugh me out of
Speaker 1: the room, but she only picked up each volume and
Speaker 1: turn her finger, tracing the tattle than the print info
Speaker 1: of then the old sticker hold. I've noticed oddities here
Speaker 1: over the years, she said, softly, Page numbers that don't
Speaker 1: match my notes from college. The odd translation attrotted up
Speaker 1: to publishing mistakes or old cataloging lips. Libraries collect things.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we don't want to know how her muff worked
Speaker 1: in awrye set half smile, but you're right, this is more.
Speaker 1: Launch hour came, and the third grader streamed out their
Speaker 1: excited voices, echoing in the stairwells. I tried to bury
Speaker 1: myself in a known label repairs, cataloging new donations, comforting
Speaker 1: the anxious with a welfing copy of Elephant Anne Piggy,
Speaker 1: But I kept circling back to those books. Perhaps I'd
Speaker 1: have gone slightly mad, but for the dozen interruptions of
Speaker 1: a librarian's life. A phone call from apparent looking for
Speaker 1: that mystery dog book, The Thump of a Fall Encyclopedia
Speaker 1: from the top shelf the brief, but spirited a bit
Speaker 1: over whether the new romant shelf belonged next to the
Speaker 1: mystery section. Jaimie, ever curious, caught me in the act
Speaker 1: of leafing through more duplicate titles that afternoon. So you're
Speaker 1: actually doing it a great library audit, mine if I help,
Speaker 1: he giggled, spreading out a batch of Hannet coppers alongside me.
Speaker 1: He selected one at random, carelessly reading aloud, and after
Speaker 1: the duel, Hannah tosses the poisoned coppicide and lives banished forever.
Speaker 1: At woe, isn't that grim? I stared, But no, Hammett
Speaker 1: dies stabbed and poisoned. That's the point he never escapes, heazen.
Speaker 1: Jamie rolled his eyes a different edit. Teachers are always
Speaker 1: telling us about original versions. Maybe this is a fun
Speaker 1: one for kits. He moved on to a shell of paperbacks,
Speaker 1: but not before he spotted a faint green smudge on
Speaker 1: the next helmet's cover. A sticker faded almost invisible with
Speaker 1: our original catalog year and my first set of initials
Speaker 1: from when I start at full time, as if I
Speaker 1: had marked it, not knowing what oddity I was admitting
Speaker 1: to the shelves that evening, with the library closed and
Speaker 1: the smell of rain and old paper settling over the halls,
Speaker 1: I made a decision. I would check as many stacks
Speaker 1: as possible, as methodically as my tired knees would allow,
Speaker 1: and note every edition, every contradiction, every physical clue. I
Speaker 1: wanted not just to prove to myself that this library
Speaker 1: contained differently printed, differently remember versions of the same book,
Speaker 1: but to understand why. So began a week of cataloging
Speaker 1: the impossible. I started as small as I could, walking
Speaker 1: the grand floor fiction aisles and morning silence. I pulled
Speaker 1: first one, then two than half a dozen editions of
Speaker 1: the same title Great Expectations, with them without pet Marrying
Speaker 1: Stella two, Moby Dick's One Wore Star but leaves with
Speaker 1: the last Lifeboat one where he is lost seen on deck.
Speaker 1: I made a spreadsheet in my ledger title barcode, catalog, year,
Speaker 1: publisher endings, notable characters, contradictory scenes. I noted dust covers,
Speaker 1: per in font, even illustrations. Some differences were trivial cover
Speaker 1: arts walk between you as the UK editions. Others were glaring.
Speaker 1: A copy of Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff never dies, simply disappears.
Speaker 1: Anne of Green Gables were returned by irregular included a
Speaker 1: visit from anand that no other edition seemed to mention.
Speaker 1: I questioned everyone I trusted quietly. Mess Hathaway, after our
Speaker 1: first discussion, became more an accomplice than a sceptic. She
Speaker 1: stopped brushing off the anomalies and began joining and showing me,
Speaker 1: for instance, a churcher Island that ended with long John
Speaker 1: Silver's unexpected pardon that she remained strangely calm. Jamie, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, thought he'd found a gold mine for
Speaker 1: library programming. We could run spot the odd ending quizzes,
Speaker 1: he suggested, or invite the high schoolers to write knee ones.
Speaker 1: Maybe each book is different for each shell, for each reader.
