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Dekar Druid lives in an infinite library. Besides Ebizenum, who is in a special category of their own, he is the only living person in the library’s single tower. Outside, a forest surrounds the tower. There’s a lake a short walk to the north and a peak to the distant south. And nothing else. The lake is easy to get to, a respite on hot summer days, but Dekar Druid has never made it to the mountains, not even close, though he’s walked for miles southward.
The stores are selling off their inventories and clearing out. The trains and buses have posted their shutdown schedules. People are returning borrowed objects, cleaning out their refrigerators, and packing to leave for the assembly spots. What to bring? Parents tell children to bring warm clothes, just in case, and toothbrushes, but no one knows if we will need them. We are vacating, leaving everything behind, taking only what we can carry or drag in a roller bag.
On Miphre, a planet hardly larger than a moon, jagged mountaintops stab above the cloud cover and harbor small ecosystems in the palms of their hands: rock eels and ribbon mosses and seabirds with rodents clutched to their breasts, each one nestled between those stony fingers. “The perfect nesting spot for gastor,” the captain of The Cyclops Cradles Her Sheep said when they arrived on board a few hours ago. “It’s basically a buffet for them.”
We saw her staggering down the promenade, gills flaring as she sucked for the gods’ aether that no longer fueled her breathing. By her gasping breaths we knew the god had moved on, swimming the invisible aether to another, leaving her gasping in the void as she fell back into the strained, recycled, and slightly fishy-smelling air of the space station.
The dancer switches the camera on as his ship falls into orbit around the black hole; the opening image of his unmuscled chest squeezed beneath translucent polyester blasts out toward a thousand points of watching light. He’s shaved his body for the first time in his life, the nicks of the razor lingering in little scabbing cuts. He hits the music.
USER: this is a message for Milwaukee Elementary’s curator Jude Towers, I hope this is the right address. anyway thanks for the story you had RIGHTR generate for my 10th graders’ Empathy Week. it was really great! can you tell me more about it?
CURATOR: I am happy to have fulfilled the assignment.
Rachel knew Jacko Hype before just about anybody. That’s what she told people when they asked what made her some kind of expert; she knew who he was, what he was, and what he was not, because she met him first.
The good news is, we have no intention of killing you. We know that this is no relief to you. The inherent feature of a position that begins with, “The good news,” is that the bad news is coming and that it usually possesses sufficient substance to be a fool counterweight.
On the high plains of Kansas in a tiny town worn down by drought, I stop at a roadside diner. When I ask for water, the waitress pours me a glass of ice water, presenting it with obvious pride. “We have our own well,” she says. “And the wind turbine on the roof keeps the freezer going.”
This is the eighth floor of the Al-Ahli Memorial Library, my favorite place in the building. When the elevator door opens, it’s like walking into a quiet circle of glass. So, as we walk, I’m going to whisper. People are reading, writing, drawing—it’s such a beautiful place to work.
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