Witness the pluck of one Anton Bealofus, who growing up in Crocodilopolis was very well early acquainted with the Library there. And finding himself in his early thirties drummed out of orthodontics in disgrace, bumming around Solinon on the last few thousand of his severance, abandoned by friends and family, he thought again of the Library. There was none in Solinon, a small stevedore’s haven on the river Dooce. None until he plunked his whore and whiskey money down for a pee-soaked set of upstairs rooms in an old, seemingly unheated brick building in the town center.
It was valiant just doing that, and scrubbing out the vagrancy, and sitting down with hacksaw and biscuit glue to carpenter a couple hundred linear feet of shelving from the discarded pallets lying in public-hazard piles by the quay. Sanding so hard when he finally went to brush on the stain and lacquer his fingers still moved back and forth. But now to accession for it, and to add to the one card in his catalog, accession number 1, a pocketed sexagesimo of death poems from the holy knights of Marlagne, which like the pollen stuck in a bee’s pits had clung to him in his youthly peregrinations for purposes entirely alter to his own.
Up in a broad tree-lined row above the town-bustle and beyond the stevedores’ peculiar stink was a guano-splat of grand homes lived in by grandes hommes. As much a magnate as one could be in Solinon. And with teeth rotten through by sweet tidbits, made talkative by the gas, and eager to brag of the friendly competition in book-collecting, though none of them had the tongue to match the lovely caps he provided for them, and therefore seemed as literate as the avid newsreading fishmongers.
Up in that row were mounds of books, and just perhaps something of value for him.
In the Library of Crocodilopolis there were two books that might have been of great use to Anton at that time: one on the philosophy, and another, again as exhaustive, on the practicum of larceny. Fifteen chapters apiece on the proper subjects of caption and asportation. He had only the sexagesimo to guide him, an awful precedent.
Commenting is closed for this article.