Maren Brander

64 Poetry

She moved away on a Tuesday, car stuffed like a full stomach, all the windows down. Her hair blown in a wind storm of crossing borders and one last look over her shoulder. Assisted runaway was not the usual rite of passage in midwest towns, but corn loses its shine and luster eventually. Her call of the wild meant exile from the only place known as home. From Lincoln land to orange coast, 18 is a thick-skinned number. She took the highway southbound; time will pass before that town sees her in solidarity again. That routine, forever the same –No goodbyes and one hundred and one hellos.

65 Photography

66 Flash Fiction

Poetry surrounded Theo, but the names on the bindings meant nothing—Dante, Dickinson, Eliot. Theo’s wrinkles contorted into a question mark, and he rubbed his remaining hair with chapped knuckles, trying to remember those names; nothing ever came.

He placed his cardboard box at his feet, unloading the day’s selected reading materials before him—recommendations from a lady who told him to call her Evelyn. Her platinum blonde head glowed, the sun of the public library. Only upon closer inspection could anyone detect greying tendrils. Head blazing, she took her seat in the adjacent sections across from Theo labeled “True Crime” and “Just for Laughs.” Theo read a single page of seven books at a time, peering up now and then to watch Evelyn plug in her collection of gadgets. That’s why she chose to establish her little kingdom there—it had approximately eleven working outlets, the twelfth always betrayed her.

The sun of the library shifted her gaze to Theo, raised her wilted coffee cup in greeting. Theo hailed Evelyn with his tea in return. No sugar, no milk, just black. Pausing between a page of Heisenberg’s The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory and a pocket-sized version of the Gospel of Luke, Theo looked up. He positioned his head just right so that the shelves of library books flowed as waves of words. Through the book shelves, he saw the world. The smaller the books, the bigger the windows. Above Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a young librarian’s head bloomed. Theo poured over a page of the newest library gift from Evelyn, Joyce’s Ulysses. As the caffeine dripped into him, he felt like he could understand, he told himself that he could understand. Then the page was finished; time to move onto the next book.

Before confronting the beasts of Revelation, Theo’s eyes followed a sound through the bookshelves. A man lugging a camouflage backpack was trying to rent twenty copies of Gone with the Wind, but his camo failed, and the librarian caught him. Theo simpered.

At that moment, Evelyn dislodged herself from her cave of treasures. She floated towards Theo; they had never spoken before. She just left books on his table, wordlessly. Oftentimes, he wondered how dark the library would be if she left.

Theo’s mind fell into pieces on the retro library carpet; fragments of words spilled at his feet.

“Well,” the sun smiled, “what do you think?” Her rays illumined his sprawling collection of books open on the table. He didn’t understand the books, not a word. He realized that didn’t matter—she didn’t understand them, either. The words still freed them. “Lovely, just lovely.”