The guard post was a depressing place. It had been erected out of sandstone bricks, and, besides the necessary furniture like desks and chairs, little else lay around. That little else included a receptionist and an Aloe plant.

The guard left me sitting in front of the woman. She was overall thin, and something told me men weren’t used to looking her in the eyes. Of course, neither was I going to gaze into her upper orbs: I had something more interesting to gawk at. Those curves, those well cared for upper sides, that smooth skin…

“Sir Ignacio, are you with us?” she snapped her long fingers in front of my face.

“Bitch, I am appreciating the Aloe!” I yelled at the witch for interrupting my happy moment.

I slapped her hand out of the way and caressed the potted plant.

“Shhh, it’s fine, it’s fine, I am with you, dear…”

“Sir I am very distressed by the fact that you are talking to a plant. If you are going to ignore what I say, please do so by staring at my cleavage, like a normal man would.”

“The mid is envious of you, little Aloe,” I said as I kept rubbing her leaves softly.

“My owner is allergic to authority, allergic squared to authority represented by a female human,” explained Mariana. “I can fill out the paperwork for him, if necessary.”

“You being able to talk is the least strange thing about this whole situation.”

I raised the Aloe to a hole in the wall next to us, a hole that I will reluctantly call window. Roughly made, it barely deserved that designation. Half-assed windows for a half-assed place.

“Well, um, what is your name, dog?” she asked, ignoring my person. I can’t blame her, I had started to sing ballads from Luis Miguel to my sweet Vera.

“Ursula.”

“Don’t you ever have a drive to maul him to death, lil Ursula?”

I could see from the corner of my eye how Mariana shook her head. I caressed the thorns of the Aloe carefully, while promising to love her until she forgets me.

“Is he always like this?”

“No, he is actually pretty resourceful when his ass is on the line.”

I halted my singing and stared at the boring, plain sandstone roof. How long does a plant’s memory last? Probably not long. Seizing the moment was essential, were I in want of a prosperous relationship with the aloe.

“I am sorry for being rough, dear, but I can’t wait anymore.”

I disrobed and disbelted my chest. I asked for her pardon and then plucked one of the leaves out of the aloe. The receptionist’s face was a monument to disgust and fear.

I began rubbing my hirsute chest with the parenchyma of my lover. We kissed, the wounded leaf against my lips. Her bitter sap twisted my face, but it was the price of our forbidden love.

“What the hell, man? Stop that,” nagged the receptionist, to which I flipped her the bird. In totally unrelated news, my bird was about to quit due to feeling the pressure of being overflipped and underpaid.

“I will provide the data to fill out the paperwork. Ignore him, please.”

Mariana jumped over the desk to read the form. She hummed and panted, her tail a heat seeking missile going after the face of the poor woman once and again.

She screamed and began slapping Mar’s tail with a folder.

I kept on smearing my chest with aloe as I watched the ferocious battle between woman and tail. Mariana was oblivious of the punishment she was subjecting the receptionist to. The god of fluffiness had taken her tail as the ultimate weapon to punish the non-believers.

“What in The Demiurge’s name is happening here!” stormed in the guard.

“I am being attacked by the dog!” she yelled , desperate.

“No, you are being accidentally bitchslapped, Serena. Grow a pair. And you, Ignacio, what—”

“It’s consensual, the aloe wanted it,” I rushed to my own defense. “Besides, she said she is female. So if you are the kind of fellows that make gays dive bomb to death, know that this act is thoroughly heterosexual.”

He turned to Mariana, “Dog, translate.”

“He is smearing himself in aloe to annoy the receptionist.”

“Stop! Ursula, stop wagging your tail!” demanded the receptionist.

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The guard breathed in deeply, slapped me in the back of the head and told the distressed girl to go get herself some tea.

He stopped Mariana’s tail with his hand. Mar started trembling like a Parkinson’s patient who ran out of levodopa. Her body wagging in place of the tail.

The man grabbed his forehead with the free hand, still detaining Mariana’s tail and causing her to go from left to right and back uncontrollably.

“Are you some sort of Djinns testing our patience?”

“Is this question part of the forms?” asked the shaking Mariana.

“It was rhetorical. Just, please, be cooperative for half an hour and you can go on your way.”

Then I made the most important of questions “Can I keep the aloe?”

“I’d be disgusted and offended if you didn’t.”

And, with another traumatized woman on my record and a free potted monocot, I cooperated, and the paperwork was astonishingly tame, compared to the one back on Earth.

We roamed the streets of this hidden city for a while, to get acquainted with the place and because Mariana was almost flat lining from the lack of trees and fire hydrants in the proximity.

The atmosphere was suffocating still, but there was not a speck of dust to be found. The desert had exiled all that the wind could take, and left the heavy, fat grains of sand behind. Describing the buildings around us would have been an exercise in futility, except for that one shaped like a cock. Imagine whatever functional construct able to house people you want: add it twisted stairs on the outside, or windows shaped like animals, and there will still be a place in the Library City where you can find it.

