Library Vignette

There were old men sleeping in wire chairs with newspapers decomposing in their laps. The pale, round headed clerk at the front desk with his uncalloused body as soft and pliant as a rose. The gigantic diorama, the front steps of a cathedral, various parishioners frozen mid stride as they ascended. The giddy giggles of the bearded insane, rifling purposefully through their bags full of nothing. The air still and ripe as in a church, carried overseas in a thousand blushing balloons from the Vatican; it contains ashes from the fallen Rome, molecules of dinosaurs and bits of oil paint. The splashy fountain, its dark circles of coins staring up like shark eyes from the cool blue bottom. The ceiling hiding secret shadows and single-celled bodies of light changing shapes in the hidden crevices of its rafters. This building is ancient save the tile, is haunted save the children’s spittle matted around the softening corners of the children’s books. The black man with searching eyes, tries to sleep with his shoes off, pink and brown toes sticking through his socks, arms folded, wakes to the prodding of the clerk bent over him, and there is a scene which I pretend, in that other life which is a dream, to throw myself into, interjecting on his behalf. I tell her to leave him be, that sleeping, this red-eyed man means her less harm than all the ghosts in this ancient place.