Speaker 1: The night hid the city above the low hum of
Speaker 1: its street lights and traffic muffled by layers of stone
Speaker 1: and shelving. Only the library's basement remained awake. Fluorescence burst overhead,
Speaker 1: reflected in polish concrete, and the air was comfortably thick
Speaker 1: with dust in the paperies and of old bindings. I'd
Speaker 1: reshove this section just yesterday. The entire days for ages
Speaker 1: made a game of how efficiently I could restore older
Speaker 1: to decades of donations and weeding projects. So when my
Speaker 1: fingers closed on a batted, slim volume out of place
Speaker 1: on the lowest shelf, face in spine faded almost blanket,
Speaker 1: was as jarring as a familiar song played scordantly out
Speaker 1: of tune, I drew without squinting at its cover. Centennial
Speaker 1: Supplement Provisional Catalog, twenty seventy three. The year glared at me,
Speaker 1: impossibly bold for something so old and tatter below our
Speaker 1: libraries in Sydney was debussed, along with a small archaic
Speaker 1: date stamper feature phased out years ago. The books edges
Speaker 1: were culled from use. As I turned it in my hands,
Speaker 1: its pages made a faint rattling sound, not unlike dried leaves.
Speaker 1: For a few seconds, I tried to remember if this
Speaker 1: was a prop from one of the High Skull's theater groups,
Speaker 1: or if it had ever come up in our quarterly
Speaker 1: Lost or Van Binn. But neither option made sense. I
Speaker 1: balanced the book carefully on my arm, kneeling on the
Speaker 1: cold tiwl to get another look at its spine. The
Speaker 1: where matched the rest of the shelf. These were always
Speaker 1: the musties least traveled stacks, but the titles claim sat
Speaker 1: stubbin in my chest. The current year was only twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three. There had been some chatter two weeks ago
Speaker 1: about sprucing up for our libraries approaching eighty fifth, but
Speaker 1: no one here, not amor not even Rosa, had said
Speaker 1: a word about planning for the centennial. And yet flipping
Speaker 1: through the opening leaves, I found familiar names. Rosa Dauberscu
Speaker 1: listed as Emeritis Ororo History now retired, Jamie Kevanaugh Technology
Speaker 1: Services twenty forty eight, twenty sixty nine, Amersar Head Archivist
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, twenty forty now late, and myself avelin special
Speaker 1: Collections Emeritis. I have heard a finger over each, noting
Speaker 1: the way birth dates and jaw dates had been overtight,
Speaker 1: then corrected with careful edits. My stomach twisted with the
Speaker 1: uncomfortable pleasure of see myself as well, not old exactly,
Speaker 1: but finished someone looking back. Even the preface was drawingly
Speaker 1: specific to the loyal staff of Landmark City Library on
Speaker 1: the occasion of our hundred year are thanks to those
Speaker 1: whose memories have become our archive. The signature matched the
Speaker 1: elgant scroll of a director I'd worked under as a
Speaker 1: fresh growd assistant, now long departed for a university post.
Speaker 1: The names, the logo, the seal. They were all right,
Speaker 1: but wrong in their context. I abandoned my cart and
Speaker 1: took the battered catalog to the work room, where my
Speaker 1: phone was charging on the batted metal desk. First, I
Speaker 1: tried scanning the barcode on the back cover. Nothing, not
Speaker 1: even a misfile in our digital system. The only blip
Speaker 1: was a curious invalid code prompt, as though the database
Speaker 1: was politely refusing to admit the possibility. Next, I flipped
Speaker 1: to the back, looking for the old accession records we
Speaker 1: sometimes scribbled and pencil. There was nothing, only a single
Speaker 1: ink notation preshlved see centennial Holdings. I checked our online
Speaker 1: archives entering centennial supplement, Then every permutation I could dink
Speaker 1: to try, no hits, not even in the special projects folder.
Speaker 1: Or Damie would occasionally upload sample tempests for next gen
Speaker 1: record formats. Absently, I ran a thumb over the mossed
Speaker 1: seal on the cover the library's oldest logo, rarely used
Speaker 1: since the redesign a decade ago. For a while, I
Speaker 1: just sat cattalog on my lap, feeling the hum of
Speaker 1: the lights and the shift of quiet air through the
Speaker 1: old ductruk. Was I tired and missing something obvious? Or
Speaker 1: was someone, maybe Jamie, with his love for testing my patients,
Speaker 1: trying to get me to bite. I set the catalog
Speaker 1: in my station's bottom drawer, beside the lost badge bin
Speaker 1: and the half eaten chocolate bar, hesitated and slid it
Speaker 1: farther to the back, just in case i'd ask in
Speaker 1: the morning. Surely someone would know where such an oddity blonde,
Speaker 1: or at least offer a plausible reason for its existence. Upstairs,
Speaker 1: The library's polishing has always felt like a separate world.
Speaker 1: Marble floors, pillows frame in sunlight walkways, the echo of
Speaker 1: children's voices in the reading loft, but below in the
Speaker 1: archives and technical workrooms, the move was low. I'd fallen
Speaker 1: in love with the way the buildings seemed to stretch
Speaker 1: in all directions. Rooms that peered on blueprints but not
Speaker 1: on foot, rolling shelves with handriton touch from before my time.
Speaker 1: My days were steady by Richal. The first cup of
Speaker 1: coffee at an unreasonably early hour, the low rattle of
Speaker 1: carts loaded with rare volumes, the cold bite of the
Speaker 1: morning as I reviewed preservation locks, and a quiet camaraderie
Speaker 1: of staff lunches in the window's kitchen. Inventory day again,
Speaker 1: Ava Rose asked that morning, smiling over a Topowervi egg salad,
Speaker 1: her hair pulled back with a scarf pattern like clouded glass.
Speaker 1: Rosa had been here almost as long as the bricks themselves,
Speaker 1: or so she said in her memory. The library it survived,
Speaker 1: municipal storms and a generation of underfunding, all chronicled in
Speaker 1: her stories. Ammer arrived with his customary stack of annoittive
Speaker 1: folders and a thermist that always smelled a spicy burnt coffee.
Speaker 1: You'll have worn down your knees on those basement tiles
Speaker 1: by sixty, he teased, dropping a folder on the table
Speaker 1: and stretching, Or are you simply finding things none of
Speaker 1: us can remember? Why are there never fewer books, just
Speaker 1: stranger ones? Jamie chanmed in, already half distracted, peering at
Speaker 1: his phone. Jamie was still young enough for caffeine jitters
Speaker 1: and the playful optimism that heccurred to deep like the archives.
