top of page

Library

The book on the shelf pulsed with the beat of a living heart. A dimension bleeding into the one that she was precarious to call home. She was a librarian, though she carried the threat of an Indian Cobra. Ink pouring from the fulcrum of her individual arms making tapestries of abstract image and grotesque punk age art. Rats puking in trash cans, two unicorns humping. Now, near the living book, the tattoos moved, the rat puked, the unicorns humped, shifting and drifting into other planes as they faded, faded, now gone. Abstract art crashing on itself, like a folding sheet of paper into an invisible crack. The mandala cart wheels away.

By the time she noticed her tattoos had faded into nothing, she was shelving a book right beside the heart-beating book, its pulse burbling out a heavy beat, though she forgets all of that. The book pulses and sweats as she reaches for it. She had reservations; she was scared. She touched it.

It felt like your grandfather’s handshake — wrinkled, old, warm. She rubbed the spine of the book with her middle finger, and it arched inwards, shifting like a body. She turned it over in her hand. Only a centimeter of the cover wasn’t the grotesque depiction of a human skull. She ran her finger over it, feeling the hard cover under her fingers. Like wood. Bone, even.

She eased the book open to see the pages were blank, red, and moist under her fingers. When she turned the dark wrinkled pages, they moved and shook like gelatin. Each page thicker than a quarter. A floppy disk made of pencil eraser, that’s how she described it to herself.

She opened the book wide — stretching each end apart — and shook the pages, waiting for a note to fall out. Nothing did. There was no call number on it, no letter, nothing. Then, she did something she never thought she would do. She tore a corner. Nothing much, just enough to see what trick this was playing, but instead of ripping apart, it bled. It began to run down her arm where her tattoos were, then at the elbow.

It went up her arm. Over her shoulder, down her chest, up her head. It moved like mercury on a windshield, sliding across her body like lighting till she was covered in the red seepage. Each second the red liquid was on her was another second that it dissolved her into an easily absorbable fluid.

The book drank her up like a sponge, sucking what was once a woman through a simple tear, then sealing back shut. She was gone. From reality, memory, everything. She didn’t have a name anymore, and as far as anyone knew, she never did because she never was there. Finishing its meal, legs grew out of the base of the book like a millipede. It creeped along the floor, up a stack, and into a vent. Looking for a new place to hide.

And another meal.

 

BENJAMIN ERVIN was born and raised in Southeastern Ohio. He’s always had an affinity for writing, so in his free time, he’s taken to writing about things he enjoys reading, mostly science fiction. His favorite authors are Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman, and Phillip K. Dick. He’s a junior double majoring in education, with a concentration in integrated social studies, and English, with a concentration in literature and writing. He hopes to one day teach science fiction courses at a high school level or above, incorporating several of the texts he’s grown to love (Necromancer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

bottom of page