by Jude Reid
“All libraries are the same place,” you told me. “Open the door in Glasgow and you might step out in Alexandria or Ashurbanipal or anywhere in between. Every word ever written exists somewhere. It’s just a question of knowing the right way to get there.”
“And do you?”
“Every librarian knows.”
I glanced around the little village library, the door behind the desk marked STAFF ONLY, the fire escape on the upper floor with its glimmering green light. “Which door is it, then?”
“I suppose you think you’re funny, do you?”
“It’s a serious question. Or is it an invisible door?”
“This is why it’s a secret.” You sat up, and looked away, your gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the bookshelves and computers.
“Come back,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been a prick. I like your stories.”
“It’s not a story,” you said, but you came back into my arms all the same.
*
“I’d like to draw how you look right now,” I said afterwards, as we lay tangled together in the last of the light.
“You can’t draw.”
I shrugged, feigned insouciance. “For you, I’d learn.”
“Don’t draw me. Write me instead.”
“Maybe I will.”
I traced the letters of your name down the curve of your spine, and you unfolded for me like a folio.
*
The last time I saw you, his mark was on your throat again.
“How many times is that, now? Three? Four?”
I touched a finger to the necklace of bruises, thumbprints swollen like a pair of cabochons beneath your chin. “You should leave him. Before he does it again. Before he does something worse.”
“I can’t.”
“You won’t, you mean.”
The way you crumpled in on yourself made me ashamed of my anger. I took your hand, threading your cold fingers into mine. “Come with me. Please. If you don’t fancy my place, we’ll find you somewhere else. Just don’t go back to him. Not tonight.”
I should have found a way to stop you, but words were all I had in the moment, and my words were never enough.
*
They never found you, but they charged him with your murder anyway. I saw him at the trial, thin-faced, slumped, defeated, the image of a guilty man. Twenty years locked away from the light, a joke of a sentence for the man who put out the sun.
The world turned the grey of cheap printer paper in your absence, empty as a blank page. The new librarian is all bright smiles and book-of-the week enthusiasm, but your key still works and they haven’t changed the code for the alarm.
At night I sit there and write you, my palimpsest written a hundred times over. You told me once that every word ever written exists, somewhere. Every manuscript is a map, every book a doorway, and it’s there on the other side I’ll find you.
JUDE REID lives in Scotland and writes dark stories in the gaps between working as a surgeon, wrangling her kids and trying to wear out a border collie. In her non-existent free time she enjoys running, ITF Tae Kwon Do and tabletop roleplaying.