Speaker 1: His pet theory was that realities sometimes glitched in a
Speaker 1: cattleg and I've long since learned not to ask for
Speaker 1: a precise definition. Part of the joy of working at
Speaker 1: Landmark was the randomness. Sometimes a box of red books
Speaker 1: would surface in shipping, marked from a don and no
Speaker 1: one recognized, but Poor smoked locally. Sometimes a shelf would
Speaker 1: collapse and out with Poor a clutch of often photographs
Speaker 1: from the nineteen sixties. Once a patter of Veerlin case
Speaker 1: would sheet music in Romanian turned up just as a
Speaker 1: touring treo arrived for a pop up concert. There was
Speaker 1: the founder's note, a cubby rumor to be carved out
Speaker 1: behind a sealed book case in the oldest when everyone
Speaker 1: agreed it existed, no one agreed on its precise location.
Speaker 1: At the west stair will hung a yellow portrait of
Speaker 1: the library's founder as humorless, mustas brushed flat. The story
Speaker 1: went that the painted disliked books and quietly cursed the frame,
Speaker 1: so anyone who lingered too long in front of it
Speaker 1: would misremember what color the founder's tir had been. Downstairs,
Speaker 1: the basement was my preferred domain. Dull concrete bulwarks, narrow
Speaker 1: rooms with labels etched and faded marker, rolling shelves that
Speaker 1: crowned with every nudge. There were zones even the longest
Speaker 1: serving staff avoided a corrid or sealed with caution tape
Speaker 1: after a burst steam pipe. In the eighties, saxis could
Speaker 1: linger in immemory, but long since placed. The earliest chlvies
Speaker 1: still bore shop dates fifty two sixty seven sum with
Speaker 1: a rows and notes like a label with new catalog
Speaker 1: maintenance door sport had faded stencils, returned route only for shelving.
Speaker 1: Hold a survey. None of the new staff could say
Speaker 1: for sure which doors led by. It was easy to
Speaker 1: get trapped in memory, wandering amid other people's priorities. Our
Speaker 1: lunch stretched out in the usual way. Rosa sharing stories
Speaker 1: about donors who'd given books that went quite books, Amma
Speaker 1: comparing statistics of borrowing patterns across decades. I waited until
Speaker 1: the conversation turned to her spat between the teen volunteers
Speaker 1: in the poetry group, before asking, as casually as I
Speaker 1: could anyone remember anything about a centennial supplement as in
Speaker 1: a provisional catalog for the one hundredth year. Rose's eyebrows
Speaker 1: drew together. She frowned, centennial, Oh dear, the library's not
Speaker 1: that old, not yet. Did you find a proposal in
Speaker 1: the director's files. We talked about a garden a time
Speaker 1: or two, but it never got off the ground. She
Speaker 1: looked almost apologetic, as if failing to conjure up a
Speaker 1: memory was a mine embarrassment. Alma looked up mouth twisting
Speaker 1: integrin someone getting ambitious in their retirement planning, cause you're
Speaker 1: all still stuck with me at the next twenty five
Speaker 1: could be a workshop project, Jamie suggested, knuckles tap in
Speaker 1: the table in a syncopated rhysm, you know, like last
Speaker 1: year's future as catalogs class or a prank. Maybe any barcodes.
Speaker 1: His eyes lit up at the thought of an unsolved case.
Speaker 1: Scannet did that, I said, The system literally split it
Speaker 1: back at me. Rosa just patted my hand. If the
Speaker 1: shells start showing you the future, dear ask them where
Speaker 1: I left my keys. I managed to smile, but the
Speaker 1: account I left me more curious and unsettled. After clocking
Speaker 1: in for the afternoon shift, I ducked back into the
Speaker 1: work room and propped the catalog open beside my laptop.
Speaker 1: This time I picked a random listing from the supplements
Speaker 1: detance matrix of annotations photographs Mayor's gale at twenty sixty eight,
Speaker 1: mainfoy at seven thousand, one hundred twenty three format, digital, slash,
Speaker 1: ar keevilprint. I searched our holdings, both digital and physical.
Speaker 1: No such accession, no photos, no mention of a gala
Speaker 1: that year, either in newspaper archives or city events locks.
Speaker 1: The strangest bit was the name of the mayor, Michael Cheu.
Speaker 1: The term mayor was more startling than the name. It
Speaker 1: belonged to a current high school junior. The catalogs entry
Speaker 1: swung between plausible and uncanny. There were a list of
Speaker 1: books about city history attributed to people had met at
Speaker 1: local readings who hadn't yet published more than a panphlet
Speaker 1: accounts of our chosen installations were reconvened during a jubilee.
Speaker 1: Even casual listings a memoir by some one arm are
Speaker 1: often cited as a workplace legend, described as already a
Speaker 1: late and much missed. Had I simply stumbled upon a
Speaker 1: document of wishes so fantasy of retirements and legacies to come?
Speaker 1: The contradictions ran deeper the Morrow traced them. Some less
Speaker 1: included staff byself included as emeritis, while others placed present
Speaker 1: colleagues as retired, relocated, married, deceased. The specificity of dates
Speaker 1: and names was dizzing. Who would bother to fabricate the
Speaker 1: evolution of an entire building this thoroughly. By the time
Speaker 1: the afternoon sun had called into evening, shadows filtered through
Speaker 1: the topmost windows, turning the stacks of shade of blue gray,
Speaker 1: My frustration had fermented into a sharper curiosity. The next morning,
Speaker 1: Rosa drifted into the break room as a poor coffee.
Speaker 1: She was humming something shape I still dreamy from sleep,
Speaker 1: and I seize my moment, Rosa, I'm serious, nothing in
Speaker 1: your time here about a centennial supplement or anyone planning one.
Speaker 1: This time she shrugged, more sharply than before. I think
Speaker 1: maybe there was something about an anniversary display I've seen
Speaker 1: fliers for events that never happened. If that's what you mean,
Speaker 1: she smiled faintly. Always talk about jubilee celebrations, but no nothing.
Speaker 1: As you're describing, what did it look like? I described
Speaker 1: the battery's volume, skipping over my own name for the
Speaker 1: moment Amer was passing through brief kiss tilted wishall thinking aarva,
Speaker 1: he said, If you dig long enough in these stacks,
Speaker 1: you'll find a directory for the twenty one hundreds and
Speaker 1: a baseball sign by Abraham Lincoln. Just means it's ghost
Speaker 1: or someone with too much time. You want me to
Speaker 1: pull old stuff meeting notes for you. Jamie, slutched in
Speaker 1: the corner by the microwave, was the only one who
Speaker 1: registered my excitement. Might be a hacker trick, he said,
Speaker 1: echoing one of his favorite explanations for wy Olbject's surface
Speaker 1: at the wrong time. Stuff book Club did a thing
Speaker 1: last spring, right review entries for books that don't exist.
