Speaker 1: Rains grabbled across the roof of Riverside Library in frantic
Speaker 1: little fits, chasing itself in and out of leaking gutters overhead.
Speaker 1: I always liked the sound, the way it muffled out
Speaker 1: everything else, traffic forces, the clatter of cuts on polished tile,
Speaker 1: leaving only the hush of pages and the distant, patient
Speaker 1: creek of all timber settling with the weather. The North
Speaker 1: Annex always felt different way it was raining, like it
Speaker 1: belonged to another city, or maybe another century. I was
Speaker 1: shelving on catalog donation books on a Tuesday afternoon, my
Speaker 1: fingers soft from humidity, dust, read in the airblution the
Speaker 1: half light. When I first saw the shelf, it was
Speaker 1: easy to miss, wesh narrow between the faded leather bound
Speaker 1: provincial histories in a brittle row of nineteen for it
Speaker 1: as agricultural almanacs. The shelf was set off as land,
Speaker 1: almost concealed behind a pipe that bent into the wall,
Speaker 1: a peculiar angle. The shelf itself for short, maybe three
Speaker 1: feet across, and capped with a dull brass plate, tarnished tobacco.
Speaker 1: Cold works and progress that caught me. Works and progress
Speaker 1: was never a catalog in term I'd seen used here,
Speaker 1: or at least not outside in ten o life bury meetings,
Speaker 1: where we jerked about trucks of processed donations. I stooped,
Speaker 1: squinting in the unreliable glow of a flickering fixture. Overhead,
Speaker 1: A soft smell, stale sweet, somehow vegetable rose from the wool.
Speaker 1: The books and papers on the shelf didn't match. Some
Speaker 1: were stitched note books, others just sheaves bound by aging twine.
Speaker 1: Still others had their edges folded, as if pressed under
Speaker 1: too many hands. I pulled the first volume free. The pages,
Speaker 1: lobing with a slanted, neat hand, sketched out the wanderings
Speaker 1: of a boy in winter who saw to keep sick
Speaker 1: in his grandmother's house. But the story, just as I
Speaker 1: found myself leaning into it, cut sharply, the last line,
Speaker 1: ending mid sentence. With every room, the shadow grew softer,
Speaker 1: and a I riffled for a stack of pages behind it,
Speaker 1: a diary or maybe a confession, but broken off. Just
Speaker 1: as a secret was about to be described, A yellowing sheaf,
Speaker 1: written in blocky capitals outlined a love triangle among botanists.
Speaker 1: Looping through descriptions, of violets, sillery root, a walled hedger,
Speaker 1: then broke off with a word, until I tried three more.
Speaker 1: Not one reached an ending. Some stopped in the midst
Speaker 1: of dialogue, other stuttered out with the first half of
Speaker 1: a metaphor a description unmurred each writer. If there were
Speaker 1: even more than one left, whole rooms of meanings still
Speaker 1: boarded up, entire relationships half disclosed. But it wasn't simply
Speaker 1: that these one finished. Something about them felt as if
Speaker 1: the endings had been slice clean away abruptly and with intention.
Speaker 1: A progression arrested midbreath. I ran my thumb over the
Speaker 1: age of one sheaf, A fragment of graphitesmeared under my hand,
Speaker 1: as if words eroded from the paper, even as I watched.
Speaker 1: No author's names, no dates, no sign of provements or
Speaker 1: catalog in numbers, only the pulpy paper in that sign
Speaker 1: works in progress. I sat on the weathered ladder, at
Speaker 1: the distant smell of muss pencil lead, and pecked car
Speaker 1: pricidling through my nose. The annexes ere colder than the
Speaker 1: rest of the library, oddly muted and still pressed in
Speaker 1: gentler than silence. I wondered if the stories were abandoned,
Speaker 1: or if they were meant to keep growing, as if
Speaker 1: the act of reading might stir something into motion. My
Speaker 1: mind slid backward. How every year my former students turned
Speaker 1: in stories that always trailed off mid thought endings followed
Speaker 1: by the demands of homework siblings were just solved out.
Speaker 1: It was a particular ache, the potential of what might
Speaker 1: have been. But these manuscripts, these were different. Their own
Speaker 1: finishers felt less like abandon meant and more like a
Speaker 1: sort of waiting, as if in time they expected to
Speaker 1: resume themselves. I checked the time, nearly closing, I restored
Speaker 1: the shelf, but the question pressed behind my eyes, insistent.
Speaker 1: Who wrote these? And why would any one's staff, reader
Speaker 1: or librarian set aside two dozen complete stories in a
Speaker 1: public collection. Why leave them here, half glimpsed for decades,
Speaker 1: And why did every one of their voices feel so
Speaker 1: strangely current, as if their authors were never so far away?
Speaker 1: The annexes empty, light trembled in the brass play, rain
Speaker 1: battered the windows now, and beneath that, the pulse of
Speaker 1: my own curiosity ran while down the untraveled corridors of
Speaker 1: my mind There are certain patterns every school teacher comes
Speaker 1: to expect in a life mat by academic calendars, the
Speaker 1: end of June release, the second week of August summons,
Speaker 1: the small habits accumulating between. When I retired thirty five
Speaker 1: years of language arts essis both brilliant and tortuous. Poetry
Speaker 1: read both aloud and in diary margins. I thought I
Speaker 1: had relinquished a regularity of bells and lesson plans, but
Speaker 1: Riverside Library kept a different calendar. Here, the weeks clicked
Speaker 1: by with the rhythm of repairs, stone at teas, inventory spreadsheets,
Speaker 1: and quiet negotiation with the ghosts of past librarians. There
Speaker 1: was no real reason to volunteer twice a week, except
Speaker 1: that I liked how the city's stories nested in its
Speaker 1: oldest building, like layers of pain visible in the sunlight.
