The Library of Borrowed Lives — Part 1

In the corner of the library, behind row on row of shelves, past the dusty and the musty and the entirely disused, there is a door without a handle.

When my number came up in the state job lotto, I held my breath until I thought I’d burst. We were a family of eight, me the youngest, but only my eldest brother with a job. One income to feed eight people meant a lot of hungry nights. Getting chosen for a job was the answer to our prayers, but the uncertainty of the unknown roiled in my gut and turned my blood to ice. Just when the ringing in my ears threatened to crescendo in a faint, the overseer read out the job ticket: Six months of library duty. My breath escaped in a blast of relief. For now, at least, my family would eat, and I would be safe. The library sounded like an easy ticket.

No one opens the door, I was told on my first day. Stay away from the door. Pretend the door does not exist.

There were barracks for the workers built beneath the library, ages ago. There were two meals each day and a series of bunks that we all climbed up into, exhausted after our shifts. It almost made me laugh to see it, us shelved down there each night just like the books we shelved during the day. Some had been there for years, some who worked fast and hard enough to catch the notice of the overseers and be granted permanent status. They didn’t have much to do with those of us there on a temporary ticket.

I never saw anyone go in the door. I never saw anyone come out.

The work was easy enough, I suppose. We weren’t allowed to talk. The whole cavernous library was under an eerie hush all the time, nothing but the sound of shuffling feet and leather covers sliding past each other as endless books were shelved. Only time I ever heard a voice was the day D1943 stumbled off the ladder and cried out as he crumpled to a heap on the floor below. He was hauled away by two permanents whilst a crowd of temporaries wordlessly gathered all the books he’d dropped. I never saw him again.

I tried to choose the stacks that would take me as close to the door as possible. I’d sneak furtive glances when the overseers weren’t looking.

The question crept into my thoughts one particularly gruelling day when the stacks were twice as high as normal, and the wheels of the carts creaked and groaned under their load as we pushed them up and down the aisles. It came unbidden, unexpected, but once there, it refused to leave. It took up residence in the corner of my mind, settled in with the obstinacy of a grease stain in a clean shirt.

Who was reading all these books?

No one I’d ever met had ever learned to read.

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Come back on the first Tuesday in May to read the next instalment of this new dystopian series: The Library of Borrowed Lives