Speaker 1: Some kids took it way too far, or you know,
Speaker 1: a manifestation era catalogs are recursive, Hue and put enough
Speaker 1: fake staff. The database gets all new ideas about you.
Speaker 1: I left them to their theories, but decided, as I
Speaker 1: finished my coffee that the only waiter unravel the thing
Speaker 1: was to check more entries against reality. There had to
Speaker 1: be a point where the fiction cracked. Maybe I'd even
Speaker 1: catch sight of forever was responsible chronicling our imagined future
Speaker 1: in the slow, inexorable script of bureaucracy. I tipped the
Speaker 1: catalog and set up with the cart, trailing stacks of
Speaker 1: reference locks and print outs, planning to cross check every
Speaker 1: improbable listing that caught my eye. The aisles of the
Speaker 1: archives were a familiar landscape, shoving ranges allocated to local history,
Speaker 1: city documents, urban planning special collections, each with its oddities
Speaker 1: for their local history twenty forty two listing attributed in
Speaker 1: the catalog to Way Simmonds. I found no match in
Speaker 1: any database, not even in acquisition plans. But I did
Speaker 1: recall a prickling, nagging memory, having misshelled the pamphlet with
Speaker 1: that author's name just yesterday. Its title a near match.
Speaker 1: Growing up on Fort Street, I sped back to the
Speaker 1: spot and found it tucked behind a row of technical volumes.
Speaker 1: It was then printed in the distinctive form at the
Speaker 1: city's Deen writers around table he used for their annual contest,
Speaker 1: yet in the main system it was marked as pending
Speaker 1: review with no accession date and no borrowing record. A
Speaker 1: ghost half we reel. Next a look for art installation,
Speaker 1: the Silent Sculpture one D seventy one bronze granite base,
Speaker 1: anonymous donor. The digital catalog had not a trace, although
Speaker 1: the description was ritual location a note on materials a
Speaker 1: claimed unveiling at a jubilee celebration. Out of habit when
Speaker 1: dealing with art objects, I checked the lock caoset on
Speaker 1: the second cell basement level where records and correspondents about
Speaker 1: tentive exhibitions went to die. Sifting through yellow memos I
Speaker 1: found a brittle handritten that A proposed an a soundless
Speaker 1: sculpture commemorative, non invasive to the gallery environment, dated three
Speaker 1: decade prior of the materials matched. The letter was stamped
Speaker 1: never approved, but I was dropped by the congruents. Not
Speaker 1: a copy but a ghostly resonance. The most jarring discovery
Speaker 1: camile hunting for a children's book Timekeeper's Day gift from
Speaker 1: future mayor. The inscribed volume was peculiar. The dournalist did
Speaker 1: was the same teenage two named as made in the
Speaker 1: catalog's fictional future. Yet sitting out of place in the
Speaker 1: returns bin was pristine, brand new edition, vivid illustration shining
Speaker 1: through the plane wrapper, inside an inscription in careful block
Speaker 1: letters to Landmark City Library, May your stories lost forever?
Speaker 1: Michael Chugh, twenty twenty three. When I searched the borrow
Speaker 1: and database, there was no history attached, no holes, no reservations,
Speaker 1: nothing except a short note in Jamie's hand, brand new
Speaker 1: donor a student police shelveing children. Back at the workroom table,
Speaker 1: I lined up the pamphlet, the letter, and the inscribed
Speaker 1: picture book, considering each in turn. When people say the
Speaker 1: impossible is built on a series of minor plausible steps,
Speaker 1: usually it's just a way of excusing their own attention.
Speaker 1: But here the impossibility seemed to sprout from the plausible,
Speaker 1: like mushrooms pushing through dirt overnight. I Pepper Damer and
Speaker 1: Rosa with fall up questions. Ahmer rolled his eyes Urban
Speaker 1: mas O. Every place is them. People claim we hosted
Speaker 1: some my secret readings years ago, but all the rememberers
Speaker 1: the punch. Probably someone wrote all this as a prank
Speaker 1: for a future celebration and then forgot about it. Rosa
Speaker 1: was less dismissive. I remember when we first talked about
Speaker 1: the citywide celebration. The Mayor's Gala was supposed to happen.
Speaker 1: The funds never if it came through. Maybe in another
Speaker 1: timeline Darling were famous for it, but not this one. Besides,
Speaker 1: you can't trust everything you dig up in busments. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the building remembers things that never made it to paper.
Speaker 1: The contradictions were mending. I found margin notes scattered throughout
Speaker 1: the catalog, trails of incrawling beside entries, adjusting names, adding
Speaker 1: what looked like were scheduling notations, a few boil looped,
Speaker 1: and letterforms serially similar to my own recent handwriting, as
Speaker 1: though I'd annotated something in a sleep woroking fit referencing
Speaker 1: future shelving and proposed projects twenty sixty sixty nine. But
Speaker 1: I had never worked on such a list. Nothing in
Speaker 1: the staff communications or minutes hinted at plants, entennial events,
Speaker 1: just the barest bones of programs and catalog language, like
Speaker 1: ripples from a stone fur and somewhere upstream in time. Then,
Speaker 1: late one afternoon, as rain flattened against the windows above,
Speaker 1: I found a photograph wedged in the corner of a
Speaker 1: shelf in the archives of faded directed or labeled book
Speaker 1: Fair twenty twenty eight, a year still five years ahead.
Speaker 1: It showed the central lobby flooded with pale green light,
Speaker 1: banners drooping from the upper balustrade, and a mural I
Speaker 1: couldn't place an abstract map, perhaps shifting with the lines
Speaker 1: of the wall. Furda looked well aged, curling at the edges.
Speaker 1: The in color shifted in the whale to violate years
Speaker 1: will do it shouldn't exist, not outside of someone's anticipation
Speaker 1: or fantasy. Their obvious question was this all some elaborate
Speaker 1: staging persisted, but every new artifact posed its own challenge.
Speaker 1: If it was a prank, it was thorough and subtle.