Speaker 1: I found myself oddly hardened by his cheerful reverence, even
Speaker 1: if he missed the death of contradiction. Mister Dogardo took
Speaker 1: a more academic stance. He found a hammett with Herry
Speaker 1: she Show's monolog at the end replaced and scoffed. Some
Speaker 1: student printings were notorious for butchering the texts, but this
Speaker 1: one's properly types it original, fond, and all he'd grown pale. However,
Speaker 1: turning the last pages a second and third time, patrons
Speaker 1: themselves were unreliable witnesses. When prompted, some ore cold endings
Speaker 1: that matched the alternate coppies, while others, often as certain
Speaker 1: as I felt, described entirely different resolutions. An older woman
Speaker 1: insisted she'd always remembered Charlotte's Web as ending with Charlotte
Speaker 1: coming back in the next spring. When I pressed her
Speaker 1: to look at two different volumes, her answer was simply,
Speaker 1: maybe I read an Australian edition. Dear catalog, entries, digital records,
Speaker 1: acquisition logs. None of them helped. Archod Catalog was long
Speaker 1: since retired, but the database was clear as always each title, publisher, copyright,
Speaker 1: catalog year. But the physical books, through thick, weighty objects
Speaker 1: told their own are reduced to be varied stories. A
Speaker 1: week into my audit, I finally found something that made
Speaker 1: my breath catch. A sticker aged and flaking, marked with
Speaker 1: my own age W initials paste inside a Charlotte's Web
Speaker 1: with the alternate ending. I had catalog that copy in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three, during a scotching summer. I remembered mostly
Speaker 1: for its broken air conditioning and constant circulation of a
Speaker 1: Harry Potter books. I remembered sweating at the staff table.
Speaker 1: Yet I never remembered ordering or receiving an edition of
Speaker 1: Charlotte's Weather that ended like this. By then, what had
Speaker 1: begun as gentle confusion was ballooning into a full en
Speaker 1: challenge to everything I had trusted about my own memory
Speaker 1: and about literature itself. If books, the most permanent of stories,
Speaker 1: could change under my hands, what else could alter? And more?
Speaker 1: How could a community of librarians, bookovers and skeptics have
Speaker 1: missed this happening so openly? Surely I couldn't be the
Speaker 1: first to notice. Desperate for something solid to grab onto,
Speaker 1: I turned to digital wreckers for comparisoness will its screen
Speaker 1: approach old meats knew at the reference desk, I called
Speaker 1: a project. Gutenberg'scans University pressed previews the official publisher archives
Speaker 1: for every mocking Bird Dan Gatsby. The online digitized versions
Speaker 1: matched the canonical editions I'd always talked, unremembered. No alternate endings,
Speaker 1: no missing characters, nothing strange. Only our library's physical copies,
Speaker 1: scattered among shells, cataloged for decades, bore the marks of
Speaker 1: these impossible variations. I flagged a mess halfway down. The
Speaker 1: next quiet afternoon, she followed me to the reading room,
Speaker 1: where it set a table with six alternate Coppies passages
Speaker 1: printed out from the digital versions, and two copies of
Speaker 1: Little Women Wedding and Burymen. I can't find a single
Speaker 1: online source reporting a Best's Wedding version, I said, almost apologetic.
Speaker 1: But it's right here in our hands. I checked the
Speaker 1: publisher's database too. These version shouldn't exist, not like this,
Speaker 1: and yet in this building they do, Nor a Hathaway side.
Speaker 1: For the first time in fifteen years, she seemed unsure.
Speaker 1: He thumbed through my bindo of notes, the columns, the
Speaker 1: color coded highlights, my increasing the unsteady comfort with the
Speaker 1: library's reality I've noticed before, she said so quietly, I
Speaker 1: could barely hear her. As a junior page over thirty
Speaker 1: years ago, sometimes i'd shiel a volume with a different
Speaker 1: dedication or a paragraph I didn't remember. I thought maybe
Speaker 1: I was recalling the wrong translation, or we'd got a
Speaker 1: misprinted buck lot in the seventies if I never cataloged it,
Speaker 1: not formally. But lately, yes, I think there's a pattern.
Speaker 1: Something about this place. Some days, I swear book is
Speaker 1: swapped out from under me. She straightened, tucking the loudgitary chest.
Speaker 1: You realize what this means, Harold. It's not just about
Speaker 1: editions or memory. Something about this building, These shelves as
Speaker 1: producing and biting these versions more than fluchs, patrons webs.
Speaker 1: I found myself rubbing the groove in my thumb where
Speaker 1: I always held a date stamp. But why here? Why us?
Speaker 1: How far does it go? I couldn't tell now if
Speaker 1: my tone was one of all or exhaustion. Nora's face softened.
Speaker 1: We might never know, but we can document it. For now.
Speaker 1: Let's just accept in this library the books are not
Speaker 1: always what they seem, and neither are the stories we remember.
Speaker 1: Maybe we're the keeper's Harald. That night I pisced the
Speaker 1: quiet halls after close, my flashlight, jittering in the darkness.
Speaker 1: If the building itself was special, if it had always
Speaker 1: quietly even this confluence, Who, I wondered, had first noticed?
Speaker 1: Surely not me, nor even nor Hathaway. Some one, some
Speaker 1: time must have cataloged the impossible, drawn by a half
Speaker 1: remembered rumor of forgotten basement corridors. I went looking for answers,
Speaker 1: not just in paper, but in stone and Stairwell. There,
Speaker 1: behind a loose plaqu in the slant floor basement, just
Speaker 1: past the bockhouse staff only a door, I found a
Speaker 1: short marble hallway. I nodged a wobbly stack marker, ready
Speaker 1: to upright it then call the evening a loss, But
Speaker 1: instead it swe aside with a soft clunk, revealing a
Speaker 1: narrow downwards stowell I'd never seen, even after all these years.
