Lilacs in the Library

                     She lived in pieces of old literature and outdated magazines. Every day she’d read the same pages, study the same images and wonder the same things. Her hands were pink wildflowers that every so often the children in the library would pluck and displace. She had a broken record for a life. At night the library stilled and her fears unraveled into little threads that hung on the windows. Sometimes the man on the moon would drop by and get tangled up in her threaded fear; he suggested she knit a sweater with the thread or play cat’s cradle with the dust bunnies.

                     Dried and fragile, she lifted her head and brushed the cobwebs out of her eyes. She shed the stale words and familiar images she looked at every day in her existence like a snake sheds its skin. Her eyes opened for the first time, though the library had been her tabernacle as long as she’d been present. It seemed like a new place without stale words in her head and cobwebs in her eyes. She still swallowed spiders.

                     The way she giggled would often haunt people who visited the old library, and sometimes readers claimed feeling her little hands on theirs when they read books about knitting. As time progressed, so did she. She took up ballroom dancing with the janitor’s mop once she learned to walk. The janitor didn’t think it was very endearing, often times his mop would be hanging from the chandelier in the lobby when she was finished dancing. As summer months came, she grew brown locks without keys to match. They were curly, tangled and reminded her of the sweater she knit. She thought it clever, she had sewn the covers of old magazines and horror stories into the garment.

                     The librarian thought he had a stalker after him when the sweater appeared on his desk one day and asked for security guards to be posted in the library. She didn’t like the guards, but tried to play tic-tac-toe and hide and seek with them to break the ice. One of the guards died when she smiled, her mouth was full of staples, old blackmail and lilacs. She hid his body in the educational books with pieces of the guard’s fingers and toes scattered about the way her own had been scattered.

                     She made the library smell like lilacs by smiling, and more people went missing, soon the books curled in on themselves from all of the fingers and toes. They didn’t want to keep her secret anymore. The library wept when it was condemned and the ashes it produced when it was burned alive were like silver and gold. She sat in the ashes of her former haven and painted a frown on her face. Lilac bushes and little pink wildflowers grew where the library stood.

She still knits sometimes, but now she knits the fears of those who sit under her lilacs, and when she gives them sweaters sometimes they keep them.