- for Tori

                The Librarian was a gorgeous woman, red-haired and hazel-eyed.  She possessed those kinds of looks that were at once classic and timeless.  She looked old to one set of eyes and young to the next, and everywhere – which was not many places at all – she walked, people would notice and would argue.  She was beautiful, after all.
                She awoke at a quarter of six every morning and showered.  Some days she shaved her legs and under her arms, and some days she did not.  She worked alone, anyway, she would reason on those more hirsute days.  She would step from the shower and wrap a towel around her midsection, dry her hair with a hair drier into red waves down to her shoulders, and she would dress.  Her wardrobe was as varied as her day was unvaried.  On one day, she would dress as a flapper, her dress dangerously short, with a long string of pearls around her neck and a cap pulled down low.  It was nothing to bob her hair, took nothing more than a flick of thought, a subtle nudge at her appearance, and her hair would pull into the short and understated sweep of the vintage hairstyle.  On the next day, she might appear a bustling art student, dressed in faded, paint-speckled overalls and white tank top – barefooted – with her long-again hair pulled back in a small bun or a ponytail.  
                After she dressed, she had breakfast: Wheat-A-Bix and artificial sweetener, a cup of coffee, petite glass of orange juice, and a bagel with regular cream cheese – none of the low fat or flavored fancy stuff with crushed up bits of fruit or vegetable or herb for her, thanks.  She would then leave out a can of tuna for the cat she never saw but that she knew must exist, because the canned fish always disappeared, she would gather up her bags – a mismatched purse and tote, the latter filled with books – throw them on one shoulder, turn out the lights, and creep out the creaking front door that was white on one side and green on the other.  
                She walked to work.  She had no need of a car, as she had friends only occasionally, went out for a night on the town or in the clubs even less, and dated never.  She meandered along through the city on her course to the Library.  The city was crowded, like cities tend to be, and the sidewalks often clogged, as sidewalks always are, but people seemed to part before her.  She had never bumped into anyone and no one into her.  Even people about to collide with her, at the last moment, always remembered that they forgot something, or they dropped something, or they simply stepped aside for no reason, and they never knew why, though they always noticed the Librarian.  They noticed how beautiful she was and they were sure they would never forget her, but then she passed and they forgot, or they would argue about the old woman or the young woman or the child that they just saw.  
                Eventually, she made it to work.  No morning was different than the one before or the one after.  She had never missed a day, had never called in sick or took a vacation to Barbados or Alaska or France or wherever else people take vacations, and she never would.  She stepped up to the building, a hunkered one-story thing, built of white-painted brick, she unlocked the door, and she stepped inside.  It was large on the inside, much larger than it would have looked outside to anyone who saw it, but they did not see it, and the Librarian knew it was much larger and better appointed on the interior.  She moved from table to table, turning on the meager but sufficient lamps on each.  She turned on the lamp on her on desk, placed her bags beside the wingback desk chair, and moved off over the rich Persian rugs, and through the rich mahogany stacks and racks and boxes for the morning inspection.
                Each book was a world.  
                Some were folios no larger than a few pages, some large tomes in multiple volumes bound in supple materials, and some so vast they spanned across entire series of computer disks in several boxes, each box stacked – in order – one atop another.  She inspected every morning because it was nothing for a world to disappear or to suddenly appear frayed. or for one to become lost and be in desperate need of being found.  Some would grow longer in their places on the shelves and some would grow smaller, and being that she was only the Librarian and did not know everything, she inspected, made notes of changes or disappearances, and earmarked books in need of repair.    
                While a book may disappear at any point, at the whim of the book itself or of the author, a world never shows damage overnight.  The flaws first appeared at the edges, a corner bent here or a spine cracked and loose there.  Rarely an event to cause worry, as a well-worn book was far better to the mind of the Librarian than an unyielding new one.  When the flaws or cracks or frayed edges began to work inward, towards the center, was, on the other hand, a cause for concern and, subsequently, repairs.  Worlds always needed fixing and taping or resetting on their spines and, occasionally – though only very – entirely new binding and covering.  So, this was her job, and she loved to do these things, to run her fingers over covers and to pay meticulous attention to the care of the important things.  
                And then, one day, a book she passed a book she had passed time innumerable, and always it was a little the worse for wear.  It would be a little dog-eared or slightly faded, but never in need of repair as, invariably, when she marked it to be pulled, someone would save it or discover a renewable energy source or a war would end, and it would be good as new before she returned to pull it onto her little wooden cart.  This different day, though, was different because she passed the tiny book and it appeared so dogged that she initially hesitated to touch it for fear that it may collapse into brittle paper and leather fragments.  She flipped open the small notepad in her hand and checked the notes for the day before, then the day before that, and the day before that, even, and each check indicated it as “Damaged, No Need For Repair.”  
