A fantasy. Why did Freya have to be so clever? Why hadn’t she just told the truth? Dan was bound to look at The Fragile Phoenix. She’d been so busy trying to keep him from getting fired, she’d forgotten it at the counter.
The librarian waved to Freya as she unlocked the front door. Freya had to unclench her jaw to say hi as she walked in. She went straight to the fiction section, her steps heavy in the hushed air.
If she texted Dan and asked him not to look in the book, it would make him do exactly that. Any excuse she could come up with sounded crazy. Her only hope was he’d be too busy to even thumb through it.
It was all ruined now.
Freya had been looking forward to a morning at the library, perusing the shelves for as long as she wanted. She’d hoped to find enough books to last until the end of November.
Now, all she could do was sit at the end of one of the long tables with her forehead against her palm, thinking how she’d messed everything up.
A fantasy.
At least she didn’t need an excuse to skip the party. She sat there throbbing with embarrassment until finally she was sick of worrying about it. There was nothing she could do about it now, and if she sat here for too long, the librarian was bound to come check on her. Freya pulled out her phone and opened her book list.
All the books people recommended to Freya were organized in a color-coded spreadsheet on her phone. First was a golden column with the name of the person who recommended the book to her. Author names were the teal column, titles were in lavender. There was a wide pale blue column at the end where Freya kept her notes as she read. She saved these so she could talk about the book with the recommender when she finished.
Freya didn’t like the idea of assigning numerical ratings to books, but she would sometimes bold a title when she really liked it. After she’d talked with the recommender and thanked them, she moved the row to the completed tab. Invariably, the person who recommended the book would have another recommendation after that, so the list never ran out.
Right now, her open recommendations were:
Mr. Rutteridge:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami
Randall:
Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koelester
The L.A. Quartet - James Ellroy
The Dark Tower - Steven King
A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guinn
Dying Inside - Robert Silverberg
The Physics of Star Trek – Lawrence M. Krauss & Steven Hawking
Betty:
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Monsters of Templeton - Lauren Groff
The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker
Dr. Garbuglio:
The Fragile Phoenix - Dr. Garbuglio :P
The library had all of Betty’s picks. Freya especially liked the cover of the Golem and the Jinni. She considered not checking out The Goblin Emperor, but Betty had a good grasp of how much bullshit Freya would put up with in a fantasy novel. She would never have recommended a piece of junk like The Song of Sword.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Freya walked along the shelves with a little stack growing beneath her arm as she looked for Mr. Rutteridge’s recommendations. These would be more demanding reads than Betty’s selections, and Freya only planned to pick one of them. She looked at all three, then settled on South of the Border, West of the Sun. She’d had more than enough solitude lately, and Kundera was supposed to be wrenchingly depressing.
Freya spent a while browsing the paperback carousels before picking a yellowed 1984 copy of The Void Captain’s Tale by Norman Spinrad.
Lastly, Freya looked at the books under Randall’s name and, again, she was only going to pick one. When she’d read these five recommendations, there would never be any more. The list under his name had been so long once. There was a lot of downtime as a small-town police officer, and Randall was a voracious reader. One by one, she’d whittled down his list until there were just these five remaining.
Randall was always the best to talk with after she finished a book. He was always interested to hear what she thought. Freya remembered the way he smiled when she’d enjoyed something he recommended, almost as proud as if he’d written it himself.
Randall was where she’d gotten her habit of always finishing a book she started. She remembered starting Dune and flaming out fifty pages in. Randall encouraged her to give it another fifty pages, and when she still didn’t like it, he’d told her to go fifty more, saying she was almost at the good part.
She read through the rest, and then didn’t stop until she’d read the whole book, and then the other five books in the series. For three whole months her head was swimming with stillsuits and sandworms and the tyranny of prescience. Randall even re-read Heretics and Chapterhouse so he could talk with her about them.
A few months after Randall was gone, Freya had the urge to re-read the original book. His hardcover copy was on the bookshelf in the hallway. It was from the Chilton printing. The dust jacket was the John Schoenherr painting with the flowing title. It was Freya’s favorite science fiction cover.
But when she held the book, all she could think about was that it had been in her father’s hands. His fingers had touched the pages, his eyes had run over the words, and they never would again. She’d put Dune back on the shelf and hadn’t read anything for a while after that.
The memory beat against Freya, and she set her stack of books down. She had the urge to leave them there and run out of the library. She could hit the pavement and start running until she was far away from this town, far from everything. Her hand was in her pocket, closing on the Starball. She shut her eyes tight and tried to visualize herself in outer space.
It helped, but when she opened her eyes again, Freya was back in the library, surrounded by the smell of old books and furniture polish. She was stuck here on Earth, no matter where she went the memories would follow her.
Freya picked her books back up and walked back through the shelves, looking at Randall’s recommendations. The library didn’t have the Omnibus edition of the four James Ellroy books, and she didn’t want to carry four separate books. All the copies of The Dark Tower were checked out, and King was kind of hit-or-miss for Freya anyway.
Darkness at Noon sounded interesting, but the title reminded her too much of the black sky of her dreams. Wizard of Earthsea wasn’t on the shelf, even though the computer said it was.
That left Dying Inside. The library’s copy was a battered 1972 edition with the red and black dust jacket sealed with ancient, yellowed laminate. It had a pocket at the back for when they’d used check-out cards, but there was no slip in it.
Freya had a thought, and she took her stack of books to the check-out counter. She had to wait a second while the librarian helped an older woman who’d gotten confused by a pop-up on one of the library computers.
The librarian had very short hair, she couldn’t have been much older than her early forties, but it was already mostly gray. She wore a long-sleeved shirt with a few tattoo lines visible around her collar and peeking out at her wrists. Freya thought there was a good chance this was Lynn Harris’s older sister. There was a strong resemblance.
“Checking out?” she asked, and her eyes shot to the stack of books, noting each title.
“Yes, I had a question, though. Do you guys keep track of who checks each book out?”
“We do. There are records for all the books in our collection,” the librarian replied.
“Oh, that’s great!” Freya slid Dying Inside out from the middle of the stack and handed it over. “Can I see if this book was checked out by someone?”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t release that information. We don’t want people to be afraid others will look up what they’ve been reading.” The woman’s expression was a little severe, but her tone was polite. Now, Freya was almost sure she was related to Lynn. They talked alike.
“Even if it’s family? I just wanted to see if my dad checked out this book.”
“Even family, unless it’s for a child under the age of twelve.”
“Oh, okay, never mind,” Freya said, feeling dumb for asking.
She slid her library card across the counter. The librarian ran it through the barcode reader and was about to hand it back when she hesitated. Her eyes went from the card to Freya, and Freya wondered if she was in trouble or something. Then the librarian scanned the inner back cover sticker on Dying Inside. She typed something in on her terminal, her eyes darting from side to side as she read.
“Your dad checked this out eleven years ago, on September 23rd. He returned it on October 9th. Did you want me to look up the others?” There was a catch in the librarian’s voice as she spoke. Of course, she knew about Randall. It was a small town.
“No that’s okay, it was just this one.”
“It’s one of Silverberg’s best. I hope you enjoy it.” The librarian said quickly checked out the rest of the stack. Her bottom lip was tight as she handed Freya back her card.
“Thank you,” Freya said, feeling awkward. She took her stack of books and found a place to read where she couldn’t be seen from the check-out desk.