Shelf Life
Mary answered the phone and it was Joyce. Frank had taken a fall and she would not be in that afternoon. The line went dead as Mary gazed through the glass front of the library windows. Chaos reigned outside on the street, while inside an unsettling quiet ruled.
She watched the two part-timers leave for college, book-shaped parcels protruded from satchels and audio books mumbled from their tablets. Now alone, Mary gathered the returned books, flicked to the date stamps, she imagined hundreds of wet digits thumbing the pages.
Mayhem briefly encroached, the automatic doors yawning wide, as a mother hushed into a phone while her children went quietly to leaf through the picture books. Mary held up an encyclopedia, enjoying its weight, as she glared at the woman and thought of releasing the volume onto her stiletto-ed foot, snapping the metatarsal inside her pale skin.
Mary returned the volume to its shelf in the reference section, where she found a small man amongst the Ordnance Survey maps. Unfurling one at a time, he proceeded to fold them up haphazardly and returned them out of order. Mary anticipated death by paper cut, the Brecon Beacons slicing deliciously through the webbing of his fingers and toes.
Mary wheeled the trolley of spineless books round the empty aisles, as a soft thump echoed up to the ceiling. She shuddered to a stop and it came again, louder this time. Outside something monstrous approached, the metal shelves rattled, before the roof was ripped off by a giant claw.
Mary cautiously tidied the newspapers, one headline declaring ‘Libraries face extinction’, when footsteps scurried past. She turned as the characters returned to their pages, whispering through fiction, tiny voices lost in comedy and tragedy. Words of anger and jealousy, laughter and pain and sadness, from thousands of dusty paperbacks, many unheard for years. Mary closed her eyes and sank to the sad brown carpet.
Finally, there was only the voice of Mary’s favourite character and she smiled at the thought of him coming to take her far away. She followed his words to the front doors, but only found the entire library staff stood smiling at her. The manager stepped forward and handed her a card.
‘We wanted to give you something for your ten year anniversary,’ he said. ‘There’s a gift voucher inside.’
Mary smiled as she imagined the classics aisle tipping over and crushing their bodies, as Dr Jekyll led her off into the night.