Speaker 1: My heart stuttered, not with fear but wild anticipation. I
Speaker 1: fumbled from my faam light and descended the stone steps calves,
Speaker 1: slick with time light, to a cool echoing annex room
Speaker 1: lined which el's shells upon shelves, stacked for to ceiling
Speaker 1: with new identical coppice of familiar titles, each labeled with
Speaker 1: the code I'd only glimpsed once before, and faded into
Speaker 1: old accession ledgers obidic at twenty four moby Dick v.
Speaker 1: Sixty two, all over twist Hitien, Frankenstein kiseeven each rowe
Speaker 1: precisely organized each light in plot or structure, marked in
Speaker 1: a neat spidery hand on small index cards pressed inside
Speaker 1: each cover flap. The codes meant nothing to me at first,
Speaker 1: nor did the subtle notations. All ending H eighteen, reverse
Speaker 1: or cousin appears were rooved in B thirty one. A
Speaker 1: battered desk at the fall wall held fou drawers brimming
Speaker 1: with folders, each crowned with detailed comparison's hypotheses digrans, a
Speaker 1: timeline half finished with stretches of red thread connecting volumes
Speaker 1: across decades. Some folders were yellowed to brown, others CRISPINU,
Speaker 1: all written in the careful hand of a true obsessive
Speaker 1: I forgot to kneel. I simply sat on the tile,
Speaker 1: breathing in dust in electricity, and set my notebook beside
Speaker 1: the largest open folder. This was no abandoned oddity. This
Speaker 1: was a system, a laboratory of literary confluence, as someone
Speaker 1: had been tracking every change, every versionary anomaly for longer
Speaker 1: than my tenure. Combined, names meant nothing now, only codes
Speaker 1: shifting centuries, notes attached to character and chapters that had
Speaker 1: never been or have possibly always been. I let my
Speaker 1: finger rest on the cool wooden edge of the last shelf.
Speaker 1: I was adjusting to the half light, and thought for
Speaker 1: the first time that perhaps every generation of staff here
Speaker 1: had lived with these versions, cataloged, then pondered them before
Speaker 1: finding comfort, not an answers, but in the act of
Speaker 1: observing the impossible. Was this the entire reason for the
Speaker 1: library's endurance, a secret annex of possibilities tended as quietly
Speaker 1: as any rarest manuscript collection. I stood quietly, listening, hard, alive,
Speaker 1: with an excitement as and familiar as any I'd known
Speaker 1: since my first day as a junior page. Maybe somewhere
Speaker 1: done here, I'd even find the names of librarians before
Speaker 1: as keepers of the shifting stories. As I climbed back
Speaker 1: towards reading room, the shoe size and intention of it
Speaker 1: all washed over me. The anomaly wasn't random, nor perhaps
Speaker 1: even unique to my lifetime. It was deliberate, collected, observed,
Speaker 1: passed down, preserved as a secret threat in the library's
Speaker 1: long history. A pattern emerged. The library wasn't simply encountering
Speaker 1: these alternate vertions. It had for decades, if not longer,
Speaker 1: quietly archived, classified, and studied them, as if these story
Speaker 1: of variants, as mutable as rumor, were as real to
Speaker 1: our shelves as any first edition or band printing. This
Speaker 1: placed my familiar old workplace. My second home was not
Speaker 1: simply a hold of stories. It was a convergence point, alive, humming,
Speaker 1: always ready for the next impossible chapter. The days that
Speaker 1: followed were not carved by routine, but by restless energy,
Speaker 1: threading my every action. The annex, silent, dust, rich and
Speaker 1: mediculously ordered, a linger behind my eyes. Even amid the
Speaker 1: bustle upstairs, it seemed as if there in the main
Speaker 1: stacks tasted subtly different. Now, every cold number and cover,
Speaker 1: inviting me to look closer and certain whether I'd find
Speaker 1: a familiar or then accountily altered. I could not leave
Speaker 1: it alone. I spent each morning cataloging in plain sight,
Speaker 1: then descend into the secret room, whereas study the folders,
Speaker 1: tracing my finger to belong time line stretching from the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties through to the previous year. Each decade more entries,
Speaker 1: more indix cars, bearing impossible summaries in different hands. The
Speaker 1: air list notesing faded almost invisibility compared Shakespearean passages perbatim
Speaker 1: flat differences between folio sequences, But as decades marched on,
Speaker 1: the figuration changed. Later fall as charted character maps, branching diagrams,
Speaker 1: a kind of evolution of narrative itself, none of it
Speaker 1: matching documented publisher history anywhere I could check. I grew
Speaker 1: bold enough finally to bring select files and coppies to
Speaker 1: Ms Hathaway, locked in her off as well. After the
Speaker 1: last patron had left. She greeted me with her usual
Speaker 1: folks reading glasses in her hand, cardig and draped loosely
Speaker 1: as always, But she said nothing. When I spread out
Speaker 1: the coded volumes and folders. You've known about this room,
Speaker 1: I asked, force a rasp a pause. Her gaze softened
Speaker 1: on the folder between us. I found it in my
Speaker 1: third year here, when an old shoving list failed to
Speaker 1: match the actual stacks. As swore to myself, it was
Speaker 1: just an Overzeala's predecessor. Then, as years pass, I realized
Speaker 1: I couldn't explain how the room kept growing, books appearing
Speaker 1: that I had never ordered, files, had never type. I
Speaker 1: started maintaining my own record, from my own sanity. She
Speaker 1: unlocked a drawer with a small brass key and placed
Speaker 1: a stack of note books on the table, brown covers
Speaker 1: warped from use, each marked personal, then a h than loopinscript.