Speaker 1: If the events were so unremarkable as to escape anyone's memory,
Speaker 1: why would the matting Artovac's pamphlets, photos correspondences exist in
Speaker 1: such piecemeal, out of place fashion. In the staff meeting
Speaker 1: minutes for the past decade, there were no references to
Speaker 1: centennial planning, no committee a ssignments, no budget lines for
Speaker 1: silent sculptures or gala films. But here and there turnings
Speaker 1: of phrase mirrored the catalog. A project draft for story
Speaker 1: Keeper's decade, A proposal for Lobby Mural's anniversary celebrations details
Speaker 1: t b D. What if these catalog entries were artifacts
Speaker 1: of conversations that never grew into action. Were we just
Speaker 1: seeing echoes of rejected ideas? Or was there something weird
Speaker 1: or burrowed within the stacks? Even I began to feel
Speaker 1: my resolved shifting more often, I found myself hesitating before
Speaker 1: moving a cart or clearing an odd item, wondering if
Speaker 1: it might be the seat of a future listing, or
Speaker 1: if I was seeing evidence after the fact, my perception
Speaker 1: colored by the catalog's presence. After a few days spent
Speaker 1: half in the world of daily tasks and half mid
Speaker 1: in a catalog's riddles, my skepticism gave way to a
Speaker 1: stubborn urge for clarity. If this were a prank, it
Speaker 1: was one years in the making, designed only for the
Speaker 1: person obsessive enough to try tracing it to its ends.
Speaker 1: If it was an error, it was the luckiest concatenation
Speaker 1: of half remembered institutional history and misfeld memorabilia. Yet everywhere
Speaker 1: Turran the catalog felt less like a failed record and
Speaker 1: more like a document of what could be the possibilities
Speaker 1: stacked beside the certainties. Rosa, when pressed again, told a
Speaker 1: story I'd never heard. Oh that sculpture, she said, when
Speaker 1: I showed her the proposal letter. I remember it being
Speaker 1: there just once, probably two adversaries back big, she emphasized,
Speaker 1: tracing a curve in the air bronze like a pile
Speaker 1: of open books, did disappear, then disappeared, just as quietly.
Speaker 1: I always figured it was unloan from the modern. When
Speaker 1: I asked the amor, he blinked here, misremembering, Rosa, you
Speaker 1: told me yourself the city never approved the commission. I'd
Speaker 1: have noticed ulpture blocking my reference desk For a week,
Speaker 1: I found myself cornered by Jamie, who hung around after
Speaker 1: closing one night. So do you think the entries or
Speaker 1: predictions are more like mirrors? He asked, his voice almost reverent,
Speaker 1: because the photos are maybe fake, but they look and
Speaker 1: feel right. It's like the kettle of doesn't care about sequence,
Speaker 1: just about attention. Like whatever you care about gets remembered harder.
Speaker 1: He flipped open the batted volume and ran a finger
Speaker 1: knelt down a column of entries. What if we're making
Speaker 1: it true just by checking the thought gave me chills,
Speaker 1: but in a good way, the kind of tingle curiosity
Speaker 1: leaves behind. I tried another tack, emilling the City Historical
Speaker 1: Society for references in their ledges. Nothing. A quick search
Speaker 1: for digitized city records yielded not a single mention of
Speaker 1: a centennial event or committee, not even in optimistic ideas
Speaker 1: for the future members that jamped every planning folder I'd
Speaker 1: ever proused. With each revelation, the familiar world shifted. Small
Speaker 1: artifacts seemed more pregnant with meaning, as if I had
Speaker 1: overlooked a system that only revealed its workings in the
Speaker 1: right frame of mind. Was our record in complete? Or
Speaker 1: was the cattle of drawing from some well of happenings
Speaker 1: I alone couldn't recall? What if these signs appeared for
Speaker 1: each person prime to recognize them. At that point my
Speaker 1: curiosity chain shape. I was no longer towling evidence against
Speaker 1: the catalog's claims in order to disprove it. Instead, I
Speaker 1: began to map out each impossible prediction, building a spreadsheet
Speaker 1: that tracked every entry, artifact, and memory against locations within
Speaker 1: the library. If I could document the congruences, perhaps I
Speaker 1: catched the pattern as it took shape an dissipate the
Speaker 1: appearance of the next startifact see the boundary between the
Speaker 1: imagined and the shelters. It blowed into something touchable. My
Speaker 1: motive had shifted, not to solve the impossibility, but to
Speaker 1: witness its unfolding. A week into my mapping, the impossible
Speaker 1: arrived in the form of a crate if blocked the
Speaker 1: narrow corridor between the supply room and all teachers large
Speaker 1: a space use so really we'd long since stopped stacking
Speaker 1: supplies there. The crate was oak heavy, its sides paneled
Speaker 1: and secured with brass over hinges old by age. There
Speaker 1: was a single yellowing label fixed to the lid, being
Speaker 1: faded almost to invisibility, an Adversary sculpture Centennial twenty seventy three.
Speaker 1: I recognized the typeface, a font we'd only begun to
Speaker 1: use in the past few years for official event materials.
Speaker 1: Stood there, backed by a sickly flicker from the overhead fixtures,
Speaker 1: running a palm over splinters that flaked under my touch.
Speaker 1: Jamie joined me, lugging a tool kit he claimed to
Speaker 1: have found beside the reference desk. With a bit of
Speaker 1: joint effort and a lot of cautious wiggling, we levered
Speaker 1: the crate open. Inside, swaddled in layers of moth edenfelt
Speaker 1: was a bronze sculpture, books twisted amid opening spines, braided
Speaker 1: in nets of stamp words. Some of the titles and
Speaker 1: scread across the surfaces were familiar, the memoir, the art exhibit,
Speaker 1: the children's book. Other names they didn't recognize, not even
Speaker 1: as jokes. All along the base a phrase as etch
Speaker 1: to knowledge boundlism. Before the entire sculpture's surfaces were dappled,
Speaker 1: textured so that the bronze flashed with greenish and gold
Speaker 1: pattern in the torches. Beam Rosa found us there, blinking
Speaker 1: at the cray. She put her hands on her hips
Speaker 1: and side a smile fighting its way upward. I told you,
Speaker 1: there it is, she said, almost kindly, exasperated, backward always
Speaker 1: was before someone decided it didn't fit the gallery. Jamie
Speaker 1: crouched to study the inscription, then nodded utterly, non blast,
Speaker 1: It's always been in storage, right, just in a different room.
Speaker 1: I carried it to the lowing bay. Three months ago. Almer,
Speaker 1: summoned in his usual deliberate way, took one looking swore
Speaker 1: softly no, I'd have remembered something like this, something heavy.
