People don't seem to care too much that that librarian is dead. I didn't even know her name, but for some reason, I can feel her absence. There's that feeling that someone I might have seen on the street and nodded at is gone forever and I never even knew her. I saw her photo in the paper today. She was surrounded by cats. Fat cats that obviously loved her just as much as she loved them. And she looked happy.
I joined the crowd watching them bring her body out of the burnt library, the library that I never visited. I told Alex not to look and I thought to myself don't look don't look, but I looked. We both looked. I held Alex's hand because she let me and we watched the last bits of smoke rise from the library and into the sky.
5.20.2010
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Alex read the newspaper today. Well, she read the obituaries. The librarian died. No. The librarian was killed. Set to flames in her own library. Alex didn't really know her, but she drank a cup of tea in her memory. The obituary said Edith E. Evans loved tea. So Alex had a cup of Earl Grey as Sam slept soundly on her couch.
ReplyDeleteEventually he woke up and she showed him the paper. He was silent, but soon decided to walk down to the library. Alex joined him. They walked in silence through the streets that were so chaotic just the day before. The air smelt like burnt paper and Alex suddenly craved the smell of the ocean again. They arrived at the library.
There was a large crowd of people surrounding the pile of burnt knowledge. Every inhabitant of this demented town watched as the body of Edith E. Evans was pulled out of the rubble and put into the back of an ambulance. Sam didn't want Alex to watch. He didn't want to himself. The sight, however, was impossible to look away from.
Alex looked at Sam's saddened face and then at the crowd and what was left from the library. And then she made her decision. She would go back to her past life. She would tell Sam tomorrow and he could join her if he desired. But she had to go back. She had to be back on the sea. She had to go home.