Speaker 1: The original library, sandstone and brick, predated even the oldest
Speaker 1: river ccentered city maps sprawling out over Tanikes building. It
Speaker 1: accumulated annexes and conversion wings. The north annex, built on
Speaker 1: an even stone added in nineteen o two, with gossip
Speaker 1: about hidden rooms and lost blueprints as constant as the
Speaker 1: drafts under every door colleagues groaned about its plumbing quarks,
Speaker 1: but I liked the way it seemed to rearrange itself
Speaker 1: when left to its own devices. The staffer that the
Speaker 1: annexes got up and moved their own holes at night. Marjorie,
Speaker 1: the director, considered herself practical about such things. Honestly, Ruth,
Speaker 1: half the stories in this building come from bad lighting
Speaker 1: in late hours. Gets some coffee, and don't mistake all
Speaker 1: for magical. But she trusted me with the North annex.
Speaker 1: It was, she said, had a perfect task for someone
Speaker 1: who's both patient and not easily rattled. She often assigned
Speaker 1: me to inventory the volumes nobody else volunteered for. I
Speaker 1: think she suspected I found pleasure in disorder. Then there
Speaker 1: was Sammy, technically a part time archaves but really the
Speaker 1: library's best source for local oddities. Only in their twenties,
Speaker 1: sharp eyed, constantly digging in the back stacks from catalog
Speaker 1: to femeer, Sammy had a talent for finding forgotten corners.
Speaker 1: Every building like this as a memory, they'd say, showing
Speaker 1: me an eighteen ninety one ladger or a musty theater program.
Speaker 1: People leave way more behind than you think. You just
Speaker 1: have to choose to notice. Frank was the longest standing
Speaker 1: figure of Janitor, with twenty seven years and a collection
Speaker 1: of keys so heavy I once saw him move a
Speaker 1: fore mop with his foot. Rather than risk adding keys
Speaker 1: to his rowing, he refused to cling further than the
Speaker 1: annex's first two rows of stacks. He once told me, Ruth,
Speaker 1: those shells back there, they move around, and not one
Speaker 1: clock works right in that part. I'll keep my broom
Speaker 1: where I can see out both ends. So I catalogged
Speaker 1: and reminisced and listened to the quiet. The routines became
Speaker 1: their own kind of story, traceing faded coal numbers, dusting spines,
Speaker 1: trying to decipher's owner notes, and cryptic leaping handwriting. Some
Speaker 1: days Marjorie would stop by, mutter about clothing, budgets, and
Speaker 1: shuffle off. Occasionally a visitor from the community would poke
Speaker 1: their head in, but they always stayed close to daylight,
Speaker 1: rarely wandering as far as the north annex. The place
Speaker 1: had its own atmospheric shell, like stepping into caverorn old cellar,
Speaker 1: where rewards came back to you differently, softer as if
Speaker 1: he'd spoken into pillow. The works in progressed shelf nestled
Speaker 1: under a flickering gold that never stayed replaced for long
Speaker 1: became my minor obsession. Every time I pass the urge
Speaker 1: tickled at me take another book, find another fragment, tried
Speaker 1: to tease out the pattern. A shelf so out of
Speaker 1: place should have come with its own origin story, but
Speaker 1: the catalog was silent on the subject. I'd always had
Speaker 1: a particular fondness for student stories that finished and completed
Speaker 1: in the margins of their potential. I saw possibility, not failure.
Speaker 1: Every story tells on its own terrems, I'd say to
Speaker 1: groans from tide sixth graders. Now, with retirement, I had
Speaker 1: all the time in the world for those unfinished narratives
Speaker 1: waiting in borrowed light, for someone patient enough to listen.
Speaker 1: The annexe in turn listened back. Rain continued to tap
Speaker 1: at odd Morse on the window panes, and the bulbub
Speaker 1: of the shelf covered von poff On. A faint breath
Speaker 1: of cold wind coiled around the brass, almost inaudible. Late
Speaker 1: that evening, as I gathered my things, I felt certain
Speaker 1: there was something in this shelf that invited not just myself,
Speaker 1: but anyone who'd ever pause uncertain at the ending of
Speaker 1: a story. The next day, I moved faster than usual
Speaker 1: through the main building. It was bright up and glancing
Speaker 1: through clouds. The river outside blue as a prose cord,
Speaker 1: but the northanx still held that colorless chow quiet you
Speaker 1: didn't get elsewhere. I carried with me both a stack
Speaker 1: of catalog slips and a half formed plan to day
Speaker 1: as read systematically and perhaps with new focused spot patterns,
Speaker 1: I missed. The feeling I'd had yesterday was more than
Speaker 1: idle curiosity. There was a hum of expectancy, as if
Speaker 1: returning one might find the story had shifted onwards. I
Speaker 1: started where I'd left off, pulling from the middle of
Speaker 1: the shelf and notebook with a pebble green cover, its
Speaker 1: corners worn into rounded flaps. I remembered, if vividly, it
Speaker 1: had caught me last time, with the image of a
Speaker 1: vanishtale in the last written words, Trailing off at pace
Speaker 1: forty seven, stopping in mid description, I settled on a
Speaker 1: rickety wooden stool, drew the notebook close, and began from
Speaker 1: the beginning. The opening was as I remembered, a sister
Speaker 1: and brother searching for something lost, rifling through seed of chests,
Speaker 1: their dial or glaced with small domestic worries. But at
Speaker 1: page forty seven the narrative didn't just stop. It continued
Speaker 1: six pages further. I combed backward and forward, blinking. The
Speaker 1: handwriting matched the elegant slanted strokes, the consistent pressure, the
Speaker 1: same faint blue link. But the story pressed forward into
Speaker 1: places I had never seen. It didn't stumble or pause awkwardly,
Speaker 1: but swept on, and the missing airlum was now discussed
Speaker 1: in the context of a newly installed city bus stop.