Speaker 1: I inventoried that they, during the last fire drill nothing
Speaker 1: but old folding chairs in the commemorative clock. Inside the crate,
Speaker 1: aside from the sculpture was an envelope stuffed with pamphlets
Speaker 1: library in the city's next century. They read dates running
Speaker 1: from twenty twenty three to twenty seventy three. These limb
Speaker 1: booklets were filled with lists of speculative stuff, rosters including
Speaker 1: all of us, with retirement dates and variously optimistic career highlights,
Speaker 1: ven descriptions, notes on planned renovations, even tentative partnerships with
Speaker 1: organizations not yet founded. Their predictions teetered between plausible and uncanny,
Speaker 1: sometimes aligning perfectly with projects that, to my knowledge, had
Speaker 1: never progressed beyond wishful thinking. Artifacts began to multiply a
Speaker 1: week later, Tucked behind the elevator's stack, and event badge
Speaker 1: from an exhibit never scheduled in a box marks simply
Speaker 1: forces to be filed. A polaroid of a children's story,
Speaker 1: how decorated with centennial banners stamped twenty sixty nine. A
Speaker 1: guest book to an awards prog ground with names that
Speaker 1: matched future catalog entries. As pages yellowed and faded, some
Speaker 1: objects bore evidence of natural decay, as if they lain
Speaker 1: undisturbed for the decades since they were ostensibly created. Others
Speaker 1: were suspicious Sleepsteine, The initial explanations hoax, error, must remember
Speaker 1: proposals no longer fit. I found myself awake at night
Speaker 1: thinking through sequences how the catalogs impossible entries had become
Speaker 1: piecemeal a map for the appearance of matching artifacts. The
Speaker 1: more closely attract the more the flow of new odities
Speaker 1: seemed to accelerate, as though the act of participation itself
Speaker 1: drew things from potential into being. In the following days,
Speaker 1: every shelf, every forgotten noook began to feel less like
Speaker 1: storage and more like a soul current carrying the memories
Speaker 1: of futures not yet realized. The boundaries between the possible
Speaker 1: and the archive softened. What mattered more was the attention
Speaker 1: we gave each anomaly, and the care with which they
Speaker 1: were chronicled after the fact. With each mapping, discovery and contradiction,
Speaker 1: my old skepticism was replaced by a conviction both sobering
Speaker 1: and exhilerating. Our library was hosted more than just history.
Speaker 1: It was accumulating possibilities just as naturally as it gathered dust.
Speaker 1: I resolved that if the phenomenon was systematic, I would
Speaker 1: become its cartographer. I spread the batter catalog, the index
Speaker 1: of Impossible, on to the workroom's biggest table and began
Speaker 1: to chart its trail for our shelves. I'd stopped asking
Speaker 1: my colleagues whether each item was familiar. Dances now only
Speaker 1: met the changing landscape of memory. There was something profoundly
Speaker 1: beautiful and quietly in settling about a place that could
Speaker 1: become both archave and possibility. The echo of futures folded
Speaker 1: into yesterday's dust. Mapping the Impossible catalog became my preoccupation,
Speaker 1: filling ours in the hush aft to closing in the
Speaker 1: empty echoes of the archives. Between deliveries and meetings, I
Speaker 1: laid out spreadsheets marked the physical maps of the library
Speaker 1: with color coded dots. Read for items that were now
Speaker 1: physically prison blue for this still only income the page,
Speaker 1: yellow for objects others insisted had always been here. The
Speaker 1: catalogs spread across my desk, annotated and worn, its strange
Speaker 1: blend of fantasy and reality blurring more each day. Jamie
Speaker 1: caught my drift before I had even asked, as curiosity
Speaker 1: kindling to match my own. We agreed to keep our
Speaker 1: survey between ourselves, for now too many competing memories with
Speaker 1: muddy the trails even further. We started with the most concrete,
Speaker 1: the bronze anniversary sculpture, now sitting in a corner of
Speaker 1: the supply room under a paint as top every muscle
Speaker 1: in my memory, insisting I'd never hold anything like it
Speaker 1: before last week. Each morning I peeped in to see
Speaker 1: if it was still there, half fearing, half hoping it
Speaker 1: would vanish or age before my eyes. This stubbornly remained,
Speaker 1: though sometimes it seemed subtly different. The pattern is shifting
Speaker 1: a word on a spine, almost misspelled, the dustry arranged
Speaker 1: in swirls. I left the cradle open, just in case
Speaker 1: someone else would offer a fresh account of how it
Speaker 1: came to be heard by the few staff who passed
Speaker 1: up to their stories, Jamie with his bland certainty, Emma
Speaker 1: with professional irritation, rose it with the fondness for paradox.
Speaker 1: By day the reference desk called Pigeon's Cube of genealogy.
Speaker 1: Questions requests for computer help for books lost again and again,
Speaker 1: but each break, each circuit through the archives. I worked
Speaker 1: the catalog, comparing, cataloging, questioning. Jamie was equal parts techy
Speaker 1: and accomplice, slipping after hours into locked rooms with me,
Speaker 1: flasclate beams slicing through the gloom. As we rifled for
Speaker 1: vaded labels on promotional posters, curling on forgotten bulletin boards,
Speaker 1: we started a new databitious for ourselves. I frowned at
Speaker 1: names and dates, the lines between the plan and the
Speaker 1: possible breaking down. As our cross references multiplied. It didn't
Speaker 1: take long for a pattern to emerge. The catalogs. Impossible
Speaker 1: items didn't appear evenly distributed, They clustered. Days would go
Speaker 1: by without a single new find, to then a flurry
Speaker 1: three or four entries manifesting within hours or even minutes
Speaker 1: of one another. A concert program for a future music
Speaker 1: teacher now sull and undergraduate, a proposal for a festival
Speaker 1: that matched the most recent idea box submission from a patron,
Speaker 1: A staff badge, once sketched in the catalog and now
Speaker 1: hanging from a hook in the retired staff copies. I
Speaker 1: began to wonder if we ourselves in our mapping and
Speaker 1: anticipation were causing these objects to crawl from future ink
Speaker 1: into the rough flash of reality. More unsettling. Sometimes, after
Speaker 1: I found and held an object to Jamie or Rosso
Speaker 1: or even emaclaimed unquestioningly to have seen or used it before,
Speaker 1: their accounts grew less fixed. A pamphlet might be brand
Speaker 1: new to me, an old hat to someone else, all
Speaker 1: as the catalogs and yellowed and the database recalctrantly shifted.
