The Way It Ends by Marnie Vinge

Author:Marnie Vinge [Vinge, Marnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-12T22:00:00+00:00

IONE

I follow Tom up to the building. He leads me to an aluminum structure. It’s something that, in Oklahoma, you wonder how it will survive the spring. But just like the movement Tom has fostered, it seems to be doing just fine.

He opens the door and inside is a library. Shelf after shelf of books stand, neatly ordered, across the room. Bookshelves climb the walls like ivy, reaching the ceiling. Ladders stand on either side, making access to the highest tomes possible. The room is something. It’s no wonder Tom is proud of it.

He turns and opens his arms wide as though I’m a prospective buyer of a home he’s selling. I smile, his enthusiasm is infectious.

A section of horror books lines the first shelf, but I wonder about them. Out here, flesh and blood predators picking off livestock are a very real and living nightmare. I’m not sure that ghost stories hold as much weight. But then again, it does get awfully quiet and awfully dark at night without the noise of the city to coax you into believe that you’re not alone. That we’re not all one skipped heartbeat away from death.

I walk up to them, run a finger along one spine.

“What do you think?” he asks.

There’s pride in his voice. This is obviously the thing out here that he feels is his greatest accomplishment. And I have to say that, if I were to leave behind everyone and everything, I’d hope for such a library.

“It’s amazing,” I say. And it’s true. The whole thing is amazing. I’m shocked at the amount of literature that Tom has amassed here.

“It was what I thought would be most important to invest in once we got everything else built. Aside from the cafeteria, of course. I guess food is more important than reading,” he smiles at me. He’s at ease. He’s in his element surrounded by the words of civilization dating back centuries.

Libraries are sacred places, I’ve always believed. A space in which so many different ideas are brought together and accessible to anyone that can read or listen to a book. If you can read, you have nothing to blame but your own unwillingness to put in a little time to cure your ignorance.

Tom is many things, but not ignorant or lazy.

I watch him as he walks past the first shelf. His pace picks up. There’s life in it. I follow him, speeding my steps to catch up. He wanders into the general fiction section and I turn to trail him down between the stacks.

We reach a shelf of T’s and he pauses. I look at the shelf and see the volume I want to pick out. Tolstoy. Anna Karenina.

I reach for it and pull on the spine. Books packed too tightly around it spring forward and cascade onto the floor in a pile. I kneel quickly to pick it up and Tom does the same, our heads slamming into each other like two big horn sheep.

“Shit,” he mutters.

“Sorry,” I grunt.

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