Speaker 1: Even the children's jokes reference things you think at tiding
Speaker 1: at the bubble tea shop that were unnively recent ideas
Speaker 1: from last week's local news. I paged true in disbelief
Speaker 1: my notes from yesterday type teachers scrip to describe a
Speaker 1: cliffhanger ending, But there, plainly laid out was a thread
Speaker 1: of plot entirely new. At first, I suspected memory. Could
Speaker 1: I really have missed so much so recently? But my
Speaker 1: own catalog's lip dated an Annataye was still tucked into
Speaker 1: the volume. Ends. The shadow grew softer and p. Forty
Speaker 1: seven six, last sevens, last twenty four, no mention of
Speaker 1: the bus stop, no dialog about bubble tea, no hint
Speaker 1: of anything modern. There was no obvious insert, no visible
Speaker 1: sign a page had been glued or slipped in overnight.
Speaker 1: The paper ages, the inks fade, even the rhythm of
Speaker 1: the line breaks. Everything matched. A curious tingling seized me.
Speaker 1: I checked the clock only half an hour past opening.
Speaker 1: Nobody from the main stafford have passed through, certainly not
Speaker 1: with a fresh notebook a matching hand. I documented everything,
Speaker 1: this time of full transcription of the new ending with notes,
Speaker 1: page numbers, physical description. My excitement was as sharp as caveen.
Speaker 1: I flipped through several other volumes, searching for similar continuity,
Speaker 1: but nothing has striking caught my eye. By the time
Speaker 1: I surfaced from my inspection, the sound of footsteps Frank
Speaker 1: coming to check a leaky radiator reminded me how long
Speaker 1: I'd been absorbed, the sort of absorption you only find
Speaker 1: in the company of a mystery. Still, the contradiction nod.
Speaker 1: Either my memory in written notes had failed me, or
Speaker 1: the book had change naturally and impossibly since my last visit.
Speaker 1: Could it be prank err a trick of fatigue? I
Speaker 1: talked for too many years to attribute every oddity to
Speaker 1: my own mistakes. There was more here than paper and ink.
Speaker 1: That's what I told myself as I left the annex
Speaker 1: the first dreads of something large, a beginning with no
Speaker 1: sense of how many pages remained. I approached my next
Speaker 1: few visits of the Scholar's Caution determined not to let
Speaker 1: imagination run ahead of what I could observe. Each day
Speaker 1: I brought a fresh spiral notebook to record every word
Speaker 1: A found at the end of a manuscript, every curious phrase,
Speaker 1: every unfinished ending. My method was direct, pick up a volume,
Speaker 1: document the last line, cross reference it on the next visit.
Speaker 1: At first, skepticism ruled, but in quick succession my careful
Speaker 1: records betrayed a consistent, unsettling pattern, though works and progress
Speaker 1: weren't fixed in place at all. On Thursday, I took
Speaker 1: up a thin bundle tied with green thread, which had
Speaker 1: catalogged the previous week as a brief poetic memory about
Speaker 1: the city's rivers, ending with the cryptic metaphor as if
Speaker 1: even the river remembers the names, no one else will
Speaker 1: ever speak. But to day the manuscript continued, now wandering
Speaker 1: into pages about recent river clean ups, even referencing the
Speaker 1: installation of a mural downtown, a mural painted just three
Speaker 1: months ago. The language shifted with uncanny precision, adopting casual
Speaker 1: present day slang. Cackers these days don't know half the
Speaker 1: stories these waters hide. Next a collection of vignette' last
Speaker 1: week frozen mid narrative, A Child's sorrowed a missing Cat.
Speaker 1: This time the story went on a protagonist wandering past
Speaker 1: the shop with the new Neon sign, then running into
Speaker 1: a neighbor who quite inexplicably used the nickname of our
Speaker 1: new bakery's owner. Open only since May. In all cases,
Speaker 1: the new material will seem us, not tacked on, not mismatched.
Speaker 1: The versology bounced between dialog and description, and even the
Speaker 1: subtle humor ran straight from the old to the new.
Speaker 1: The voice is knew the present better than they should.
Speaker 1: With every visit, every solitary reading, the stories expanded, sometimes
Speaker 1: by a paragraph, sometimes by a page, sometimes whole scenes,
Speaker 1: always fluid, impossibly tailored not only to the setting but
Speaker 1: to the faintest current of city life outside. I kept
Speaker 1: mediculous records, dates, last lines, physical details about the page hedges,
Speaker 1: and the color of ink. Each time, my new notes
Speaker 1: captured a world that had grown wild theoretically, the library
Speaker 1: doors were locked and duck. They urged to share this
Speaker 1: with some one else, ballooned in me, hot and unwieldy. Still,
Speaker 1: something about the way the shelf sat in the corner,
Speaker 1: a shelf inside a shelf, so to speak into the
Speaker 1: exposure might change everything. I brought Marjorie the next Saturday,
Speaker 1: feigning casual interests, gesturing at the shelf and inviting her
Speaker 1: to browse. She, as ever, was brisk and skeptical, looking
Speaker 1: over the books with an a valuative eye. I watched
Speaker 1: as she flipped the pages. What am I supposed to see, Ruth,
Speaker 1: she said, arching and I borrow thumb tracking through the
Speaker 1: green note book. Nothing here but old school essays, half finished,
Speaker 1: shell them or box em up. She showed me the
Speaker 1: lost line. It was the same as before, matching my
Speaker 1: holess notes. The shadow grew softer and a no trace
Speaker 1: of the bus stop, no bubble tea jokes. I even
Speaker 1: showed her my catalog slip, but she only smiled with
Speaker 1: the administrative patience. Are you sure you are not mixing
Speaker 1: them up with the reader's contest entries? Shells get swapped
Speaker 1: all the time. Back here, she checked her phone anyway,
Speaker 1: ye know where to find me if you need a
Speaker 1: second set of eyes. I tried again, this time with
Speaker 1: other friend, once a math teacher whose memory for detail
Speaker 1: rivaled my own. I explain nothing, simply suggested, let's have
Speaker 1: a look at these old stories. Tell me how they end.
Speaker 1: He obliged, thumb the same volumes and purported exactly the
Speaker 1: lines I cataloged at first. Nothing new, nothing modern, No
Speaker 1: oddity is threaded in. He shrugged, grin. Maybe they meant
Speaker 1: to never be finished. It's good practice for patience, Ruth.