Speaker 1: More than once, Jamie swore up and down that a
Speaker 1: book had spent months on display, though I'd marked its
Speaker 1: location on my map that very morning as empty. Curious,
Speaker 1: we pressed further, venturing into corners that hadn't felt a
Speaker 1: sweep of light or curiosity for decades. The sealed corridor,
Speaker 1: long since denied even to maintenance, yielded at last with
Speaker 1: Jamie's lot picking skills and the disarmingly mundane rattle of
Speaker 1: an old key he found in the bottom of a
Speaker 1: supply drawer. Inside the dust was thick, and an disturbed
Speaker 1: but not pristine patches reveals great drag marks where heavy
Speaker 1: cuts or perhaps crates, had once crossed along the far wall.
Speaker 1: Shelves labeled the deferred collection to be cataloged every box,
Speaker 1: though was empty, the cardboard soft with humidity in time,
Speaker 1: save for a single slip of cream paper on the
Speaker 1: lowest shelf. In looping script, it read, all returns are
Speaker 1: ultimately shelved. We read it three times, traded looks, then
Speaker 1: almost sheevishly took it with us. I slipped it into
Speaker 1: my own mapping notebook, noting how my fingers tingled, as
Speaker 1: if I just handled staff electricity. It felt like a
Speaker 1: pronouncement not just of library practice, but a kind of
Speaker 1: guarantee or challenge. Was that what the phenomenon was a
Speaker 1: system bent to the logic that as soon as something
Speaker 1: could be cataloged, it would be Our pattern seeking instincts
Speaker 1: led us next to the dusty remains of what once
Speaker 1: passed for a catalog committee. Entries in the older stuff, minutes,
Speaker 1: chronicling debates, frustrations, whimsical brain strumming about the library's next
Speaker 1: fifty seventy five hundred years, the most fanciful notes, minic
Speaker 1: the language of the supplement. I now knew by howratt
Speaker 1: proposals for imagine a books, speculative lists of likely attendees
Speaker 1: for whatever gale of the city could Sunday afford sketches
Speaker 1: for public art displays. The echoed events never funded. But crucially,
Speaker 1: nothing from these files matched the handwriting or the age
Speaker 1: type of the Centennial supplement. The lines were similar, but
Speaker 1: the substance wrong, the staff names misaligned by a generation.
Speaker 1: Our condestined surveys, sometimes deep into the midnight quiet, sometimes
Speaker 1: in the gray vale of early morning before the doors opened,
Speaker 1: brought more contradictions. A donor Black referenced to grand campaign
Speaker 1: that never quite launched. A bundle of emails from an
Speaker 1: old reference server described in exhibit that nobody owned up to,
Speaker 1: but how I would later remember setting up, only to
Speaker 1: change his mind and claim he'd merely talked about it.
Speaker 1: Most odd was that these contradictions didn't always match up
Speaker 1: from day to day. If I rechecked a shelf, sometimes
Speaker 1: the artifacts they would have acquired new scalfs for marginal
Speaker 1: notes roseve members maries, and particularly became slippery. One Tuesday,
Speaker 1: she'd insist she ran the centennial photo booth, complete with
Speaker 1: Polka Dotti bottaite by Thursday. Should laugh the notion off
Speaker 1: as Jamie's fantasy. Alma, for his part, became suspiciously interested
Speaker 1: in then dismissive of the oddities we pointed out. I
Speaker 1: caught him quietly photograph in the sculpture's base one night
Speaker 1: before he left, muttering to himself about misplaced priorities. On
Speaker 1: Jamie's suggestion, we decided to draw a line in the sand.
Speaker 1: If attention or cataloging us the mechanism of objects appeared
Speaker 1: because their entries were attended to, could we trigger the process.
Speaker 1: Jamie proposed to test and vent a new item, write
Speaker 1: it into a blank page at the back of the
Speaker 1: provisional catalog, and see if it would appear. We spend
Speaker 1: in our crafting something that could plausibly fit the odd
Speaker 1: logic of the supplement. Display board Children's Wing constructed from
Speaker 1: mossic puzzle pieces Donor Inscription to the Quietest Readers twenty
Speaker 1: fifty five. Jamie coppied my handwriting as closely as he could,
Speaker 1: and I forced my script into on familiar forms for
Speaker 1: a second backup annotation. We slipped the new page between
Speaker 1: the batted covers, pressed the catalog back to the bottom
Speaker 1: of my work desk, and waited. Days passed and no
Speaker 1: display board appeared. We scoured the children's wing, checked inventory,
Speaker 1: reviewed old donation files nothing. Jamie was disappointed, but I
Speaker 1: suspected we were missing the point where perhaps we couldn't
Speaker 1: force the echo, only notice its effects. But the following Friday,
Speaker 1: while paging for the catalog in search of another listing,
Speaker 1: I found a new surprise. There in the middle of
Speaker 1: an otherwise unremarkable two page bread was a paragraph in
Speaker 1: aged and mirroring I made up listing only now outated
Speaker 1: as corrected. But twenty fifty five committee noticed and cross
Speaker 1: reference to the adenda. Our invented entry had wormed its
Speaker 1: way in but reworked, catched in the familiar language of
Speaker 1: a delay, but confirmed by ten D recollection. A blinked
Speaker 1: called Jamie over, and together we stared in amazement. We
Speaker 1: checked the supplemental catalog's older pages for change, but the
Speaker 1: other entries remained, only now the added missake board appearing
Speaker 1: beside a marginal note pending construction volunteer project see Oral
Speaker 1: History twenty fifty six. We double checked the inventory. No
Speaker 1: display board, no town a plaque. Nothing of the sort
Speaker 1: appeared in either digital or physical record that the catalog
Speaker 1: itself had changed, ret proactively adjusting to include the new
Speaker 1: now fictive event as if it had always been, now
Speaker 1: slightly misaligned with our creation. Jamie theorist, half joking, half
Speaker 1: resigned that the cataloger remembers better than we do, were
Speaker 1: writing not reality, but our record of what could have been.
Speaker 1: This was a new contradiction, deeper than before. The catalog
Speaker 1: didn't simply create objects in the world, nor was it
Speaker 1: a passive record. It responded subtly and unpredictably to the
Speaker 1: attention of those cataloging it. Memory could shift, records could realign.