Speaker 1: I never spoke of it. I feared being dismissed as forgetful,
Speaker 1: or worse, accused of tampering with the catalog. You recorded
Speaker 1: every variation. I marveled, turning pages fold edge to edge
Speaker 1: with tiny notations. How did you know what to accept
Speaker 1: is real? Her smile was right, but not unkind. After
Speaker 1: enough time I stopped trying to match anything with certainty.
Speaker 1: I just started observing it was. It is an endless project.
Speaker 1: Not every difference is visible every day either. Sometimes all
Speaker 1: pull as shelf in its entire contents, feel all at
Speaker 1: once changed. Sometimes nothing alters. For weeks we sat Neatonny,
Speaker 1: two keepers of a secret, neither quite wanted, but now
Speaker 1: found ourselves wholly entangled with. I showed her the timeline
Speaker 1: sticks with red threat from the annexed States, arrows, plots,
Speaker 1: brief notations of emotional tone, and under each decade new handwriting.
Speaker 1: I'd had the most recent erratic script. These look recent?
Speaker 1: Have you has any one else added to the collection
Speaker 1: since he started? She shrugged. A few pages a junior
Speaker 1: staff are now and then perhaps even you Unknowingly, sometimes
Speaker 1: no car to appear. I have no memory of writing,
Speaker 1: she hesitated, glancing at me sideways. It's as if the
Speaker 1: act of observing makes you a participant. The more you
Speaker 1: try to pin a version down, the more the enne grows. Harold,
Speaker 1: I sometimes I wonder if the room isn't just a
Speaker 1: physical place, but rather the library's own memory, accumulating every
Speaker 1: attempt to notice something inside me shifted at that phinnise. Yes,
Speaker 1: but so much more, a deep, exhilarating sense of possibility
Speaker 1: tangled with humility. I was not uncovering a tidy secret.
Speaker 1: I was walking inside the question itself. We carried a
Speaker 1: selection of courded books and a handful of annotated cards
Speaker 1: up to the break room for tea. Jamie arrived midway,
Speaker 1: perpetually late, curly hair plastered his head from the rain,
Speaker 1: fresh from a lunchtime dash for coffee. He eyed the table,
Speaker 1: then grinned, So is this the famous secret reading society
Speaker 1: to code in the old books? Or is it literary
Speaker 1: bingo night? Seeing my luck? Nora adjusted her glasses and said, Jamie.
Speaker 1: He said, once you'd like to play spot the alternate ending?
Speaker 1: Would you like to see something truly strange? She slid
Speaker 1: the varying little Woman additions toward him. Compared these last chapters,
Speaker 1: note any differences. He obliged flipping through with mock seriousness,
Speaker 1: ibrous climbing as the discrepancies emerged. Okay, wild, how many
Speaker 1: of these did the library print exactly our weight? Is
Speaker 1: this like those old shoes your own adventure books? Just sneakier?
Speaker 1: He looked at us, both suddenly searching our faces for signals,
Speaker 1: then went quieter. I mean, if this isn't a joke,
Speaker 1: it's well, it's kind of brilliant. At least it keeps
Speaker 1: the classes from getting boring. I didn't quite laugh, but
Speaker 1: felt some invisible tension in mind you see it? Then,
Speaker 1: I said gently. These cops aren't supposed to exist, not
Speaker 1: with these endings, and yet if we look here, they are.
Speaker 1: Jamie poke that I mind file with a pencil, then
Speaker 1: whistled low. That's a lot of obsessive documentation. So is
Speaker 1: this like ghost stories? Or do you guys think it's
Speaker 1: a quantum thing parallel world's time travel? Nor report him
Speaker 1: some tea, her hands sturdy on the pot. We don't know.
Speaker 1: We only know it's always here, at least for the
Speaker 1: thirty years I've been watching, maybe longer. We think the
Speaker 1: library is leaky in some sense, for perhaps it's actively
Speaker 1: collecting the possibilities. He sat back, mulling it over. I
Speaker 1: like the idea better than ghosts. Besides, there's a lot
Speaker 1: less screaming. You sure nobody's filming one of those prank shows.
