library of no return

just a story I wrote that's been on the back burner, thought I'd share

I remember the night when my parents died: gunshots echoed in my ears over and over again; lightning struck houses around mine; distant howls made me run under my bed and never come out again until another howl split the air. My bed had collapsed leaving me in the wreckage calling for my mom and dad who were out of reach. I remember getting up the next morning finding my mom and dad nowhere in sight. That was when I started my survival. I crawled from under the wreckage of my bed calling out for my mother and father who I knew were too late to be saved. Sometimes I still imagine they're here...

When I come back to my senses I was in my bed. Well you could call it a bed, or you could call it just some wood planks and old blankets I had found. I have hidden from the police my whole life. I still want to go up to them and ask for a new life, a brand new family that won’t mess up. But I know I could never do that. I have been an outlaw for so long. I put on my black hoodie, grab my money box and walk downtown. 

As I open the door to the post office, the little tiny bell rings. I go to the dark blue counter and ring the bell three times until the mailman comes to the front. “Any mail for Madeline S. Q.?” I ask, expecting there to be none. 

“Uh, you have two,” He says, handing me two envelopes written out to me. 

“Thank you,” I respond, closing the door behind me. One letter is from the library saying I had an overdue book. The other letter is written out to me but it doesn't say who it is from. I decide to save that one for later, then I head out for town. 

When I get to 43 Hinckley Street instead of finding the nice yellow doors of the library, I find a black building with moss covering all of its windows and doors. The roof has caved in and the stone walls looked like they're about to crumble. I look down at the letter checking the address again. It says 43 Hinckley street, Little Hulton. I look up again at the building and see the number '43' etched into the wood on the caved-in door. In the right place....but I still go inside knowing that this is a mistake and I have never seen this building in my life before.  

The walls are crumbling from the inside, and moss is the only thing keeping them up. The inside looks like a library, the walls are lined with bookshelves, filled with pages of books that look like they got burned in some sort of fire. The spiral staircase is missing a couple of stairs and it's leading up to a caved in roof. The room echoes with the water slowly dripping from the loose tiles. The floorboards creak under my weight as I walk across the hall to a rotten desk with a skeleton on it as if it were a patient at a hospital. The back of the library is what looks like once used to be a children's area. There is a big window that is broken and the glass shards scattered the floor. All around the area are bones and skulls. It makes me shiver, just to think...

I can't take this madness anymore. Where are all the books, and kid, and painted library walls? What happened here? The place is so dusty, I'm struggling to breathe. I look at the bookshelves lining the library again and I see one book that is actually a book. The cover is a little dusty but at least it is a book. Maybe this place isn't totally decimated after all. But it does look out of the ordinary, as if in all this wreckage, a book still standing is abominable. I pull another book off of a shelf but instead of holding it, I get pulled by some invisible force, into a room full of books. These are actual books. The kinds of books I was expecting to see when I walked into a library. Not some sort of archaic war relic. These books still are a little dusty but at least they're books. The place has a big skylight with a painting that I can’t make sense of. It almost looks like everyone depicted is trying to eat each other but hug all at the same time. The bookshelves here are lined with books that looked ancient. I pick up one book and literally falls apart in my hands. The cover, which read 'Writings of the Future' fell off the book, which pages turned to ashes as I flipped through them. Pocket full of posies...

I open another book and see if not the strangest thing yet. The book is all made by hand. It was written by hand, and in a language I don't think is English. I open to a random page, and it has the same cursive writing as the others, but at the very bottom of the page there is a drawing, as if made by a kid, of a building on fire...a path in the woods scattered with bodies...a girl with a rope around her neck hanging from yew tree. And all of the sudden I'm pulled into the book by that same invisible force. Oh, what the future brings...

Author's Note

this is a story I wrote five years back and I just revised it now.