Speaker 1: When I visited alone, the stories grew again, each time
Speaker 1: a new insertion, a subtle growth, sometimes of recent city councils,
Speaker 1: of handed expression, sometimes a market detail borrowed from this
Speaker 1: week's paper. Once the child seeking the lost dog suddenly
Speaker 1: noticed the new blue mail books, recently debated in the
Speaker 1: neighborhood committee. I checked city records. The mail books wasn't
Speaker 1: even three weeks old. It became clear the scripts weren't
Speaker 1: just finishing themselves, plodding through to neat endings. They were morphing, evolving,
Speaker 1: breathing in the cities present, pulling the world outside the
Speaker 1: annex into their own tissue. I suspect it briefly, some
Speaker 1: elabora trick at a creative writing circle met here over years,
Speaker 1: steadily layering in new content, but nothing in the shelf stats.
Speaker 1: The lack of any witness to other readers, and especially
Speaker 1: the impossibility of verifying the changes outside my own solitary visits,
Speaker 1: made sense of it. Curiosity transmuted into orbit, it growing
Speaker 1: ourknees only half rational. Was a some subtle enchantment, a
Speaker 1: decades old game, something to do with the building's rumored history.
Speaker 1: If so, why did the phenomenon shut down the moment
Speaker 1: in other's eyes attended. I dove into the library's records,
Speaker 1: scouring accession logs and old staff catalogs for any mention
Speaker 1: of the mysterious shelf. Nothing, no purchase, no donor listing,
Speaker 1: no accident report or urban legend about works and progress
Speaker 1: touched by the north annexes rear wall. The mystery only deepened,
Speaker 1: becoming more articulate. The shelf seemed to adapt aslf to
Speaker 1: the contemporary world, as if it now not yet alone,
Speaker 1: But the stories within desired the life line to the present,
Speaker 1: and found it impossibly in the act of being read
Speaker 1: by a single person alone and attentive. I pressed the
Speaker 1: palm of my hand against the flickering light above the shelf,
Speaker 1: feeling its persistent weak warmth. I no longer doubted that
Speaker 1: there was something more here, or something at Like a
Speaker 1: f saint radio signal required both the precise frequency and
Speaker 1: complete privacy. A day ended unease and excitement twined together.
Speaker 1: The shelf hadn't just bled the line between unfinished and complete.
Speaker 1: It had begun to erase the wall between external world
Speaker 1: and internal imagination. The next week, I resolved to move
Speaker 1: from documentation to a fright experiment. I returned to the
Speaker 1: annex in the quiet hour after opening, when the library
Speaker 1: was at its most undisturbed. I arrived with the plan
Speaker 1: and a thin tip blue pentucked into my cud, again
Speaker 1: chosen for its contrast to the older fagetings of the manuscripts.
Speaker 1: Selecting a notebook that I had already cataloged, this one
Speaker 1: a curious travel oc narrating a rambling walk through city
Speaker 1: streets that could have been mapped any time in the
Speaker 1: past hundred years. I examined the last page, where the
Speaker 1: previous sentences ended in a vignette about a bakery's window
Speaker 1: unfinished A cinnamon bread on display without buyer. I turned
Speaker 1: the page to a blank sheet. On the upper line,
Speaker 1: I wrote a single sentence, she remembered, as if out
Speaker 1: of nowhere, the coal hush of the concrete steps after
Speaker 1: her first recital, the way sunlight fell and angled stripes.
Speaker 1: I shut the notebook, snapping the elastic band over its cover,
Speaker 1: a tremor between anticipation and out flickering through my chest.
Speaker 1: The next day I pretended detachment, chatting with Frank about
Speaker 1: the radiator for a few minutes before slipping back to
Speaker 1: the annex alone. The notebook was where I left it,
Speaker 1: with my sentence etched in blue. It had been continued.
Speaker 1: Four new sentences now followed mine, in the same script
Speaker 1: that ran throughout the rest of the notebook. The narrative
Speaker 1: pressed on her legsac from the secret stretching she'd done backstage,
Speaker 1: wanting to seem tall older. Her father stood outside, shifting
Speaker 1: from for deferat as if erasing his own apology. She
Speaker 1: realized Afros. It described sensations I'd never told anyone, not
Speaker 1: even in passing the rest is standing with particular anxiety
Speaker 1: about seeming taller after my first piano recital. These were
Speaker 1: just plausible details. There were memories from my own life,
Speaker 1: seldom revisited and never disclosed aloud, not even to myself
Speaker 1: in recent years. I checked the ink I faded into goblue,
Speaker 1: indistinct from the rest of the preceding pages, neither newer
Speaker 1: nor older, as if it had always been there. I
Speaker 1: tried again, in another context. I inserted a passage from
Speaker 1: a dream IDE's gold in my personal journal, a recurring
Speaker 1: surreal vision involving stray cats, colored lamp posts, a sense
Speaker 1: of running lead for a meeting I had already missed.
Speaker 1: I rephrased it, then added it to the trailing end
Speaker 1: of an old story about runaway dogs. Three days later,
Speaker 1: when I came back again in solitude, the manuscript's next
Speaker 1: page described, in uncannily accurate fragments, a stray cat leaping
Speaker 1: between colored lamps, a woman arriving always just after everyone
Speaker 1: else had left. The books weren't merely finishing themselves. They
Speaker 1: were sampling, mirroring, perhaps what surfaced in the reader's mind,
Speaker 1: incorporating memories, dreams, and even the color of private anxieties.
