by Julie Hersh
Image: Ambika Thompson
It was morning and there was a solid gloomy cloud coating the books and the sighing people at the long tables. The library was a big room. And not the kind that covers around you but the kind you’re always looking across nervously. The librarian behind the counter wanted to go home. She was damp from rain, dripping onto floors and books and curving wooden shelves. She thought: Libraries are like stacks of money in a wallet, wrinkled and soft and useful for something until they’re torn in two, when they spill their books over the side of the world into a hole and each half goes in its separate directions, fiction to the left or to the ground, nonfiction to the right or toward the sky, to rain back down later. Continue Reading →