Speaker 1: N as he could passageways with smoke machines. Unfortunately, no,
Speaker 1: I said, half laughing. Just a basement room, a lot
Speaker 1: of books, and too many folders to count. He tapped
Speaker 1: the coded label on a copy of Moby Dick. But well,
Speaker 1: if I was an author, I'd want this place to exist.
Speaker 1: Even the best story might want the second or third
Speaker 1: ending gives people new things to argue about. Anyway, we
Speaker 1: discussed possible explanations, trading old urban legends, campus rumors, and
Speaker 1: literary oddities with increasing vibrancy. Jamie Lobber doesn't create a
Speaker 1: theories rode printer from the future, a secret international translation project,
Speaker 1: a I powered edition shuffler of each one more entertaining,
Speaker 1: but none enough to satisfy Nora or me. The dinner
Speaker 1: bell mussas Jenkins in the staff kitchen frying onions have
Speaker 1: signaled that it was time for the crew to socialize
Speaker 1: interrupted us. As we packed up, Jamie paused and more
Speaker 1: earnestly than he'd spoken all day, said, if you ever
Speaker 1: want to help documenting the weird, I meant there could
Speaker 1: be a great podcast in this library, mysteries the lot
Speaker 1: you never knew, nor wave tim off, but not without
Speaker 1: a smile. Help. Yes, podcasts, No, at least not yet.
Speaker 1: Later that week I found mister Dogado in the rare
Speaker 1: book's room, examining a bundle of eighteenth century as is
Speaker 1: for preservation. I knew every sounding unbalanced, but the need
Speaker 1: for corroboration overruled caution. I set down two halm the
Speaker 1: desks with flagged axe and a copy of our notes.
Speaker 1: Francisco I said gently, in your years of teaching, did
Speaker 1: you ever encounter alternate endings or plot lines than Shakespeare
Speaker 1: or elsewhere? He raised a bushy ie brow, then read.
Speaker 1: The change in his expression was genuine, a shift from
Speaker 1: ry amusement to measured seriousness. This I have not seen.
Speaker 1: He conceded, voice low. I like to think my memory
Speaker 1: is sound, but there is nothing in the favor of
Speaker 1: editions matching the scene. He closed the book, hands sturdy.
Speaker 1: It is dislocating. Even now. Part of me wants to protest,
Speaker 1: insists it must be a modern prank or a fever dream.
Speaker 1: But Harold, I believe what I hold. He leaned closer.
Speaker 1: What does it mean? I told him what we'd found,
Speaker 1: the annex, the generations of notes, the idea that our
Speaker 1: library overlapped somehow, somewhere with possibilities otherwise unreachable. He stared
Speaker 1: at the rose of stack volumes around us, his fingers
Speaker 1: drumming and anxious, hopeful rhythm on the table. If it
Speaker 1: is true, if all this is true, then our tasks immense,
Speaker 1: two immense for one life, perhaps, But what a responsibility
Speaker 1: for a place of learning? Yes, to care for all
Speaker 1: the stories, not only the sanctioned ones. Missess Braggs I
Speaker 1: brought in with more trepidation her reading group's love of
Speaker 1: Beth's wedding and now saw was itself a kind of
Speaker 1: variant memory. Invited to the staff office, she handled both
Speaker 1: little women s with reverence. It never confused me, she admitted,
Speaker 1: flicking between the chapters. My mother said, our family's edition
Speaker 1: ended happily. I thought she misremembered, but she blushed, a
Speaker 1: lively glint in her eye. Maybe we all just read
Speaker 1: different stories growing up. Maybe all of them are true
Speaker 1: enough for her. The prospect was freeing now I don't
Speaker 1: need to convince the book club. Each of us can
Speaker 1: have our own Beth. The happiness in her voice made
Speaker 1: me realize how much intendal comfort could be found in
Speaker 1: these literary ambiguities. Not everyone sought single answers. We'd Our
Speaker 1: group now began to meet after hours, sometimes in the
Speaker 1: stuff room, sometimes when we dared, Sitting shouldered shoulder among
Speaker 1: the stone and shadow of the annex, we compared copies
Speaker 1: with growing wonder, recording new variants, speculating on mechanisms with
Speaker 1: some for a shold of attention require were readers influencing
Speaker 1: the versions or were the books guiding the memories? Jaimie,
Speaker 1: a born experimentalist, devised small trials. I'll shel free hamlets.
Speaker 1: He proposed, putting the variant on a different shelf. Then
Speaker 1: come back tomorrow and see which ending appears. If we
Speaker 1: all remember the same thing, will the books stay aligned?
Speaker 1: The results were inconclusive. Sometimes variants persisted, sometimes shifted, sometimes vanished,
Speaker 1: as if the library itself was aware of our watching.