Speaker 1: Even the impossible became bureaucratically plausible as long as someone,
Speaker 1: perhaps just as cared to document it. I found myself
Speaker 1: drawn to other perspectives. The official record, our digital dashboards
Speaker 1: couldn't help. I needed to know how others remembered the
Speaker 1: library's history, and if these echoes had ever pressed into
Speaker 1: the awareness of people outside our small team. And so
Speaker 1: for the first time I turned outward in biding at
Speaker 1: angle of Prospectus to muddy Maroon. I began with patrons
Speaker 1: who lingered for years city regular so at home they
Speaker 1: nearly blended with the architecture. Mister Saunder, who'd read every
Speaker 1: city sensus from nineteen o five armored, told me his
Speaker 1: grandfather claimed the library had been built to lust through
Speaker 1: every possible future. He meant, it was over engineered. Mister
Speaker 1: Saunder joked, But sometimes I swear a walk through the
Speaker 1: lobby and see a new mural or a shelf I
Speaker 1: could have sworn wasn't there before, He shruked. Maybe that's
Speaker 1: just the years. A retired librarian, m mess Park, agreed
Speaker 1: to meet for coffee. We had this daying back in
Speaker 1: the eighties, she said. As crinkling we called at the
Speaker 1: stack echo staff would notice a book suddenly in the
Speaker 1: wrong place, or an event flyer from a series nobody
Speaker 1: had ever hosted. Yet it looked perfectly eat like it blonde.
Speaker 1: We used to joke the library kept spare events just
Speaker 1: in case. Later, while sorting through a drawer in the
Speaker 1: workroom left and touched for decades, I found a brittle
Speaker 1: news clipping about the city's seventy fifth anniversary. A small ceremony,
Speaker 1: two mayors in attendance, or so the article claimed. But
Speaker 1: the next day, reviewing the clipping again side by side
Speaker 1: with a digital skin I just made, I noticed subtle differences.
Speaker 1: The names of the speakers had shifted, The ear printed
Speaker 1: in the barline had rolled forward by three two paragraphs
Speaker 1: describing a mural included details absent from the actual lobby.
Speaker 1: The changes were so slight I newly missed them, like
Speaker 1: the difference in taste between water from two identical looking taps.
Speaker 1: I really these fines, to Jamie, whose wonder was tinged
Speaker 1: by something light nervousness. Maybe every time you read it,
Speaker 1: the record updates, he said, shaking his head. Or maybe
Speaker 1: everything's just a back up version, a catalog of all
Speaker 1: the things some one he might some day remember. Others
Speaker 1: saw less calls for concern. Russa, when pressed for her
Speaker 1: oldest memories, simply shrugged. The shells remember what they wilt.
Speaker 1: There's more room for memory than theirs for books. Amer,
Speaker 1: after more grumbling and a grudging admission that sometimes proposals
Speaker 1: become tradition in the retelling, still clung to the practical.
Speaker 1: There are always mistakes of a libraries misplaze catalogs. People
Speaker 1: must blaze memory things lide. One evening, after the building
Speaker 1: had emptied, I wanted the stacks, mentally rehearsing what I'd
Speaker 1: learned was the catalog an attempt to predict a failed
Speaker 1: record of staff ambitions, A living arc cover of possible
Speaker 1: futures or a space worse sentiment and routine bent memory
Speaker 1: toward utility. I found myself thinking about the elderly patron's
Speaker 1: phrase by time, sitting on a low step nearer vent
Speaker 1: humming faint heat, I wondered aloud if the entire vocation
Speaker 1: of libraries was less about keeping a puss in inviting
Speaker 1: the future by shaping what could be recalled, What stories
Speaker 1: would have supporting artifacts to scaffold memory. Jamie, or perhaps
Speaker 1: the presence of the echo, must have heard me, because
Speaker 1: later that night he handed me a thin volume, a guide,
Speaker 1: but to an expansion. The library had never scheduled. Its
Speaker 1: cover read Landmark City Library, The North Stack, The Guide
Speaker 1: for New Volunteers twenty eighty one. It was slim, the
Speaker 1: page's brittle, yet the ink sharp. Half the staff listed
Speaker 1: inside weren't even born yet, the map chart at always
Speaker 1: that didn't exist. The paper bore the sharp tang of
Speaker 1: chemical fixture, the some mixture of prison and impossibility. For
Speaker 1: a moment, I found myself almost delighted at the absurdity.
Speaker 1: The more we hunted, the more potential realities crept from
Speaker 1: shelf and box and digital file, but hidden among each
Speaker 1: find was a new question. Were we discovering futures written
Speaker 1: by other hands, tracing wishes frozen in bureaucratic amber, or
Speaker 1: was the act of catalog in the investigation, the mapping,
Speaker 1: the retelling, giving shape to something that wouldn't otherwise be.
Speaker 1: The theory took on more gravity after the stack Echo's
Speaker 1: stories looped back into my orbit. An etterly friend of Rose's, missessco,
Speaker 1: stopped by on a great Tuesday to return an entire
Speaker 1: crate of overge mysteries and lingered for stories. When prompted,
Speaker 1: she smiled, hands folded on her back. They say, if
Speaker 1: you walk the stacks just after closing, you'll hear sounds
Speaker 1: from parties that haven't happened yet, laughter and music right
Speaker 1: through the walls. She winked, I believe it. My sister
Speaker 1: claimed to have attended every exhibition here in the sixties
Speaker 1: and seventies, but some of those banners only appeared in photos.
Speaker 1: Ten years after our stories stopped, I found myself less
Speaker 1: interested in the mechanical house and more focus on what
Speaker 1: all this meant for the place and the people inside it.
Speaker 1: The impossibility had grown too deep and systemic. Every attempt
Speaker 1: at fixing the boundaries of memory, artifact, and possibility only
Speaker 1: left more scenes visible. Something else was happening too. The
Speaker 1: catalog's entries began to change, not just in response to
Speaker 1: pass events, but in response to our investigations. Several times,
Speaker 1: when Jamie or I poured over a particularly cryptic section,
Speaker 1: the next day would find a new marginal note dated
Speaker 1: years ahead, referencing our current activities in strangely formal language.
