Les Petites - A Short Story Collection

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Every Day

~*~*~ Winner in the Short Story category of The Ambys 2022 ~*~*~

The library in Mountain Falls is empty.

Not for lack of people scuttling about the ski town, or even a disdain for the written word. Indeed, the residents, blessed with an abundance of green slips of paper and bedrooms that can store more than a twin mattress, are able to buy books whenever they want.

For those on the other side of the American Dream—souls like Alexander Graham Bellamy, part-time sandwich artist at Mountain Falls Panini Laboratory—green slips of paper are not so easy to part with, and so, if they want to read, they must use libraries.

After the last school bell of the year clangs, and the wealthy start their journeys to summer homes and foreign countries, and the teachers seal themselves away to prepare their hearts and minds for next year, and the athletes begin their sweaty, dirty summer camps, and the others of his caste plan hikes and gaming sessions that he isn't invited to, Alexander finds himself wandering.

Backpack still on his shoulders, stuffed to the brim with old papers and gum wrappers and a yearbook with empty signature pages, he walks and walks.

Home, with its overworked parents and devices that cause electrical bills to go up, will offer no refuge from the searing summer sun and heart-squeezing isolation. He walks in the opposite direction from home, all the way up Main Street, to the only place he can think of. A tiny red building with broken letters in its sign. A building he knows will be empty. The Mountain Falls Public Library.

The cloudy glass door creaks open, revealing an empty hallway with an empty desk and a few doors hanging ajar. For a moment, the only sounds are the squeak of rubber soles against tile floors and the bubbling of a broken water fountain, and then, one of the doors opens. An old lady emerges, bathed in a cloud of perfume and hairspray, elated to see a human being entering the building.

Elated, at least, until she processes that said human being is Alexander.

The subsequent examination is as familiar to Alexander as breathing, a daily ritual where an older, conservative onlooker begins to theorize about his tragic history and dangerous tendencies.

The woman, whose name tag indicates that she is Anita, sends her eyes crawling over every concerning part of him, lingering on his forearm and the tattoo of a fox that had been one of the few things he had ever bought for himself.

"Can I have a library card?" he asks.

"Do you live in Mountain Falls?" she asks right back.

He's used to that question too. The unspoken law of Mountain Falls is that those with holes in their jeans—the unfashionable kind—and unkempt hair and baseball hats must initially be treated as wanderers come to disturb their utopia.

But a crumpled learner's permit from his backpack answers her question, and a few beeps later, he holds a plastic key to the treasure chest in front of him. He goes past the second set of doors and enters the place that he aims to turn into his impoverished version of a summer home.

Anita watches him, lips pressed in a thin line, as he weaves in and out of the rows of books, every now and again spotting a strange picture or title that promises a bit of entertainment.

After walking through, he tosses his backpack on the ground and collapses into a chair. The selection is outdated, and honest introspection reveals that the books are less attractive to him than the rattling sound in the walls and the blissfully cool air that accompanies it.