/yesod

Tag: library

  • the assassin

    Somehow, I’ve been asked to participate in a rehabilitation program for dangerous prisoners. The prison is large and gray and nondescript, and you can’t escape the feeling of being trapped once you’re inside.

    The prisoners are terrifying. And these are the ones ready to be rehabilitated.

    My initial assignment does not work out well, since he appears to be more interested in adding me to his list of victims, rather than enjoying the freedoms that await him outside.

    The second charge is a bit more promising, while still more likely to end in tragedy than success.

    He is elderly, Japanese. Very thin and tall. I only know a few phrases, not nearly enough to actually communicate. He is uninterested, and may or the program, and there is a patient menace, fairly perceptible beneath his, silent frailty.

    Leaving the facility takes me through the library, which is a ridiculous assembly of shelves and stairs and books. I’m surprised that the corrupt administration officials, let me wander on my own, even though I have no interest in wandering. I want to leave.

    Finally, above ground, I am close to my goal. Two large concrete buildings sit, flanking the gates to the outside. I walk across the flat open courtyard, pale light sky overhead. A familiar sky.

  • the recursive old woman

    [This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated December 6th, 1996]

    …I’m standing in front of a shelf full of journals and books in the dead man’s rooms. I take one down, finding [ILLEGIBLE] and poetry, handwritten recollections between the pages — it dawns on me that these are the rooms of my great uncle, the missionary to Burma, and that only I know he is dead.

    The guard eyes me through the front windows and I move on to the inner rooms, marveling at the collection of antiques, souvenirs, and artifacts [ILLEGIBLE] the grimy gray walls, the peeling paint, and the dusty windowpanes.

    Within the inner rooms, I come upon a woman — elderly and wholly lovely. She embraces me and slowly we back to an old bare mattress with a brass frame and headboard tarnished and lovely.

    …and then the guard is knocking at the window and shouting and I am still standing at the bookshelf, a book open before me with a picture of an alluring elderly woman open on the page.

    And I know I am dreaming, but still I set the book back upon the shelf and move once again into the inner rooms, coming to the place of the woman yet again, embracing and being embraced yet again, awakening once more at the shelf of books with the guard behind me, knocking on the window of the dead man’s rooms.

    And again, I turn to pass back into the inner chamber again,

    And again.

    Again.

    Until I wake in the dark morning.

  • the three old men

    Three old men. Drunken and cheaply dressed sit in a library and make vulgar innuendos to every girl who walks by. In the background a brass ensemble plays Cab Calloway tunes.