Speaker 1: Further investigation by interim staff twenty twenty five, twenty twenty nine,
Speaker 1: or chillingly query outstanding see all History forthcoming. This wasn't
Speaker 1: just hallucinatory cataloging disorder. There was a principle here and
Speaker 1: settling in its implications. The closer we attended to a possibility,
Speaker 1: the more solidly materialized not just an artifact or memory,
Speaker 1: but retroactively as documented inevitability. Our inquiries spent the che's
Speaker 1: content in ways we could not anticipate. The realization bill
Speaker 1: slowly then slant into places. I spent a humid sleep
Speaker 1: as night in the library, artifacts and records splayed out
Speaker 1: across the ochaz battered oak table. I laid out every
Speaker 1: artifact to the sculpture's plaque. The photo of the future
Speaker 1: mural deans gribbed children's book. The staff badge retrofitted from
Speaker 1: our fabricated entry at the pamphlets each want trace to
Speaker 1: a catalog entry that began as unread, then, upon investigation
Speaker 1: began to change reference with new marginalia cross indexed to
Speaker 1: events I'd set out to examine more than if you
Speaker 1: now suported marginal notes in my own hand. No matter
Speaker 1: how hard I tried to write differently, I studied the chain,
Speaker 1: possibility entered the catalog, then attracted attention. Then at some
Speaker 1: unpredictable into vo LARTI fact were memory shifted, and soon
Speaker 1: both people and cattalog claimed it had always been there.
Speaker 1: The result wasn't always physical. Sometimes an email chain changed.
Speaker 1: Sometimes a plaque text suggested itself when I compared versions,
Speaker 1: like water settling in a new channel after a flood.
Speaker 1: Sometimes only a mutual acknowledgment between staff sealed the shift.
Speaker 1: We've always had a reading room for the anniversary. The
Speaker 1: gala was a disaster. Remember a consensus written into being.
Speaker 1: My mind raised echoing logic from everything I'd ever read
Speaker 1: about arkeevil practice in the malibility of collective memory. There
Speaker 1: was nothing magical about it, and yet nothing explainable by
Speaker 1: ordinary records management. The archives responded to curiosity. The actively cataloged, noticed,
Speaker 1: considered possibilities. Sometimes the curiosity brought lost things back. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it made what could be real. Sometimes it road even
Speaker 1: the pass as arkev ba, paper, art, fact and mouth. Physically,
Speaker 1: the building remained the same, bunks of marble, stacks of brick,
Speaker 1: fluttering pieces of history on all sides. But I had
Speaker 1: become witness to something bigger and stranger. The library, I realized,
Speaker 1: was an archive of possibility as base where memory in it,
Speaker 1: to say, patient twined together, each feeding and rehiping the elder.
Speaker 1: The catalog here was less to tell what was than
Speaker 1: to invite what could be into the story, to step
Speaker 1: probabilities with the solidity of books. The echoes, in this
Speaker 1: sense were not accidents, but a natural, perhaps inevitable, side
Speaker 1: effect of the institution's collective curiosity. It's hunger to have
Speaker 1: a story survive in every possible future. One last thought
Speaker 1: chilled me sweet and difficult in mapping the supplement, In
Speaker 1: sharing my curiosity with Jimmy and rose enamor, I was
Speaker 1: as much authoring the library as recording it. The more
Speaker 1: vivid our investigation. The more defined the possibilities became woven
Speaker 1: into odd fact, into recollection, into print. I reviewed a
Speaker 1: stack of modern memory science and philosophy of archive articles,
Speaker 1: trying to find precedent, collectively written histories, self fulfilling legends,
Speaker 1: mnemonic anchors disguised as objects, but nothing accounted for the
Speaker 1: phenomenon of the precision or the uncannon. As I felt
Speaker 1: blooming within these walls by dawn, with the world upstairs
Speaker 1: just stirring, I tied it up the table, careful to
Speaker 1: make no change that might nudge the catalog further. The
Speaker 1: last act, whether of hubris or humility, was to slip
Speaker 1: a blank card into the supplement's back pocket right after
Speaker 1: the air. For once I left it truly blank enough
Speaker 1: for one more possibility. In the days that followed, I
Speaker 1: let routine reclaim me bookharts, inventory, the soft chatter of
Speaker 1: regulous tasks that had defined the rhythm of my days
Speaker 1: long before the centennial supplement appeared. I scrutinized avery misplaced
Speaker 1: volume for a shimmer of possibility, every unlabeled photograph for
Speaker 1: future echoes. Sometimes I noticed to book a little too
Speaker 1: welphon for its claimed succession year or an artifact whose
Speaker 1: labels seemed to have always waited my question. I smiled
Speaker 1: more at the statsmus remembered stories, wondering if these were
Speaker 1: minor errors, ore the first blushes of future shells. In
Speaker 1: staff meetings, whenever Rosa championed an idea, no one recalled,
Speaker 1: offizing or Jamie induced about glutch events that left the
Speaker 1: scroll in the room locked but no more tangible record.
Speaker 1: I became the one to say, let's write it down,
Speaker 1: let's see where it appears next. Mme rolled his asmost days,
Speaker 1: but I caught him double checking old inventories, his skepticism
Speaker 1: now tinged with reluctant fascination. My desire for a tidy
Speaker 1: explanation relaxed into something more patient and more joyful in
Speaker 1: acknowledgment that this library was not just a mine mosleium
Speaker 1: of the fixed past, but a living, shifting catalog of
Speaker 1: possible futures. Each artifact, each memory, each new entry was
Speaker 1: not only a proof of existence, but a footnote to
Speaker 1: uncertain to me tangible in the stax, I felt tall
Speaker 1: and relief and a quiet thrill that comes of belonging
Speaker 1: among mysteries that need never resolve into threader escape. One evening,
Speaker 1: as rain ticked faintly on the skylights, I sat cataloging
Speaker 1: a new box of donations, modern novels, city monographs, a
Speaker 1: map with rats so fresh the paper sparkled. Would think
Speaker 1: the battered centennial supplement sat carefully in my desk drawer,
Speaker 1: quietly patient, beside the lost badges and the chocolate gun
Speaker 1: to powder. As my fingers hovered over the keyboard, entering
Speaker 1: the details of today's arrivals. I paused at my act
Speaker 1: of cataloging. Just now tonight already been written in a
Speaker 1: future supplement? Some are yet, I noticed, between brittle leaves
Speaker 1: and margin notes. Or would this new batch, by passing
Speaker 1: through my attention, become a possibility, awaiting rediscovery, solid in
Speaker 1: the stacks only when some other curious hand, decades on
Speaker 1: wondered what had always been there. The liverary remained as
Speaker 1: it had always been, and would always be quietly alive,
Speaker 1: with both memory and possibility shelves curving in to time,
Speaker 1: every entry, waiting for the curious gaze that might one
Speaker 1: day make a reel or let an echo forward a
Speaker 1: future no one had yet thought to imagine. And that
Speaker 1: is the end. Thank you for listening. And I will
Speaker 1: see you in the next one.