Speaker 1: Nor suggested, not without mischief, that we invite a few
Speaker 1: regulars into the observation game. We'll ask them to recall
Speaker 1: the ending of a favorite story, then pull coppers and
Speaker 1: let them read for themselves see what aligns. The results
Speaker 1: made for fascinating conversation. People often found their own memory
Speaker 1: reflected in the coppies they opened, though not always. Sometimes
Speaker 1: a reader would insist the ending different from their recollection,
Speaker 1: only to return days later having convinced themselves they had misremembered.
Speaker 1: We noted that some john was mythology. Classic novels folk
Speaker 1: have spawned the widest variation, while technical manuals, dictionaries, reference
Speaker 1: guides stayed largely stable. Would even hear the rose blurred
Speaker 1: As Missus Jenkins discovered her nineteen seventy two City Almanac
Speaker 1: contained two different maze for the same year and two
Speaker 1: separate copies. Well, that explained some of the council confusion,
Speaker 1: she quot though her laughter sounded oddly relieved. Curiosity grew
Speaker 1: bolder than unease. Our little circle to pleasure impossibility. Our
Speaker 1: conversations less about pinning down the right version, more about
Speaker 1: mapping the field itself. We shot at new points. Catalog
Speaker 1: in not just plot, but motion, has some endings felt
Speaker 1: softer or sharper narratives closing with open arms or bitter defeat.
Speaker 1: We debated which versions seemed more real, which resonated more
Speaker 1: purely with the heart. There was no consensus, only delight
Speaker 1: in the plural. Nora. One evening invited me to her
Speaker 1: office while the sky outside sizzle with dying daylight. On
Speaker 1: her desk was a battered green note book, older than
Speaker 1: any ide, yet handled, its corners culled by decades of handling.
Speaker 1: She pushed it toward me, my first observations over thirty
Speaker 1: years ago, she said quietly. Inside were pages of careful notes,
Speaker 1: not just sexual analysis, but a child's wonder written into
Speaker 1: the margins. Hammet's death felt wrong, Horashiar speech missing, and
Speaker 1: mobi Dick stab are crowing away, joudals of tenline branches.
Speaker 1: Early attempts to systematize the shifting stories. I began thinking
Speaker 1: of it as a garden, she murmured, stories tending themselves,
Speaker 1: growing new branches. Each time someone remembers, they gave up
Speaker 1: seeking the original long ago as simply collected evidence, enjoyed
Speaker 1: the blooms. We spend hours reconstructing her cross reference diagrams
Speaker 1: and listening Jamie to digitize what he could, though frustratingly
Speaker 1: every attempt to upload scan variant pages failed the files
Speaker 1: appeared as plain texts, matching always to the canonical version.
Speaker 1: It's like the library's rules don't extend to cyberspace. Jamie remarked,
Speaker 1: physical only digital can't hold the weight of what's really
Speaker 1: happening here. That realization changed everything again. The library was
Speaker 1: not simply a collective, but a facilitator, the very walls
Speaker 1: somehow enabling this plurality that the Internet's neat informity refuse
Speaker 1: nor speculated wildly. Maybe the constant touch books handled shared
Speaker 1: discuss keeps the possibility. Active digital versions are static, frozen
Speaker 1: hours here, live and breathed by being read. With theories together,
Speaker 1: they into evenings that perhaps the buildings aged the layers
Speaker 1: of stone accumulated memory echoing footstep's played a role. Mister
Speaker 1: Dougoddom used about superposition's quantum physics for the literary crowd.
Speaker 1: Books here exist in multiple realities until you open them,
Speaker 1: at which point of version becomes real for you. Just then,
Speaker 1: but open it again tomorrow another truth might surface. Each
Speaker 1: new angle made the issue stranger, never simpler, but we
Speaker 1: stopped longing for straightforward explanations. I found myself at last
Speaker 1: comforted by ambiguity. When an anthology of fairy tales arrived
Speaker 1: at its cured donation from a retiring teacher. I recognized
Speaker 1: its battered cover from my own childhood days. It should
Speaker 1: have contained the Three Brothers, a Red Shoes or Rapunzel. Instead,
Speaker 1: taffed between was The Willow Bride, A story how familiar,
Speaker 1: its prose matching the rhythm of memory, though the plot
Speaker 1: drifted midway from what I swore I have read aloud
Speaker 1: years ago. After I finished the story, my certainty wavered.
Speaker 1: Had I truly readed differently before or merely believed I had?
Speaker 1: Even my strongness recollections grew parse, and I allowed myself
Speaker 1: for the first time to enjoy the uncertainty nor I
Speaker 1: began to formalize our observations. Hand Drawn diagrams lay with
Speaker 1: arrows and question marks, categories of persistent variants. A reader
Speaker 1: matched endings transcend interpretation. We invited others of the staff
Speaker 1: only as far as the comfort allowed. Some waved off
Speaker 1: the procedure, content with the received cannon, while others quietly
Speaker 1: fed as further examples. The more we discussed, the clearer
Speaker 1: or unspoken conclusion became. The library was not so much
Speaker 1: a container of unchanging facts as a living, breathing arka
Speaker 1: a place where multiple realities pressed close, where the act
Speaker 1: of reading drew particular versions up from a sea of possibility.