                She pursed her lips and placed the notebook with its nub of pencil on one of the shelves next to a particularly boring red world and reached for the fragile-looking little book.  She was relieved – a feeling she had little occasion to feel as one only feels relief when they are worried and, as she did her work well, she was rarely worried – when the book felt sturdier in her supple hands than it appeared sitting in its narrow spot on the shelf.  
                The damage was extensive.  Little threads shot off the book on all its edges as the wound leather unraveled from the outside-in, the pages sandwiched between the front and back cover were cracked and uneven, the ribbon place-marker little more than a frayed, crimson tassel, and the spine was broken.  She could slide her thumb fully between it and the bulk of pages to which it had been attached.  For the first time, she worried, and she did not like worrying, because she did not know that worrying was what she was doing.  But she knew she did not like the feeling and she did not like the way she felt flustered and suddenly hot despite the perpetually cool air and she did not like to feel that the book had escaped her attention, despite the fact that she knew from her notes that it had not.  
                She walked back to her desk, holding the book gingerly before her, clasped between creamy hands, and she set it down.  She pulled out her chair and sat.  She grasped the book again, placed it flat on one outstretched palm.  The Librarian closed her eyes, breathed deep, and opened her eyes, and saw the world as it was.  A marble-like thing, slightly squashed, seventy-percent blue and the rest green covered all over with swirling grey and white masses.  She inspected it in this form for damage and saw little at first.  Worlds are funny things, she knew, subtler than books in ways, and one has to be more astute about their observations when looking for the cracks.  Then, all over, black spots, like rotten places on too-long-in-the-bowl fruit flowered all over the orb and disappeared just as soon, only to be replaced by more of the spongy black abrasions.  She closed her eyes again and opened them on the book.  She kept it flat on her palm, ran her other hand over it gently, and placed it flat on the desk.  She traced the faded and chipped gold leaf of its title with one spindly, short-nailed finger.  She opened the front cover, laying it flat against the desk, and – for the first time – the Librarian read one of her books.  She did not read her books, the constant repair precluded her possessing the time to take such pleasures, the books she took home simply volumes to which her maintenance had not advanced during the day.  
                She read about the first murder and about wars and holocausts and pollution.  She read about fossil fuel and petroleum and about electric toothbrushes and politics.  
                When she first moved her gaze from the book, the light at the windows was dim, the day almost over, and she realized she had whiled it away reading in horror.  It was the first day she did not work, and the last, and when, looking at her silver watch, she realized the lateness of the hour, she considered closing the book and replacing the volume on the shelf; letting the world disappear.  She had work still in need of doing.  But, she considered in the closest thing to a fit of pique she had ever had, the work had waited and could wait.  There was very little left of the book, after all.  She could, at least, finish the horrible little collection before replacing it.  So, bending her neck, she read to the end.  She read about art and about poetry and music.  She read about heroes and writing, and coming to the last page, about hope.  And she closed the book and looked up.  
                The Librarian did not move for a time she considered everything she had read so, and finally, breaking her stillness, she grabbed glue and new ribbon and a stout, small bolt of leather.  Until the small hours of the morning, she bound the book in new and supple binding, setting it gently in its new spine.  
                With weary eyes and wearier fingers, she made the final repair, and she closed the book tight against its pages.  She stood, pushed her chair to the desk, and moved into the stacks.  Moving the book to its narrow spot, she saw that it had grown in the fixing.  She moved the adjacent books to either side, widening a new space, and placed the newbound book between its companions.  Her hand lingered for a moment on its spine, and then she walked away from the world, as she did at the end of every day, she gathered her things, the other books in need of repairs, and left, dousing every lamp before she left.  She closed and locked the doors behind her, and she walked home.  
                Everyone who saw her that evening agreed she was an old woman, once beautiful, but now tired and bent with age.  Some thought to help her beneath the burden of her bags, but forgot what it was they wanted as she moved past.  
                She returned home, to her modest flat, made her evening ministrations in preparation for work the following day, and slept.
                For a time after that, as always, dreamers would occasionally visit the Librarian while she was at work.  They were as varied as the worlds she kept, though she noticed more and more from the tiny world she had repaired late that night, always with names like Neil or Cheree or Aaron or Joyce.  She even once had a Barry.  Dreamers always had certain sounds to their names.  She, as with all of her visitors, would allow them to wander through the stacks as long as they promised to be careful and as long as they washed their hands, and they always returned to her, mystified, and said, “I never knew there were so many.”
                And, every time, she smiled and said in return, “Yes, so many,” and she would let them stay as long as they desired, showing them to the exit when it was time, and she invited them to return whenever they wanted.  Then, she doused all of the lights, closed and locked the doors, and left the dark Library behind.


P. Jarett Underwood
--2004--