The city center was the ever-shifting library. Inspired by the dunes of the surrounding desert its parts migrated, changed places. On a first glance, there was no defining core. Towers, rooms, halls, entrances and exits: all seemed to be equally important in the tug of war between the different architectural elements. This living marvel could be seen from every point of the settlement, and several people had signs outside of their stores, announcing they could read the future by looking at how a person’s facial structure resembled, or not, the current shape of the Library.

Whether it was the belief that shaped the library or the library the one shaping the local beliefs, it escapes my knowledge.

Once in a while Mariana-sized lungfishes dressed in robes wriggled by, to and from the library. Nobody commented on them, so I assumed they were equivalent to the stray dogs that gather outside butcheries and become fat slobs due to all the leftovers they consume. Some people even clothe those dogs, so it wasn’t a deranged leap of logic.

Reaching a cul-de-sac, we were forced to backtrack until the nearest street crossing. Turning right, we found ourselves in front of an old woman that had stolen her dress from the Association of Male Peacock Imitators.

“Excuse me, beautiful dame, do you know where can we reach the main access to the Library?”

“I do know,” she said, her voice as soft as your average lifelong smoker truck driver.

“Will you tell us?”

“Maybe.”

I examined the small, ugly creature that dared foster an attitude. Maybe behind those wrinkled lips she had teeth to bite. Maybe she would produce a cane from between the feathers and beat me to a bloody pulp while Mariana was distracted with, I don’t know, a particular grain of sand. For all the virtues Mariana possessed —which are in the low single digits in her best days—an attention span was absent amongst them.

“Well, I am waiting.”

“Hello, Waiting, I am Grandma.”

I turned away from that Omen of doom. Why was an old woman behaving like me? What did this mean? Had I finally met my nemesis?

“I am just joking with you dear. I can show you the way to the library for a price.”

I faced the bird enthusiast again. “We are fucking rich, tell us how much.”

“Hello Fucking Rich, I am Grandma.”

I considered sending the woman back to the nursing home via Mariana Express, but she was likely to skip that stop and go straight to Heaven.

I cracked my knuckles. “Woman, tell us how to reach the library, or else…”

“You can find Else by turning back and following this same street,” she ketamined her sonic.

“What’s happening?” Mariana asked with a quivering voice.

“Happening: (Noun) an event that has transpired.”

We had come across the final boss of dad jokes. Defeated, I bowed. “It will be an honor to serve, my queen.”

Mariana desperately sniffed the old lady: her legs, her hands, her feet, and her ass.

“Ignacio, this is a woman!” she warned me.

“Bow, bitch, we have been surpassed.”

I forced Mariana down by her collar, and she whined and whined.

“Is the floor comfortable?” asked the old lady in a mocking tone. “Bah, I may have a little task for you two, if you are willing to risk your lives.”

I clenched my lips for a second, my face a reflection of my busy mind. “I am willing to risk her life and she is willing to risk mine. So we technically qualify.”

“I am not willing to risk your life!”

“Right, you do it unwillingly. Yet you put me in jeopardy nearly every single time we fight.”

Mariana rolled on her back and panted. Her tongue went up, unnaturally defying gravity.

“I don’t do that!” she protested while scratching her back against the sandstone.

“You don’t even notice you do it, that’s the issue.”

“If you have finished bickering with each other, I need you to save my girl from some bandits,” the grandma said with a calm tone, as if kidnapping weren’t this heinous crime.

“Your girl?”

“The hottest secretary in town. She is a very basic lady, but she is not picky and makes friends with ease. You would love my girl.”

This sounded like a trap. Now, was it a trap of the kind that gets you killed or of the kind that boosts your anal circumference stat?

“On one hand, you could have been sent by the seer bitch to misguide us. On the other hand, your girl sounds like a good prospect.”

“Indeed, hottest secretary in town, I assure you.”

“I guess she takes after her father’s side of the family.”

Mariana was apparently trying to reach Planet’s equivalent to China with her back scratching. But the sandstone was not willing to lose the Mandate of Heaven so easily.

Now and then some extravagantly dressed individual passed by us, but not one paid attention to our situation. I decided to ask the woman why everything was so variable in the city.

“That, sweetie, is because people have a pact: the library is sure to contain books recording the fates of every last one of us, or at least some interesting facts. But that doesn’t mean they would refer to us by name—”

“And thus you live in bizarre houses and wear rather unique clothing,” I interrupted her.

She frowned.

One skeletal finger was placed against my chest. It was biteable, but I refrained. Self- control was something I had to practice if I intended to have her as my mother-in-law for a little while.

“Yes, and if some well-mannered folk,” she made a strong emphasis on the last three words, “finds a book describing someone’s else abode or garb, he is morally forced to tell that someone about it, and where to find the book.”

“Fine, I will keep that in mind. Now, tell me about that rescue mission.”

Mariana stood up. “I am no rescue dog.”

“Think of it as fetching a person.”

“Let’s go, then!”