Speaker 1: I pushed further, this time, using a family anecdote half
Speaker 1: remembered a lost Nicholas, my aunt's denial, the Summer of
Speaker 1: the Cicadas. I added this coded into the margins. By
Speaker 1: week's end, a fresh page appeared, rendering the cicadas buzzer
Speaker 1: as a motif, the lost necklace reimagined as a glass
Speaker 1: beat hidden in the lining of an old carpet, and
Speaker 1: the anecdote sheep folding into a new plot. Entirely, I
Speaker 1: thrill swept me dizzy and oceanic. The boundaries of myself recognition, memory,
Speaker 1: even secret winds were poorus here, at least so long
Speaker 1: as I was alone, curious, unwilling to pay attention. I wondered, then,
Speaker 1: not entirely comfortably, about the limits. Would it find my
Speaker 1: deepest regrets, my happiest days. Would it remake them or
Speaker 1: merely echo them in fiction, never surfacing the truth outright.
Speaker 1: Each edition was gentle, never invasive, always refrained in a
Speaker 1: way that left the moment less like confession and more
Speaker 1: like permission. Still, sometimes the annexes are felt closer, charged
Speaker 1: in a curious way. The fluorescent fixtures stutter, filling in
Speaker 1: for a heartbeat. After a last check to confirm my findings,
Speaker 1: I left that evening and stood by the wrist stacke
Speaker 1: slow with wonder. I didn't quite know if I was
Speaker 1: the author now or simply a conduit. Did these stories
Speaker 1: search for endings or for new beginnings? Did every visitor
Speaker 1: find their life absorbed? I let the thaw slip into
Speaker 1: the hush, out loud, only half aware, I murmured into
Speaker 1: the cool air. If the books can grow using pieces
Speaker 1: of my own story, what else can they remember that
Speaker 1: I've forgotten? The annex was silent, save for the soft
Speaker 1: staccato of the flickering bulb above the brass plateforonn then off,
Speaker 1: then on again. The moment after I spoke aloud in
Speaker 1: the annex, the only reply came in the subtle cease,
Speaker 1: the flicker of that overhead bulb, and the faraway shuffle
Speaker 1: of water in the radiators. I weeded listening, but the
Speaker 1: hush only pressed in or respect for the line I'd crossed,
Speaker 1: a small private contract sealed between myself and the shelf
Speaker 1: of unfinished stories. Almost immediately, the clarity of a new
Speaker 1: question burned. If the annex could pull fragments from me, memories, secrets,
Speaker 1: even stray worries, What bunderies, if any contained its gathering?
Speaker 1: Did the stories in these pages come only from me?
Speaker 1: Or was I a single voice among many, old and new,
Speaker 1: stitched together into something wider. The compulsion then was no
Speaker 1: longer to prove what the annex did. I believed in
Speaker 1: its strange mechanism, secret and personal as it was, but
Speaker 1: to understand how far back its reach extended, and what
Speaker 1: or whom I had joined by participating. I could no
Speaker 1: longer satisfy myself with private experiments. Some shards of history,
Speaker 1: some half lived strands from others, must have slipped themselves
Speaker 1: into these ever revolving tales over time. If so, were
Speaker 1: their echoes of older visitors, long vanished librarians, or even
Speaker 1: city dwellers whose voices had never found a home anywhere else.
Speaker 1: I needed, discreetly, a putner, someone sensitive to oddity without
Speaker 1: being threatened by it. Samy was my first and final candidate.
Speaker 1: There'd always been something in their delight with library strangeness
Speaker 1: that marked them as the right confidant, too sharp to
Speaker 1: dismiss what I could show, too pragmatic to make a
Speaker 1: circus out of discovery. The next morning, just after the
Speaker 1: library opened, I found Samy in the staff lounge, elbows
Speaker 1: deep in a carton of disordered city directories. Humming low
Speaker 1: and off key got a minute. I tried for nonchalance,
Speaker 1: but excitement cold the edges of my words. There's something
Speaker 1: on in the annex, and I don't think it's just
Speaker 1: bad filing. Sammy grinn, dusting their hands, then followed me
Speaker 1: back through the primary stacks into the north Annex. I
Speaker 1: led them directly to the works in progress shelf, brushing
Speaker 1: my knuckles over the cool, dull brass plate. I descried
Speaker 1: as much of the anomaly as I doubt, without begging belief.
Speaker 1: Unfinished manuscripts, they mused, running a finger tip down a
Speaker 1: sheast's torn edge. Let me guess some city scandal? Or
Speaker 1: are we talking haunted penmanship? Nothing so dramatic, but I hesitated.
Speaker 1: I've been cataloging endings, and when I read them alone,
Speaker 1: they change, not always much, but the change in ways
Speaker 1: that tracked the present and sometimes oddly track me. Sammy
Speaker 1: arched one. I brow up with skepticism, but friendly show me.
Speaker 1: I tried with them beside me in the cold annex's
Speaker 1: light bulb, blinking as feebly as if I pulled down
Speaker 1: the travelog in which I had written my own sentence,
Speaker 1: I showed Sammy my dated catalog note and then with
Speaker 1: effort of careful detachment, opened the notebook. The pages ended
Speaker 1: precisely on what I'd logged a week before. The cinnamon
Speaker 1: bread and sold window as smudged morning, cold and unkind,
Speaker 1: no blueing, calfter thought, no line about the crisp haash
Speaker 1: of concrete steps, of the uneasy apology of her father.
Speaker 1: Sammy watched me, understanding flickering across their face, more amused
Speaker 1: than stymide. You're seeing different endings when you're alone, not
Speaker 1: just endings, Sammy. The whole narrative shifts, as if someone
Speaker 1: came and updated them. Use my words, my memories. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the present day leaks in, but only when I am
Speaker 1: the sole reader. To their credit, Samy didn't laugh or
Speaker 1: edge away. They considered, if it is true, maybe you're
Speaker 1: picking up on some old palimpst pages for purpose, overwritten,
Speaker 1: maybe erased and restored. Sometimes old ngrey appears hedra sunlight.
Speaker 1: Ghosting could be psycological too. Memory is a trickster, maybe,
Speaker 1: But even if it's just memory, have do you explained
Speaker 1: details I never told a soul, or the references to
Speaker 1: the new mural or the mailbox, that wasn't there last week.