Speaker 1: Our buildings age its heavy stone and worn would The
Speaker 1: long standing practice of reading, lending, remembering, debating all wove together,
Speaker 1: thinning the border between stories as they were written and
Speaker 1: as they could have been. One night, sitting with Nor
Speaker 1: beneath the murky cone of a banker's lamp, my notebook
Speaker 1: spread between us. We gave shape to our hypothesis. She
Speaker 1: traced a finger across her timeline, whispering, there's an old
Speaker 1: superstition among librarians, especially archievis that reality warped under the
Speaker 1: weight of enough stories, that buildings absorbed the contents, that
Speaker 1: the very act of remembering bends the world to fit.
Speaker 1: She looked at me directly. I don't think it's a superstition.
Speaker 1: I think there are places to our place where possibilities
Speaker 1: thin skinned, and if he cared deeply enough about the contents,
Speaker 1: the shells bloom outwood. We tried half heartedly to test
Speaker 1: this theory. Jamie suggested that new reader's teens from the
Speaker 1: local school and familiar with library legends, might serve as
Speaker 1: an unbiased audience. We handed them variant copies, asking them
Speaker 1: to read aloud the final pages of Mockingbird The Little
Speaker 1: Women a Gatsby. Some read endings that matched their memories.
Speaker 1: Otters did not. But even within a group of friends,
Speaker 1: disagreements and marriage, loyalty to particular memories, and wavering everyone
Speaker 1: wants their own ending. Jamie said, the more you believe,
Speaker 1: the more real it is. I found myself oddly hardened,
Speaker 1: not by any clear answer, but by the evidence that
Speaker 1: meaning was not lost in perality, but multiplied. Every reading
Speaker 1: became a small act of creation, every discussion a way
Speaker 1: of shotting the ever widening field of story. Once we
Speaker 1: had accepted this framework, the central anxiety faded. Nora and I,
Speaker 1: with Jamie often in tow, spent less time hunting for
Speaker 1: new contradictions and more time savoring the deep strangeness of
Speaker 1: our work. We developed a system anologue in a large
Speaker 1: battered by nowerstaff. Intrusted patrons could note variance they encountered,
Speaker 1: whether they matched memory or appeared fresh. Jamie, delighted, created
Speaker 1: a version Hunt's Gavenger game for the junior readers, cluecards
Speaker 1: leading from Wilber's bond to Heathcliss Fanishmore, and the children
Speaker 1: took to it instantly, cackling each time apparent or teachers
Speaker 1: who are plot point had never existed. The fiction discussion group,
Speaker 1: which Missess Briggs now hosted in the Reading Lounge, shifted
Speaker 1: focus from plot analysis to open debate, not which ending
Speaker 1: was right, but which one meant the most to each reader.
Speaker 1: All arguments lost their teeth. Some members drifted away, uncomfortable
Speaker 1: with uncertain deed. Others found the ambiguity liberating. Lectures once
Speaker 1: dedicated to literary analysis became celebrations of multiplicity, with mister
Speaker 1: dug God opposing open ended questions and refusing to resolve
Speaker 1: arguments except by saying both are true if he found
Speaker 1: birth on the shelf this week. Our catalog of variants,
Speaker 1: both digital and handriten grew by the day. If never
Speaker 1: fully stable, files would sometimes disappear from Jami's cloud folders
Speaker 1: if they had never existed. Physical binders carried the most reliability,
Speaker 1: so long as you trusted the paper you could hold.
Speaker 1: As for me, well, my sense of role changed more
Speaker 1: radically than I could have guessed. Librarians often navigate by
Speaker 1: certainty g numbers quisition years careful shelf order. Now my
Speaker 1: confidence lived in the practice of attention, not resolution. My
Speaker 1: passion for tidy answers softened, replaced by a humble, persistent curiosity.
Speaker 1: The building itself changed for me too. The ancient stacks
Speaker 1: became a map of what might be heat shelf its
Speaker 1: own little probability wave, chapters blooming open according to the
Speaker 1: hands that sought them. Even the rooms I had once
Speaker 1: considered drab or over familiar took on an inn a
Speaker 1: humming vitality. With every visitor, I found myself more invested,
Speaker 1: not in helping them retrieve the right book, but in
Speaker 1: learning which story they expected to find, and whether, when
Speaker 1: they cracked to cover the story would oblige. It was
Speaker 1: in the annex some weeks on that Nor stopped me
Speaker 1: beside a row of dickens, her finger resting on a
Speaker 1: faded Oliver twist, heighting the jew you suppose, She said
Speaker 1: quietly that all library's boundaries might be more than physical.
