Jimmy laid his cheek on the cool grassy bank just shy of the water's edge and looked out upon the plane of the lake's surface. The lake heaved up and down. Pressing his ear against the ground, he could hear the lake's deep, strange voice. A sense of vertigo swept over him as he imagined himself falling into the dark otherworld.

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.

jimmy, second part

Jimmy never considered intimacy a precious commodity. Intimacy was a service to be rendered upon request. Flesh surpassed the thin veil of piety. Somewhere in it's unending, warm, salty folds lay the keys to acceptance. It invaded dreams in fragmented segments with larger-than-life faces belonging to respectable people - people uttering unnatural gasps that seemed to emanate from his own mind. Flesh became part of Jimmy, adding it's cadence to his life. Confusing and awkward, it lurked, ready to be served.

jimmy

Jimmy knew he was too old to play under his grandparent's house, but he could not resist the temptation today. Having moved with his mother out of the neighborhood for almost two years now--an eternity at age thirteen and a half--all his friends had forgotten him, and were certainly too old to play such games as 'club-under-the-house'.

Jimmy walked around to the side of the house to use the most obscured entrance to the mysterious cavern of his childhood. Standing at the low entrance, he could feel the coolness leaking out into the summer heat, and against his face. A quick glance around proved that his entrance into the cave could only be observed from his old friend Brian's front porch through a gap in the low brush surrounding him. All was quiet at Brian's house.

Jimmy ducked into the cave with one quick motion--out of the hot summer afternoon and into the dark, damp, mysterious underworld of the house. After a moment to allow his eyes to adjust, Jimmy found himself in the inner sanctum of his childhood. Strewn on the earth floor, the old talismans were still laying about. Folded and broken-legged lay the old road construction sawhorse, with it's heavy battery that kept it's yellow light blinking for two days after it was stolen. Half-buried in the dirt, the varnished-bedpost-turned-Tiki-God stared up with it's deep, shadowy carvings. The frowning Tiki God always gave Jimmy chills up his spine, especially when he was alone.

Jimmy crawled deeper into the underworld, toward the opposite side of the house, where the flooring above and the dirt below constricted, forcing the visitor of this Exalted Shrine to crawl forward on their belly, swallowing the beginnings of claustrophobic fear. Reaching the dark space along the far inner wall, Jimmy pulled the loose brick from the cubbyhole in the cement block wall, exposing an old lunchbox. It seems that all profound objects of childhood --things too adult to be understood by grownups--were small enough to fit easily into a small box: hoarded cigarettes that were carefully doled out during bonding rites and ceremonies; cutouts from girlie magazines, folded and refolded until the reclining women bore deep, white vertical and horizontal scars on their glossy-surfaced skin.

Before opening the box, Jimmy slid back into the more comfortable domain of the Bedpost. Holding the rusted steel box in his lap, he could feel the warm excitement in his lap--the camaraderie and first lust contained within. Jimmy opened the box. A beetle was trying desperately to scale the vertical walls and escape the nearly empty box, his home-turned-prison-cell. All the contents of the box had long been removed except for a small book of matches advertising a local grocery store. Each item, in turn, had been used to grant a single club member entrance into adulthood. All that was left for Jimmy was a damp book containing two matches, and the scorn of an angry beetle.

Jimmy sat in the cool space of the clubhouse remembering times when everyone knew who they were supposed to be, and what they were supposed to be doing. Brian was a couple of years older than him, but up until two years ago they were best friends. Now, when Brian saw Jimmy, he pretended to not know him. Brian now smoked openly on his way to his new car. Brian now ferried girls in his new car, girls louder and younger than the ones kept folded in the secret box.

Crawling back to the entrance of the cave, Jimmy slipped back into the hot summer air, and began brushing off his dusty, cobwebbed clothing. He looked up and saw Brian standing on his front porch. Cigarette hanging from his mouth, Brian looked over and acknowledged Jimmy's existence for the first time in two years. Brian took the cigarette from his lips, blew smoke toward Jimmy, and laughed sarcastically at him before stepping off the porch, and walking toward his car.

Caught cherishing some discarded fragment of time, crimsoned-faced Jimmy took his time removing the last of his childhood from his clothing.