Speaker 1: They shrug, but their curiosity was lit now unmistakable. Let's
Speaker 1: try a control. I'll come in here on my own.
Speaker 1: Maybe whatever's happening keys to time of day or the weather,
Speaker 1: or I don't know something else. We spent the day
Speaker 1: alternately reading and discussing, stacking everything we knew. With semi present,
Speaker 1: the manuscripts remained statickan if anything more resistant. Intercession page
Speaker 1: is felt heavier, the ink dollar, the pros less magnetic.
Speaker 1: The annexes ought hushed, seemed to flatten things out, like
Speaker 1: too many radio stations sharing a single frequency. Yet the
Speaker 1: subtler pattern emerged as we talked. In compared notes, many
Speaker 1: of the infinite stories in their frozen states swelled with
Speaker 1: the rhythm of remembered local tales. There were city landmarks
Speaker 1: described an antiquated language, but with corner details that matched
Speaker 1: the dance. But of the hardware shop, of the handrail,
Speaker 1: of the old fairy slip. There was one about a
Speaker 1: London tree lost in a flood, a half a colt
Speaker 1: from neighborhood lore but which Samy had never seen mentioned
Speaker 1: in any local chronicle, and the motifs the lost dog,
Speaker 1: the runaway laundress. The gentle, absent minded watchmaker reminded me
Speaker 1: dimly of things I'd overheard mothers and grandfathers recounting on
Speaker 1: buses or at playgrounds decades or other. It was as
Speaker 1: if these narratives borrowed not only from the physical world,
Speaker 1: but from the oral landscape that died a community's sense
Speaker 1: of self. Sammy, unable to conjure the manuscripts evolution alone,
Speaker 1: pivoted to their strengths. Let's dig not in the stories,
Speaker 1: but in the library's own guts. They pulled out abouted laptop.
Speaker 1: The library's digital catalog add more crucially, a sheaf of
Speaker 1: scam blueprints and staff ledges dating to the late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: We spend hours over at tepid coffee tracing the development
Speaker 1: of the annex. In the records from the eighteen seventies,
Speaker 1: which between pleased to fund new plumbing and lists of
Speaker 1: donated high back chairs. There was a neat cryptic line
Speaker 1: in an old director's handwriting, allocate space northeast corner room
Speaker 1: for unfinished voices. Unfinished voices. There it was described like
Speaker 1: any other facility, bracketed by the mundane. A new courtcuttle
Speaker 1: needed for winter lamp oil supply low. In the blueprints
Speaker 1: of the period, a tiny and afferentiated room was marked
Speaker 1: in nuck, not much bigger than a janitor's closet. Precisely
Speaker 1: were the present day works in progress. Shelf rested. The
Speaker 1: rooms label shifted across later decades eighteen ninety eight, storyteller's
Speaker 1: corn attempt storage nineteen twelve, then what time year's simply
Speaker 1: annex reading niche. Each notation grew dim and fainter, until
Speaker 1: by nineteen fifty one it vanished entirely, a wall continuous,
Speaker 1: the only room in a cluster of cross outlines in
Speaker 1: a staff memo, odd manuscripts, changing text, report at possible,
Speaker 1: reshoving error, returned to Maine. Even odder orl accounts tucked
Speaker 1: into the library's less formal history, spoke of thenook that
Speaker 1: never falls quiet. Elders remember going out there have always
Speaker 1: alone to write letters or test new pencil leads. Often
Speaker 1: came away with an idea for a story I'd never
Speaker 1: have dreamed up myself. One legend had it. Sometimes the
Speaker 1: air would turn and I'd get the feeling that someone
Speaker 1: had finished my sentence as I wrote. Samy traced these
Speaker 1: hints with growing excitement. If it's not just you, they mused,
Speaker 1: but a thing passed through the building for generations. Something
Speaker 1: about the space they broke off, eye shining. What if
Speaker 1: the annex isn't haunted by ghost, yes, but by fragments
Speaker 1: of local story waiting for the next person willing were
Speaker 1: lonely enough to pick them up. We crossed Rufford's topics
Speaker 1: on the shifting manuscript, old oral histories, local legends. I
Speaker 1: began to notice the plot lends in these living stories,
Speaker 1: often echoed community incidents never formally documented anywhere else. Are
Speaker 1: workmen's lost ring, a music teacher's vanished child, protests from
Speaker 1: decades past, each preserved in local rumo, but not city ricor.
Speaker 1: It was as if the annex, in its solitary chilly heart,
Speaker 1: functioned as a minor museum for historical footnotes too fleeting
Speaker 1: or shameful or private to ever rateus official. But why
Speaker 1: the requirement for solitude? Why did Morgorery Arthur, and even
Speaker 1: say I me themselves see only static tacks while I
Speaker 1: am perhaps others before me witnessed fresh pages bloom When private, expectant,
Speaker 1: and a loon with possibility, Sammy's working theory was that
Speaker 1: the phenomenon had always protected itself by hiding behind pausible dinerability.