Speaker 1: That when readers share stories, remembered them together, discussed them here,
Speaker 1: the act itself draws out the unspoken versions, the roads
Speaker 1: not take. Before I could answer, a realization sudden and clear,
Speaker 1: crystallized this convergence. This multiplicity was not a mistake of malfunction,
Speaker 1: but the library's true mode of being. The collection was
Speaker 1: not limited by stone or buklo. The story sheeped by memory,
Speaker 1: longing debate were always crowding just below the surface, waiting
Speaker 1: for atentive hands to draw them forth. We weren't just keepers,
Speaker 1: but participants in ongoing, collected act of narrative creation. The
Speaker 1: central question that had dogged me while here, why us
Speaker 1: split open and inverted? The library was nothing less than
Speaker 1: a living intersection, a place where the stories of the
Speaker 1: community and of literature itself, with all their subjective layers
Speaker 1: and forgotten branches, converged and recombined. Its peculiar genius was
Speaker 1: to be a home for possibility and contradiction alike. To
Speaker 1: insist on only one story had always been a kind
Speaker 1: of loss. Nor of perhaps sensing the clarity in my silence,
Speaker 1: smiled softly, We are not our caves of certain tis herald,
Speaker 1: We are the gardeners of infinite chapters. After that, I
Speaker 1: needed no further evidence, no resolution, only to practice of
Speaker 1: participation itself. The need for one truth to solve replaced
Speaker 1: by the richer certainty that our purpose was celebration and wonder.
Speaker 1: We formalized our observations, but never as a closed system.
Speaker 1: Volunteers carefully chosen for their open mind in this joined
Speaker 1: our quite circle, contributing memories, debating endings. Some left finding
Speaker 1: ambiguity uncomfortable, Others, like Jamie, found a new calling. Story
Speaker 1: time became improvisational, children chanting what ending will it be?
Speaker 1: To day thes grew less anxious, more anticipatory. Once I
Speaker 1: found myself invited to join a fifth grade reading class
Speaker 1: as guest reader. The teacher asked if I'd bring Charlotte's Web,
Speaker 1: and I obliged. But when I cracked open the copy
Speaker 1: jamie sticky note attached, I paused, would wilbur live in
Speaker 1: hope or loss or some third possibility? The room waited,
Speaker 1: bursts held, yet I found I had no anxiety, left
Speaker 1: only joy in seeing which strand the book would draw forth. Today,
Speaker 1: community dinners expanded to include debate over lost stories and
Speaker 1: found characters half myth and half anecdote. A local reporter
Speaker 1: brought in by Jamie left baffled, unable to pin down
Speaker 1: the angle for a tidily objective article. She wrote and
Speaker 1: said about place bamed possibility, a phrase that delighted nor
Speaker 1: for weeks. When patrons asked me for recommendations, I found
Speaker 1: myself asking, what version do you remember? Or which ending
Speaker 1: would you rather find? It was as if a new
Speaker 1: cart had appeared in the reference deck of bewilder faces
Speaker 1: turning to luminous grins as I handed them their story,
Speaker 1: knowing even as I did so, that the shelf might
Speaker 1: bear a new text tomorrow. My own reading, one shape
Speaker 1: by habit became an exercise and delight. The books on
Speaker 1: my own shelf at home, steady and unchanged in decades,
Speaker 1: now seemed gently and complete, as if inviting me to
Speaker 1: some day stumble on their forgotten twins in the stacks.
Speaker 1: Late one afternoon, with no budgeting for new acquisitions, and
Speaker 1: Jamie leading a batch of giggling children on the version hunt,
Speaker 1: I found myself quietly drawn to the upper reading room,
Speaker 1: rein Pressing softly on the colored goss above, I traced
Speaker 1: the spines, recognizing with affectionate uncertainty how many stories they
Speaker 1: now housed. I thought of my own life's chapter, some
Speaker 1: clearer sunlight, others doubled, ambiguous, never fully settled. I realized
Speaker 1: with a gentle happiness that truth in story is Perhaps
Speaker 1: the living was not diminished by mutiplicity, If anything, it
Speaker 1: was enriched. I paul my hand resting on to Kill
Speaker 1: a Mockingbird, remembering the version with Missus Macalliso, those half
Speaker 1: familiar cousins. The attic letter folded quietly into a vest
Speaker 1: I realized I no longer wished to choose which was original.
Speaker 1: Each version, with its own shadings and colors, now belonged
Speaker 1: an equal measure to the library, to the memories of readers,
Speaker 1: to the slow accumulation of possibility that was our community's
Speaker 1: greatest gift. As raincoats rolled past, and the last beams
Speaker 1: of afternoon cot prison brighte on a line of near
Speaker 1: identical novels, I let the question drift through my mind.
Speaker 1: Perhaps every memory, every reading is simply one of the stories,
Speaker 1: and the real magic comes in discovering them again and
Speaker 1: again for the first time. Maybe that is what the
Speaker 1: library had been patiently teaching all of us all along.
Speaker 1: I stepped into the corridor silence and footfuls braided together
Speaker 1: and smiled, ready to return every day to the Library
Speaker 1: of Versions, the garden where each story is both new
Speaker 1: and ancient, always waiting for the next reader and the
Speaker 1: next beginning, and that is the end. Thank you for listening,
Speaker 1: and I will see you in the next one.