jimmy, third part

It was a long walk from Jimmy's house to the public library, just under two miles of hot, thick, unbearable Georgian summer. The walk was worth the effort. As Jimmy opens the large glass door, a blanket of cold air quick-freezes his sweat-soaked clothing. As his eyes adjust to the homogeneous light of the library, the interior clarifies and brightens. The library possesses a special kind of light, a self-perpetuating light. Each space is a self-illuminated shadow. This static, omnipresent light reveals the true nature of the library. Jimmy finds the library quiet and nearly abandoned - the library does not reveal it's true light to everyone.

The only inhabitants were the keepers.

Nearly hidden behind tall desks, sitting on high-pitched squeaking chairs, stern overlords keep watch over the library.

Young female workers move silently through the corridors of books. These roving under-librarians, smelling of shampoo and old books, are driven by a numbered and ordered will of the library. Their beauty - their thin, angular physiques, pale, cool-to-the-touch skin, and straight, dark hair - defies any ordinary standards of beauty beyond the glass doors. Pushing carts of spent books through the aisles, they use their graceful, thin fingers to restore each book to it's previous strength. Restoring order. Reassigning proper light-space.

Tended lovingly by these roving workers, stacked neatly on metallic shelves, stand the adventures that make Jimmy's life bearable - stories that crush the fragmented falsehoods substituting for reality. These stories are too profound to be contained in their physical structures. Held loosely in the book's damp-smelling pages, they slowly leak into the atmosphere of the library. Jimmy watches them move through the air like rippling vortexes. Eventually these swirling ghosts light upon, and are absorbed into solid objects. Jimmy listens to the trapped whispers of stories emanating from the walls and furniture as he walks past them.

Jimmy heads to a forgotten back corner of the library. In these smaller, less accessible aisles, the escaping stories have their most profound effect. The books become more dense, the stories more active; vegetation from the leaking stories becomes more prolific. In the back corners, against the library's exterior walls, mutated vines - gnarled and angry - sprout and grow from the metallic shelving. Murmuring rumors of spring, their strong, dark trunks bore through the gray, thickly-painted cement block walls. Growing and expanding beyond the confines of the library, they spread into the greasy mass of humanity, rebuking and tormenting a society gone mad.

Underfoot, beneath the marble flooring, secret rabbit societies burrow tunnels and engage in epic battles. Within these tunnel spaces, small but valiant rabbits, in the calculated fury of war, clench oppressor's hairy throats between their teeth, biting into their airways, compressing their throats until their life-force drains.

Above the tall shelves, cosmonauts float weightlessly. Futuristic travelers streak through space faster than light - faster than normal light - only the omnipresent light of the library can trace their paths through the void of space and time.