Speaker 1: Only the solitary, a curious, the quietly honest could see
Speaker 1: the evolution, and then only in ways that could never
Speaker 1: supply print ready proof. I watched as Sammy took the terran,
Speaker 1: sitting alone in the dim with a blank notebook. I waited,
Speaker 1: silent and patient. When they returned, breathless, they shook their head. Nothing,
Speaker 1: no change, no new lines. Maybe I not either, trailed
Speaker 1: off searching for tact. They're not resonant enough that the
Speaker 1: next day, when I sat again in the annex alone
Speaker 1: as everard, a story in the green notebook shifted. Now
Speaker 1: an argument about whether to replant an indenttry after the
Speaker 1: winter floods of fifty three, Before anyone could remember who
Speaker 1: first named the corner Afrays Sami had muttered only hours before,
Speaker 1: appeared known to me only through our recent collaboration, it
Speaker 1: awned on me the shelf was not sampling only from
Speaker 1: my own head. It drew from any one in proximity,
Speaker 1: breeding fragments from conversations, from overhry tales, from exchanges too
Speaker 1: fleeting to be captured except by the half magic of
Speaker 1: mutual focus. Somehow the annex observed those tattered threadsned when
Speaker 1: the conditions were right, curiosity, loneliness, folks fuffered them back, remixed,
Speaker 1: and repurposed inside an unfinished narrative. With this realization, my
Speaker 1: attention turned from cataloging evidence to participating more deliberately. If
Speaker 1: I seated the stories with something ambiguous, would they grow
Speaker 1: into unpredictable new forms. I began writing tentasively at first
Speaker 1: half lines of an old family poem, the start of
Speaker 1: a regret I had never voiced, the ghostly outline of
Speaker 1: a teenage hope never pursued. I left a question in
Speaker 1: a margin, do you remember only what I offer? Or
Speaker 1: what you have always heard? In this city? When I
Speaker 1: returned again alone, there was no direct replied, only a
Speaker 1: new scene in the travelock, the protigonist stumbling into hidden
Speaker 1: alcove behind a bakery, discovering a pile of half lettered
Speaker 1: poems about rivers that remember surrounding. Then the subtle side
Speaker 1: in terms of phrase I had lifted unthinkingly from my
Speaker 1: mother's voice, entwined with the reference to the last summer
Speaker 1: festival before the bridge was rebuilt to detail so minor
Speaker 1: only local memory held it. I kept up this process,
Speaker 1: experimenting gently. A teenage confusion about someone never named, a
Speaker 1: lunch book secret, the start of a kulin, a recipe
Speaker 1: for dish I had been told only elders in the
Speaker 1: community cooked. The results were always gentle, awkward or painful
Speaker 1: moments reimagined as cheerful misunderstandings, sharp regrets softened into creative asides,
Speaker 1: never a trace of mockery or threat. The manuscript braided
Speaker 1: these stray memories with local color. Now lost shops, references
Speaker 1: to city holidays no longer celebrated, even bits of news
Speaker 1: I'd overheard in passing but never consciously recalled. I left
Speaker 1: a question of privacy. Who else reads these? And the
Speaker 1: next day one story's dialogue included in aside, Suppose nobody
Speaker 1: can see unless they want to finish for themselves, spoken
Speaker 1: between two children lost in a hedge maze. This was
Speaker 1: not a trick of paper and ink, not exactly. The
Speaker 1: annex was functioning as a kind of living narrative, net
Speaker 1: catching what drifted through the solitary mind, but always blending
Speaker 1: it with a seup of local memory, a city rumor
Speaker 1: and untold live experience from generations past, their unfinished stories.
Speaker 1: Far from being mere literary relics, became vessels for community's
Speaker 1: sense of itself, particularly its silences and stray threads woven
Speaker 1: not to name chapters, but in moments no one else
Speaker 1: would notice. Curiosity simmered now would respect there was something
Speaker 1: profoundly tender, and how the Annex treated the fragments volunteered
Speaker 1: to it, never exploitative or cruel, always receiving them with
Speaker 1: imaginative kindness. Evidently history could persist not by formal record alone,
Speaker 1: but by gentle, improvisational retelling, a process that required both
Speaker 1: a living mind and a community shared, if half forgotten experience.
Speaker 1: Sami and I became co conspirators. They helped matt connections
Speaker 1: among manuscript topics, local manis, Vanish city events, even faded
Speaker 1: graffiti in the mint stairwell. While they never saw the
Speaker 1: stories shift of their own eyes, they became invested in
Speaker 1: tracking how machief slipped between written and oral traditions, how
Speaker 1: the annex gathered, preserved and softened what official histories left
Speaker 1: and said. One afternoon, elbows touching across a crowded reference table,
Speaker 1: they asked, do you think this place remembers the things
Speaker 1: we can forgive ourselves for there was a confession, and said,
Speaker 1: in the question I need for absolution, only the Annex
Speaker 1: could grant. I couldn't answer except with what I experienced.
Speaker 1: I think it remembers the things we want to carry
Speaker 1: until we're ready for someone else to carry them to.
Speaker 1: But for all that we explored, a bigger impetition took root.
Speaker 1: If the Annex could break together city rumors, in private memory,
Speaker 1: local language, and personal dreams, then my own places, both
Speaker 1: participant and witness, became something neither strictly individual nor entirely collective.
Speaker 1: On every page I saw not just myself, but the
Speaker 1: people who come for my students, their parents. The lost
Speaker 1: stories folded quietly into neighborhoods waiting. In this way, the
Speaker 1: Annex formed not a narchive of conclusion, but a perpetual
Speaker 1: act of becoming. Every visit, every willingness to add, to ask,
Speaker 1: to leave a little more un finish fold that the
Speaker 1: city's story is only the living can semi proposed, half joking,
Speaker 1: to test whether the effect extended to other neglected shells
Speaker 1: or hidden rooms. Together, we ventured into the oldest parts
Speaker 1: of the library, the cracklinoleum behind the reference desk, the
Speaker 1: half blocked corspisned the original foundation. Unused offices on the
Speaker 1: uppermost floor. We found scraps of oddity, fragments of poems
Speaker 1: in check, sketches of riverbanks that no longer existed, recipes
Speaker 1: for feast made obsoleep by vanished ingredients, but none had
Speaker 1: the peculiar dynamic glimmer of the North annex shelf. It
Speaker 1: was unmistakably the locus of this phenomenon, a place oddly constructed,
Speaker 1: situated on old stone, the weight of two centuries voices
Speaker 1: pressed deep beneath its foundation. We wandered aloud at the mechanism.
Speaker 1: Not magic, not quite machinery, a ventured more like resonance,
Speaker 1: a place where the unfinished is protected but never frozen.
Speaker 1: Sami developed a working theory and oppress it further. The
Speaker 1: annex they spected was built at top and oula gathering
Speaker 1: ground perhaps the side of city meetings, or the last
Speaker 1: house of a forgot and lane. Its stone's quarry, from
Speaker 1: a time before the city's own memory really began. What
Speaker 1: if it's always drawn in unfinished stories, not just the written,
Speaker 1: but the spoken, the lived, and the left behind, we
Speaker 1: boughted connections, a hand drawn map of rivers and foot baths,
Speaker 1: city legends mapped onto the manuscript threads, even noting oncanny
Speaker 1: similarities between the day's events and turns in the stories
Speaker 1: they find. The morning after, when I planted a recent
Speaker 1: city council blunder, the street lamps mistakenly ordered in a
Speaker 1: dull green instead of the demanded blue. The next morning,
Speaker 1: a sheaf contained a shaggy dobtail about lanterns miscalled by
Speaker 1: wayward painters, solved only after the entire town gathered and
Speaker 1: stormy disagreement. I recognized hidden among the characters the rhetorical
Speaker 1: tics of two council members whose voices had come to
Speaker 1: know at public events. I wrote a personal question in
Speaker 1: the margin, are you alive? There was no reply except anew,
Speaker 1: possibly the oldest story called up at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the stack, now containing the lines. Some rooms wait so
Speaker 1: long for the re question that they begin to answer
Speaker 1: with parables, not sentences. The answerers and finish, but ongoing
Speaker 1: it s traveled a line between sense and nonsense. The
Speaker 1: stories offered no factual mechanism, no ghostleeking fashion, only the
Speaker 1: surety of their own process, a process that braided the
Speaker 1: living with the remembered, the private with the public, in
Speaker 1: which the mind could enter only when opened alone and curious.
Speaker 1: We confront it then the central realization, together and quietly.
Speaker 1: The annex was not haunted in the way of old buildings,
Speaker 1: nor simply preserved as a museum of failed drafts. Instead,
Speaker 1: it was a locust, created or grown or accumulated for
Speaker 1: the unfinished in all forms of recording space, where narrative, memory, imagination,
Speaker 1: and city humfused whenever someone with solitude and genuine curiosity
Speaker 1: came callin. Its principles were these as best we could grasp.
Speaker 1: It activated only in the hush left by solitude, key
Speaker 1: to mind searching for meaning in the unfinished. It drew
Speaker 1: from horse boundaries between history and rumor, private memory and
Speaker 1: shared experienced, spoken word and written phrase. It protected its
Speaker 1: own secret by refusing to yield evidence to the crowd,
Speaker 1: to the disinterested, to the attention of was longing only
Speaker 1: for novelty. It became and stay a silent collaborator in
Speaker 1: the ongoing collected act of keeping the pastel, if not
Speaker 1: by repeating, but by subtly transforming what was left at
Speaker 1: the science of the thing, if there were science escaped labels. Sammy,
Speaker 1: ever playful, called it a narrative organism, a cultural maicilium.
Speaker 1: I recognized in it the pedagogical principle I championed my
Speaker 1: entire teaching career that meaning happens in the unfinished, in
Speaker 1: the willingness to revisit, reimagine, and share, never to close
Speaker 1: the book with a period setting in the annex. Together,
Speaker 1: though the manuscripts never changed in each other's presence, we
Speaker 1: recognized ourselves part of a tradition far older and more
Speaker 1: generous than any private project. We weren't its discoverers, not
Speaker 1: really just the latest to press our stories, to its care,
Speaker 1: to take comfort in its kind mutations, its devotion to
Speaker 1: gentle writing. Promise he would let the city strip this
Speaker 1: out if they ever decide to modernize. Samy's question struck
Speaker 1: me fierce but gentle. As long as I'm able, I said,
Speaker 1: I'll see that it keeps a shadow in its silence.
Speaker 1: There was nothing to reveal to the world, nothing to prove,
Speaker 1: just a quiet faith that was unfinished in all of us.
Speaker 1: At a home in the weeks that followed, I found,
Speaker 1: to my own private astonishment that the Annex's influence seeped
Speaker 1: outward and nought in stories that wrote themselves on my
Speaker 1: kitchen table. But in the way I saw the city,
Speaker 1: the unfinished pervaded everything. The erased names on a park
Speaker 1: bench plaque, a bright mural on the wall behind the
Speaker 1: corner store, a half read book swapped at the bus
Speaker 1: station faces, and all photographs are named, lingered like sentences
Speaker 1: broken by a bell. Even the regret I had carried
Speaker 1: to projects never quite completed, students had lost track of
Speaker 1: moments when I failed to reach a child in time,
Speaker 1: felt newly softened. They existed now as prompts, starting places
Speaker 1: for future readers, beginnings, not defeats. I stopped trying to
Speaker 1: see closure content and said that the city, its river,
Speaker 1: its odd annex corners continued to collect the rest. The
Speaker 1: Annex had changed my sense of identity too. I felt
Speaker 1: written into the building, just as the building had written
Speaker 1: itself into me. Sam Me and I never spoke of
Speaker 1: it to anyone else. We both understood now that the
Speaker 1: Annex required its partial invisibility to explain if to parade
Speaker 1: it as an oddity would be a volation of its
Speaker 1: most generous rule. Only those driven by honest curiosity and
Speaker 1: lonely hours could see its work In the end. What
Speaker 1: Matt of most was believing nothing here was truly lost,
Speaker 1: simply waiting for the next and finished visitor. On a
Speaker 1: quiet morning, just before City Festival would send the library's
Speaker 1: whirl with visitors, I walked past the North Annex, trailing
Speaker 1: a hand over the worm tarnished brass plate. I didn't
Speaker 1: open a book or write anything. You just stood for
Speaker 1: a moment with the shelf, listening for the subtle, wordless
Speaker 1: pulse it held. Perhaps some places do you remember more
Speaker 1: than we do, patiently collecting everything we leave unfinished. As
Speaker 1: I walked away, a small comfort settled in. There must
Speaker 1: be other corners, in other libraries and cities and silent houses,
Speaker 1: where fragments of us wait, woven quietly into places that
Speaker 1: know how to grow a story even when we don't.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.